Asian Is Not a Useful Category

Written by Asanka Herath on  | #Culture #Organizations #Inclusion and equity

Asking if someone is “Asian” in a question of ethnicity or demographics or pretty much any context is bad. There is no reasonable conclusion you can arrive at about a person based on the fact that they are “Asian”.

Without knowing anything about the precise demographic breakdown if you were to learn that a group of people consists of 10% Asians what can you confidently conclude? What possible useful thing can you derive from this information?

First of all, let’s have a look at a map:

Map of Asia – Cacahuate, amendments by Peter Fitzgerald, Globe-trotter, Joelf, and Texugo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a partial list of countries that are in Asia (based on this Wikipedia article and includes contested territories):

Abkhazia, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Cyprus, East Timor, Egypt, Georgia , Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Macau, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, North Korea, Northern Cyprus, Oman, Pakistan, State of Palestine, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, South Ossetia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen.

So if you pictured a room with a bunch of Palastenian, Chinese, Philipino, Russian, Indian, and Japanese people you would be kind-of right. But what do Asians look like anyway?

The point is, Asia is a big place. There are many countries/states/territories. There are many races, religions, languages, phenotypes.

There is so much variety in “Asia” that any conclusion you would make based on a person or group of people being “Asian” will be wrong.

Please stop asking people if they are Asian.

So what should I ask instead?

  1. Don’t ask in the first place – if not absolutely necessary. This question is asking for trouble.

  2. “I prefer not to say” should always be one of the options. While there are legitimate reasons why you would ask for some demographic information from a person, always give an opt-out.

  3. Figure out what you actually want to know. Knowing if someone is Asian is not going to give you that information for reasons stated above. But knowing what you want to know will lead you to a better question.

    • Perhaps white/black/other is all you need for a question about ethnicity.
    • For nationality, provide a list of countries but don’t assume anything about what that person looks like or what language they speak or what religions they might follow.
    • For geography, at worst ask for a region within Asia1 instead of just Asia. And for that matter, the same goes for other continents.

  4. If “Asian” still remains as one of the response choices for your question, you are doing something wrong. Not even Google internally gets this part right. Give up. Don’t ask if someone is “Asian”.