What's good, y'all?

You are listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR.

I'm Gene Demby.

A while ago, there was the story I really wanted us to cover at Code Switch, which, you know, never came to be, which happened sometimes.

But it was right up our alley over here.

So, okay, there was this big conference of folks from colleges and universities from all over the country.

It was a convention for Asian American and Pacific Islander student associations.

You know, so there was, you know, conference stuff, panels and workshops and afterparties and Kikin, you know, all that good stuff, right?

But at one of the big sessions at this conference, this existential

question was kind of introduced, and that was, should the Pacific Islander folks, that's the

PI in that AAPI initialism, even be conferencing and kicking at this thing? Like, there

were a few parts to this argument, but they all kind of hinged

on a larger history. And the people making it said, okay, the story of Asian Americans in the

United States, very broadly, is a story of immigration, people who came to the United States.

But the story of Pacific Islanders in the United States, folks whose people, you know, hail from the Philippines or Native Hawaiians or people from Samoa, that is a story of colonization, of the U.S. coming to them very forcibly and taking over their ancestral homes and subsuming it into America.

Some of the folks argued that in many ways,

Pacific Islanders actually had more in common

with Native Americans and indigenous people in the U.S.

than they did with Asian Americans.

And so obviously this was like very chewy and fraught

and like so many conversations like these.

They've been around before this convention,

...