AT&T's CEO supports Asian Americans, but do we even understand this identity?
I wanted to share my thoughts in response to an interesting question that an executive raised at the AT&T National Employee Resource Groups conference this past weekend. He noticed that there are three Asian heritage employee resource groups at AT&T — APCA, FACES, and OASIS — representing the Asian Pacific Islander, Filipino, and Asian Indian cultures, respectively, and wondered why three groups exist and what makes them different. The latter is easy to answer: the three groups represent three different subsets of Asian cultures and are connected with different communities.
The former, I think, requires deeper critical examination. I don’t think this executive was being ignorant but rather following de facto standards in America. In most places in America, there are not enough people of each Asian ethnic group to form an influential community, and consequently the easiest way for society and Asian Americans alike is to group them under the catch-all “Asian American” moniker. What the executive was really questioning was why the current setup does not feature an Asian Pacific Islander group that is inclusive of all Filipinos and Indians.
The board members of the Asian Pacific Islander group suggested in response a few reasons that I find to be plausible, including how the three groups existed before the AT&T merger, chose to remain separate after the merger, and were grandfathered in (a political reason) and how the Filipino and Indian groups simply had different missions and communities to serve and wanted to maintain those ties (a cultural reason). However, I think the issue is less about maintaining cultural distinctiveness but rather more about constructing cultural juxtaposition.
In other words, the underlying dilemma is that the Asian American identity is an unnatural social construct. The “Asian American” identity is usually foreign to the immigrant Asian population that makes up most of the membership of the aforementioned employee resource groups (despite the fact that most have accepted being called Asian American). Grouping Americans of Korean, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Persian, etc. descent into one moniker is like trying to group Nigerians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, and white South Africans into one “African” identity. Japanese and Cambodian people clearly come from different countries and are different people with different cultures. Perhaps one of the key reasons why the Filipinos and Indians formed separate employee resource groups was that some of them did not feel an affinity to the socially-constructed Asian Pacific Islander label.
Unfortunately, the reality of most of America and its corporate environment is that Asian Americans combined only make up a small percentage of the workforce. Oftentimes, Asian American groups are not only expected to be inclusive of all Asian cultures, but really need to represent the multitude of Asian ethnicities in order to have enough members to be sustainable. Furthermore, bigger membership numbers usually correlate with an increase in visibility and support from executives. Due to practical reasons, the Asian American moniker has become a necessity for most Asian American leaders endeavoring to empower what has become their community.
The real question and challenge for Asian American leaders in the corporate environment is: how can we as Asian Americans embrace and leverage this pan-Asian American identity while representing all the distinct heritages in good faith?
I suspect many Asian American leaders have not thought about that. I certainly have not, despite having taken Asian American studies classes and being engaged in Asian American community organizations. Our generation of Asian Americans grew up basically consenting to the Asian American label conceptually but I think are not prepared to really represent it when challenged outside UCLA-like diversity bubbles. And I suspect that if the issue of cultural juxtaposition is not adequately addressed, then it will help perpetuate the fragmentation amongst a community that increasingly identifies itself as “Asian American” and hinder it from achieving its common goals in professional advancement.
