The first Asian-American Vice President?

There is a reason that Kamala Harris is referred to as an Indian-American and a Black, but not as an Asian-American.

It will confuse the life out of most of my fellow Americans when they look at Kamala Harris and search for the "Asian" in her.  Because ... in this country, Asian-American has come to mean people with roots in countries in the far east and southeast Asia.

Perhaps you are thinking that I am being picky.  No, I am not.

This has been an issue that I have been fighting ever since my graduate school days when I reminded many white Americans that I too am an Asian.

One of my favorite encounters on this topic was after graduate school, when I was working as a transportation planner.

An Anglophile colleague walked over to my work space during a coffee break to ask me a question.  She was reading a novel set in London, and was confused that the Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi characters were being referred to as Asians.

I calmly explained to her that Asia is a continent, and it includes India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh too.  I added that people from Asia are Asians, as much as the French and the Czech are Europeans!

Her mind was blown!

A couple of years ago, I wrote a letter to The New Yorker, on this very topic.

In the essay on how television made Trump's presidency possible, Emily Nussbaum writes that “The Apprentice” attracted diverse contestants and audience.  Nussbaum notes: "It also featured contestants from Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern backgrounds, and, in Season 5, recent immigrants."  In that sentence, Nussbaum makes the same mistake that is often made here in the US--she identifies "Asian" as being separate from "Indian, and Middle Eastern," even though India and the Middle East are very much part of Asia.
In America, "Asians" has come to mean only those from from the far eastern edges of Asia--like China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam.  Perhaps this resulted from our military entanglements with those countries.  But then given our military expeditions elsewhere, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, and one would think that by now we would have figured out that the people of those countries too are Asians!

I didn't care whether that would be published (it was not) but I had to get that off my chest!

I wonder what might have been the story if Kamala Harris' mother was not from Chennai, but from, say, Sikkim and, as a result, if her facial features were a tad different.  That would have been one heck of a lesson in world geography ;)