Word: label
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When I was a kid, my ethnicity--I was born in the United States to Chinese parents--made me "Chinese." Later, that label gave way to the broader category of "Oriental." At some point during high school I was abruptly informed (by a white friend) that "Oriental" was now a racist term and that I would heretofore be known as "Asian." College brought the all-important addition of "American," so that I am now "Asian-American," or, if one really wants to split hairs, "Asian American" (the hyphen, to some, indicates an undesirable hierarchy or dualism...
Generally, I've accepted these changes as mere semantics. But recently, two developments have made me consider how the conscious choice of such labels can become a serious and meaningful issue. The first is the rise, or return, of "African-American" as an alternative to, or substitute for, "black" in the past few years; the second was my learning about the Asian American community's own struggle to define its identity and its label...
...December 1988, Jesse Jackson and others suggested that "African-American" should replace "black" as the term of choice. Since then, "African-American" has been gaining ground among black leaders, politicians and the national press. In the past four years at Harvard, I witnessed the fascinating phenomenon of a label in transition: students coming to the point in a sentence where the proper racial label should be inserted would hesitate, even freeze, before gingerly choosing one. At times I would avoid using either term, electing to leave the person's race unspecified rather than choose between the two labels. "African-American...
...Chin, naming was vitally important. Just as blacks had appropriated formerly derogatory terms--from "Negro" to "black" itself--as consciously chosen emblems of racial pride and identity, Chin tried to turn the racist label of "Chinaman" into one Chinese-Americans could claim as their own. Instead, hyphenation carried the day. But "Asian-American" only replicates Chin's dilemma: for it emphasizes the duality that plagues conceptions of Asian-American identity. The theme of most popular Asian-American literature has been the conflict of cultures--the alleged impossibility of reconciling Eastern and Western values, the stories of children caught between their...
...didn't have the time to focus on the band.) "They put money away instead of doing what most bands do--split it and spend it." Today the band has four corporations, including Fishco, Inc., which handles record royalties and related matters, and Breaking Records, the group's new label, which will focus on finding and developing grass-roots bands...