Also written: Asian-American, AAPI, Asian American and Pacific Islander
| Source | Year | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Annie E. Casey Foundation | 2013 | Use |
| SEIU | 2020 | Avoid |
| Sierra Club | 2021 | Use |
| Native Governance Center | 2021 | Use |
| Diversity Style Guide | 2023 | Use |
“For nouns: African American, Asian American, black, Hispanic, Latino, Native American, non-Hispanic white, white (do not use Caucasian).”
Casey 2013 lists 'Asian American' (no hyphen) in the approved-nouns list. Pre-dates the major contested-terminology debates around AAPI, AANHPI, and the post-2020 Stop AAPI Hate-era reframing — Casey's posture is the stable baseline; later guides build on top of it.
“Oriental [Do not use.] Correct: Asian”
SEIU's only explicit entry in this cluster is the 'Oriental' avoidance: redirect to 'Asian.' Compact but matches every other guide in the corpus that addresses Oriental — DSG, AECF, AAJA, and the 1976 Department of Education prohibition all agree.
“Asian American/Pacific Islander, AAPI — Ideally refer to a more specific identity when that information is available.”
Sierra Club's only stated rule on AAPI is the specificity preference — when a more specific identity is available (Korean American, Vietnamese American, Hmong American, Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Filipino American, etc.), use it. The AAPI umbrella is acceptable as a collective frame but not as a substitute for available individual or national-origin identification. Sits inside the broader 'capitalize racial/ethnic identifiers out of respect' rule from the section intro.
“Capitalize other racial and ethnic identifiers, such as Asian and Latinx.”
NGC uses 'Asian' as its example of a capitalized ethnic identifier alongside Latinx. The guide doesn't engage Asian American as a term separately — its focus is Indigenous terminology, and Asian appears in the capitalization rule as a parallel category, not as a primary topic.
“Asian American is the proper term for people who come from Asia or descend from people who lived in Asia. Do not hyphenate. When possible, ask people how they identify (Asian American or Chinese American, Japanese American, etc.). You may use the umbrella term South Asian to refer to Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and others would be known as East Asians.”
DSG's rule is tight: 'Asian American' is the proper term, no hyphen, ask for self-ID when possible. Provides the sub-umbrella structure used across the US — South Asian (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), East Asian (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam). The separate 'Asian' entry flags 'Caution. A term as broad as European.' — useful for distinguishing US 'Asian American' usage from UK 'Asian' usage (which centers South Asian).
U.S. Census Bureau definition (1997 OMB standards)
Census defines Asian as 'a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent.' Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander is a separate category covering Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, and other Pacific Islands.
The federal-data split between Asian and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander is why AAPI is sometimes critiqued as flattening two distinct Census categories. The AANHPI expansion (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander) tries to make the Census distinction visible in the umbrella term itself.
View source →AAJA stylebook update (August 2024)
Asian American Journalists Association released updated style guide guidance, including the rule that 'incarceration' (not 'internment') is the accurate term for what happened to Japanese Americans during WWII.
AAJA is the authoritative US source on Asian American terminology in journalism, parallel to NABJ for Black/African American coverage. Their 2024 update sharpens several long-standing terminology decisions — particularly around WWII historical framing — that other guides have lagged on.
View source →Federal prohibition of 'Oriental' (May 2016)
President Obama signed H.R. 4238 removing 'Oriental' and other outdated racial terms from federal law, replacing 'Oriental' with 'Asian American' in federal statute.
Settles the Oriental→Asian/Asian American directive at the federal level. The 2016 law operationalized what most US style guides had been recommending for decades; SEIU's 'Do not use' entry codifies the same rule.
View source →The Asian American cluster is the umbrella term where the specificity rule does most of the work — every guide that addresses it agrees that Asian American or AAPI is acceptable as a collective frame but inferior to a more specific identifier when one fits. Sierra Club says this most directly (“ideally refer to a more specific identity when that information is available”); DSG codifies it as a self-ID question (“ask people how they identify”). The failure mode the rule guards against is the same one BIPOC guards against from a different direction — a broad umbrella flattening communities whose lived experience, language, immigration history, and political traditions diverge sharply.
The umbrella has internal structure. DSG’s South Asian / East Asian / Southeast Asian sub-divisions are the most common US sub-categorization. The Pacific Islander/Native Hawaiian/AANHPI question is the most contested edge: AAPI’s most-common form folds two distinct federal racial categories into one umbrella, and Pacific Islander and Native Hawaiian advocates have argued (with increasing institutional success since the mid-2010s) for AANHPI as the more accurate replacement. Native Hawaiian’s status as an Indigenous people with sovereignty claims tied to the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom adds a layer that AAPI alone can’t carry.
Capitalization and hyphenation are settled. Asian, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian — all capitalized across every guide reviewed. ‘Asian American’ takes no hyphen; ‘Asian-American’ is a pre-2019 stylistic legacy. None of the guides in the corpus diverge on these.
‘Oriental’ is the cleanest ‘do not use’ in the entire R&E corpus. SEIU 2020 is explicit; DSG 2023 routes the term to historical-context-only usage; H.R. 4238 (2016) removed it from federal statutes. There is no guide in any tier of the corpus that defends or accepts ‘Oriental’ as a descriptor for people.
‘Asian’ alone is broader than US ‘Asian American’ usage suggests. DSG flags this directly — UK usage of ‘Asian’ typically centers South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi), where US usage of ‘Asian American’ typically centers East Asian. When writing for or about non-US contexts, check whose ‘Asian’ is meant.
Casey 2013’s listing of ‘Asian American’ as an approved noun is the stable baseline. The Casey entry pre-dates the post-2010s emergence of more sharply-contested debates (AAPI vs. AANHPI, AAVE-style debates over ‘Asian American’ as identity vs. demographic category, post-2020 Stop AAPI Hate-era reframing) — but Casey’s basic call has held across every later guide. The cluster has gained sub-categorization since 2013; the core term has not moved.
‘Asian American’ as a political identity term was coined in 1968 by UC Berkeley graduate students Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee, replacing ‘Oriental’ (which carried both pejorative weight and the Cold War-era European framing of Asia as ‘East of Europe’). The term gained federal acceptance through the 1970s–80s. The post-1965 Immigration and Nationality Act dramatically expanded the demographic the term covered, and the sub-categorization (South Asian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian) emerged as the umbrella stretched to cover more communities. The 2016 federal statutory removal of ‘Oriental’ (H.R. 4238) operationalized at the federal level what every US style guide had been recommending for decades. The post-2020 AAPI-vs-AANHPI debate is the current live institutional question; the more-specific-identifier preference (Sierra Club’s rule) cuts across all of it.