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his article examines the depoliticization of Asian American as a racial category at the site of the nonprofit and the potential of employing race as political strategy for social justice. Although scholarship in Asian American studies is importantly attending to the processes of neoliberalism as a mode of political, economic, and personal governance in shaping the policies and experiences of Asian Americans, little research has examined the explicit incorporation of an Asian American identity as a category of state power in the form of nonprofit expansion. The institutionalization of nonprofit organizations since the social movements of the 1960s has been central to neoliberal restructuring and management of minority populations. The incorporation of Asian American political demands is part of the national growth of the nonprofit sector in the latter half of the twentieth century into what scholar-activists have referred to as the "nonprofit industrial complex."1 Nonprofit organizations have multiplied from 12,500 in 1940 to almost one and a half million in 2010.2 The proliferation of Asian American nonprofit community- based organizations is in part a result of challenges made to the state by minority groups in the late 1960s to address concerns of social and racial inequalities. This expansion has also led to the incorporation of minority political opposition against the state by the state. In addressing the political demands and challenges made by various minority groups during this time for more equitable racial representation and economic redistribution, the state overtly attended to race, or minority group rights, as a central category of political intervention and administration.3 Yet as scholars have argued, this recognition must also be understood as one of incorporation; a consequence of moderate economic redistribution and targeted affirmation of racial minority groups' claims was the gradual neutralization of race and race-based political mobilization.4 The first part of this essay examines the nonprofitization of a once political Asian American identity since the Asian American movement.5
Second, I turn to a community controversy that ensued over the inclu- sion of the word "Pacific" at an Asian American nonprofit organization in Oakland, California, to attend to the depoliticization of racial identifi- cations and the potential use of them as a political strategy. In February 2001, the Oakland Asian Cultural Center officially changed its name to...