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Confronting Race and Ethnicity: Education and Cultural Identity for Immigrants and Students from Asia

Part of: 60th Anniversary Forum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Liping Bu
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Extract

Years ago at graduate school, a fellow student in the American Seminar class asked, “What is the difference between race and ethnicity?” The professor replied, “Asians usually find it hard to distinguish the two.” The student was from an Asian country and the professor did not elaborate the distinction between the concepts. It is no brainer for Americans to tell the difference; however, for people new to American society who have not lived in a racially conscious and divisive society, it is confusing to refer to a minority people as belonging to both a particular race and to a different ethnicity. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when millions of immigrants came to America in search of better life and supplied American industries with labor, they were labeled white, yellow, brown, or black. This skin-colored definition of people as different races reflected American racial views of people of different cultures. Even in current mainstream discourse, racial and ethnic minorities are still called people of color or colored people, instead of minorities.

Keywords

raceethnicityimmigrationeducation and cultural identityAsian students
Type
60th Anniversary HEQ Forum
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 644 - 656
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 History of Education Society

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