At Courage Class, we acknowledge the umbrella term Asian American wipes away the beautiful diversity represented within our community.  It masks the complex, nuanced experiences we have in a Western world, both individually and as distinct cultural groups. 

We are a community with roots in more than 20 countries across East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Central Asia, encompassing dozens of distinct ethnic groups – including, but not limited to, Vietnamese, Korean, Hmong, Bangladeshi, Malaysian, Sri Lanken, Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian communities.

Asian Americans collectively speak over 100 languages and dialects including Nepali, Japanese, Khmer, Punjabi, Tagalog, Cantonese, Thai, and many others.  In fact, we are the most linguistically diverse racial group in the United States. 

Our tapestry of experience spans immigration histories, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual + gender orientations, religions, political contexts – from refugees and asylum seekers to highly skilled migrants, and adoptees, just to name a few.  Any conversation that treats Asian Americans as a single, uniform group risks erasing these differences.

At the same time, research shows that many Asian Americans share common experiences in the United States, including navigating intergenerational differences, a strong emphasis on responsibility, humility, and honoring family, pressure tied to the model minority myth and yellow peril, underrepresentation in leadership across all industries and sectors, and structural barriers to healthcare, mental healthcare, and self-development work that understand our experience and at worse, on ocassion, pathologizes the very experiences and values important to us.

At the time of this publication, there remains a significant gap in research that reflects the culturally nuanced experiences of Asian Americans, particularly as it relates to the Southeast Asian, Native Hawaiian, communities.  If data does exist on our collective community, it is often aggregated – data aggregation significantly masks the culturally nuanced experiences of our diverse community and contributes to the gap in culturally and linguistically nuanced support. 

Our commitment is to name this gap openly and advocate for greater investment, research, and programming that is informed by this lived experience through the podcast.

Courage Class is situated in this complex reality where we honor the unique and profound differences across the community, while acknowledging the shared cultural, social, and systemic forces that shape our lived experience.  This work aims to create space to reflect these differences, naming the common experiences and patterns where they exist, and build a space where each and every Asian American community member can explore, reclaim, and build upon their own individual story within a safe community.