Asian-Americans: the Unbearable Whiteness of Being?

In his memoir, the author Eric Liu reflects on being the bearer of a strange new status — "white, by acclamation." He writes in The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (Random House, 1998), "Some are born white, others achieve whiteness, still others have whiteness thrust upon them."

Asian-Americans, it seems, are experiencing the last fate. Just as previous "outsiders" — such as the Irish and the Jews — have been incorporated into our

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