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This essay provides an introduction to the late Don T. Nakanishi of UCLA, commenting on his legacy in the founding and development of Asian American politics as a field. It also offers an o...

In this paper I compare African and Asian racialization in the United States. Drawing on insights from path dependency analysis, I argue that key contextual factors help explain some of the wide differences in the racialization of the two populations. I examine the international context, the constitutional-legal context, and the population and workforce context to show how major differences in each of those factors helped to shape racializing policies, pushing African and Asian racialization along two very different paths. I suggest that we conceptualize African racialization as occurring at a panethnic level—applied to everyone with ancestry in sub-Saharan Africa—while key aspects of Asian racialization operated at an ethnic level—focused on specific nationality (or “ethnic”) groups. These differences were not due to any apparent differences in intensity of prejudice against Africans and Asians, but rather were the consequence of the way the contextual factors constrained racialization in very different ways.

Asian Americans have received relatively little attention from political scientists. Although a rapidly growing segment of the population, their political behaviors, impacts on political institutions, and the policies affecting them have been rarely studied in our discipline.

This paper offers an outline of an assessment of the future of Asian American politics. I synthesize both the rapidly expanding scholarship on Asian American politics as well as a broader body of research on Asian American incorporation and assimilation. This paper builds on a range of works that have explored similar questions, such as Gary Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams (1991), Claire Jean Kim’s “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans” (1999), and David Palumbo-Liu’s Asian/American (1999). I focus on two broad concerns: Asian American relations with other ethnoracial groups, and the prospects for Asian American panethnicity. Both of these have important implications for race in America more broadly, a topic I will explore in an expanded version of this paper. I note an irony of Asian American politics: the worse things are, the better the prospects for organizing — and the more successful that community groups are in battling discrimination and creating equal opportunity, the dimmer are the prospects for their organizations enduring. While some form of Asian American politics seems likely to endure for the foreseeable future, the specific form is hard to forecast at this point. The tension between ethnic-based (e.g., Filipino or Korean) and panethnic-based (Asian American) politics persists. Although we have benefited from a wealth of new data, it continues to be point in different directions regarding the prospects for ethnic or panethnic politics.

When compiling data for the article “Small Spaces for Different Faces: Political Science Scholarship on Asian Pacific Americans” (July 2004 PS), I inadvertently omitted the numbers for one issue of Social Science Quarterly. The omission does not change any of the rankings, but it does alter some figures slightly. The correct numbers for the affected totals are as follows