Do you believe that Asian-Americans are not considered American?

If a race is not a grouping of humans who are genetically or biologically similar, then what is race? How do we define race beyond the simple assertion that “race is a social construction”? Ian Haney López, who has done extensive work in this area, has provided a particularly insightful definition, offering that race is “historically contingent systems of meaning that attach to elements of morphology and ancestry.” When López defines race as “systems of meaning” that attach to inherited physical features, he is referring to the fact that although race always has been about physical bodies, it never has been solely about bodies. Rather, it always has been about what those bodies mean in terms of mental, emotional, and political capacities.
Thomas Joo has argued that one of the meanings that has attached to the Asian racial category is “foreignness.” He contends that the origins of this racialization are in the exclusionary policies that the U.S. once had with respect to Asian immigrants. He notes that, as discussed above, Asian immigrants were unable to become citizens because the naturalization laws limited citizenship to white persons. Further, although individuals of Asian descent who are born in the U.S. have enjoyed birthright citizenship, laws functioned to keep this number to a minimum. This was accomplished by “restrictions on Asian immigration generally, restrictions on the immigration of Asian women, and laws against interracial marriage.”
The consequence was that for most of our country’s history, the overwhelming majority of persons of Asian descent in the country “were thus literally ‘foreigners’ in the legal sense.” Joo argues that the conflation of Asian-ness and foreignness lives on in the present day. He claims that Asian still is racialized such that persons of Asian descent, regardless of nationality, continue to be considered irretrievably alien to the U.S. He writes, “The foreignness of the Oriental has not simply been an issue of national citizenship or place of birth. It has been treated as a permanent, inheritable characteristic. . . . American racial logic posits that an Oriental is not, and his or her descendants can never become, American. As a non-White racial category becomes identified with foreignness, that racial category, like foreignness, becomes incompatible with Americanness. And foreignness, like non-Whiteness, becomes a permanent impurity, impervious to alteration by immigration, naturalization, assimilation, or even American birth. Just as one cannot be both Black and White, one cannot be both racially ‘foreign’ and American.”
QUESTIONS: What do you make of Joo’s argument? Do you believe that Asian-Americans are not considered American in the way that white people are? If so, how much of that is a product of law, i.e., legal restrictions on Asian immigration, naturalization, marriage, and procreation?
excerpted from Khiara M Bridges (2018, ) Critical Race Theory: A Primer
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