owner could refuse to lease, rent or sell housing or property
on the basis of race, ethnicity, or anything else he or she
cared to name.As laws and protections have evolved, overt discriminatory acts have
diminished. Of course this does not mean the end of anti-Asian sentiment
or action. In earlier chapters we saw that Asians are discriminated against
in the workplace, in the courts and in education, and that this is true for
new immigrants who speak English as a second language, for U.S. citizens
who speak Hawai’i Creole, and even for those of Asian origin who are
monolingual English speakers and have no foreign accent at all.
Half the world
While immigrants from Asia were once largely Japanese and Chinese, that
is no longer the case. By the time of the 2000 census, there were six large
Asian groups in the U.S. (Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and
Vietnamese) that together made up 88 percent of the whole (Park 2008:
543). These six nations are both internally and externally diverse in terms
of culture, politics, religion, and language. Most non-Asians are unaware
of this level of complexity.
It is useful to note that taken together, the eight most populous Asian
nations are home to about 3.5 billion persons, or about half of the world’s
population.^2
Despite all this, the U.S. government has only one term that lumps all of
these nations, ethnicities, cultures and languages from the Far East,
Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent together: Asian (Table 15.1).
Table 15.1 Asian household population by detailed group, 2004
Total Asian population 12,097,281
Chinese, (excluding) Taiwanese 2,829,627
Asian Indian 2,245,239
Filipino 2,148,227