Sometimes, you will find a minor controversy over whether the term “female” rather than “woman” rings overly clinical. In fact, usually, it’s just a regional difference in American English dialects: It feels that way to most Northerners, and not to most Southerners, and this causes culture clashes. Thus, we get the New Yorker story on “The Debate Over ‘Woman’ as an Adjective.” And we find Jezebel’s “The problem with calling women ‘females.’” Some terms for groups of people just feel inhuman, but only to some people.
Personally, I find most acronyms to be clinical and distancing. So, I have been distressed by the rise of “AAPI” for “Asian American and Pacific Islander.” AAPI existed well before this year, but it’s been used almost exclusively by consultants, census collectors, data scientists, and other such enthusiasts of speech-by-acronyms. That’s because it’s so indiscriminate a category in real life rather than data collection terms that only a spreadsheet could love it. Asia comprises roughly one-third of the landmass of Earth, with 48 countries and nearly two-thirds of the world’s population. Tectonically speaking, Asia is two continents, which is why Mount Everest gets a little taller every year. The Indian subcontinent is very slowly crashing northward into the rest of Asia, shoving the Himalayas up. So, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans (who are in the Indian Ocean), and North Koreans are all “AAPI.”
This is a big category already, before we consider that the Pacific Ocean is yet another third of the world’s surface. It contains islands such as the Kurils, disputed by Japan and Russia. Forty-seven miles off of Los Angeles, there’s Santa Catalina, a Pacific island as well, though one famous for being full of rich enthusiasts of schooners and wine mixers.
Yet, AAPI has seen a massive uptake in the last year. I Googled it a year ago, and my two top results were an Asian organization noting it’s not a preferred term and the landing page for the American Association for Physicians of Indian Descent. This year, you get the organizations “Stop AAPI Hate,” “AAPI Progressive Action,” and “AAPI Data.” You get the NBC News vertical dedicated to Asian persecution issues covering “the racism virus.” And you get the Biden White House’s AAPI initiative.
AAPI will be foisted on American English by its popularity among the political and media class. But, because it only exists to describe people at a distance or lump them together for some political purpose, it will never be the main way “AAPI” actually identify. It commits the sin Jezebel once charged “female” with, namely sounding to many normal users of the language like something nobody who actually knows one would ever use as a noun in casual conversation.
What AAPI will be is an exonym: a word that outsiders of a community use to describe it. “Spain” is an English exonym for a place whose endonym (the thing it calls itself) is “Espana.” Or think of the original inhabitants of Santa Catalina Island. They were long called Gabrielenos, after the Mission San Gabriel Arcangel built on their land by the Spanish missionaries who colonized them. But now, that exonym is out, and it’s preferred to go with what they call themselves: the Tongva or, alternately, the Kizh — or nothing. (The culture has splintered and nearly dwindled away.) I suppose they are now “AAPI,” too, but conscientious people used to consider it immoral, or at least impolite, to give peoples names they don’t give themselves, except in translation. The all-consuming need to do what Karen and Barbara Fields call “racecraft” has overwhelmed that norm, it seems.
