The Plaid Bag Connection

Tag Archives: race


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Who counts as Asian? (Or, the social construction of race and the continents)

Via Boston.com

So the two on the left are Asian, and the one on the right is white? Via Boston.com

A few days ago I was flipping through my RSS feeds when this title came to my attention:

Asian Guys Arrested in Boston Marathon Bombing

The “Asian guys” referred to Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, the two students from Kazakhstan who were charged with allegedly helping Boston marathon bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev dispose of evidence.

This got me thinking: are Kazakhs “Asian”? Certainly, Kazakhstan is in Asia. But does that mean Israelis and Iranians are Asian, too? What about Turks? Do only Turks from Anatolia count as Asian?

If you take a step back and think about it, Asia, Africa, and Europe are all one big landmass. Why can’t people from Korea claim to be Afro-Eurasian?

Lesson of the story: both race and the continents are arbitrary social constructions.

(On a related note, the Chechen Tsarnaev brothers are literally as “Caucasian” as it gets, yet in the United States, where Caucasian is still used as a synonym for white or European, commentators can’t figure out if they should be white or not. As Sarah Kendzior wittily puts it, they were the “wrong kind of Caucasian.”)


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Native American

Taiwan-based German journalist Klaus Bardenhagen spotted this ad in the November 30 issue of the Taipei Times, the Taiwanese capital’s major English-language paper:

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As Kerim Friedman noted on Twitter, “Native American” here refers not to the original inhabitants of the Americas but the descendants of the colonizers:

I wonder if I could pass myself off as “Native American” in this case. (Probably not.)


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Jaswinder Bolina on “writing like a white guy”

Indian American poet Jaswinder Bolina wrote an excellent article for the Poetry Foundation that starts with an anecdote about his father telling him to use a pseudonym:

He knows that in America nobody should be rejected, not unabashedly and without some counterfeit of a reason, but all my father’s nearly three decades as a machinist at the hydraulics plant near the airport teach him is that economies boom and economies bust, and if your name isn’t “Bill” or “Earl” or “Frank Malone,” you don’t get promoted. You mind the machines. “Bills” and “Earls” supervise. “Frank” is the name the bosses go by, all of them hired after my dad but raised higher. So when my father suggests I use a pseudonym, he’s only steadying my two-wheeler, only buying me a popsicle from the cart at Foster Avenue Beach.

He then discusses why he did not talk about race in his first book: Continue Reading →

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