Why I Refuse to Call Asian Americans Whitewashed
Cultural distance can be real without turning every difference into movement toward whiteness.
I refuse to call Asian Americans “whitewashed.” I say “Americanized,” or sometimes “assimilated.”
The word choice matters because America is not another word for white. Calling every Americanized Asian person whitewashed quietly grants white people ownership over American culture. Everyone else is treated as either authentically foreign or moving toward whiteness, as if there were no ordinary middle ground called living here.
Asian American children grow up inside an American environment. We inherit some practices, lose others, recover others deliberately, and create combinations that would not have appeared in our parents’ or grandparents’ lives. That process can create beautiful things. It can also create real distance from our ancestral culture. But none of that makes us white.
We can debate how closely American culture is associated with whiteness. But even where that association exists, I can choose language that does not reinforce it.
This is not a global ban on the word, but it is a request to be careful of the association you are making when you use it. Are you trying to imply whiteness, or are you talking about assimilation? Those are not the same thing.