What is CAPA?

CAPA has been serving the Chinese-American community in the San Francisco, East Bay Area since 1984. We are a nonprofit, nonpartisan political association dedicated to political education.

As we continue to grow, the task of our keeping members informed becomes increasingly difficult. Newsletters, meetings, and phone trees soon become too cumbersome to quickly and easily spread news about events and issues. Faced with this problem, CAPA has decided join the Information Age and take grassroots to the Internet.

The other way CAPA is changing our approach to grassroots is by acknowledging how the political "game" is played. Racial unity as opposed to ethnic unity is the key to a strong minority voice in government. The difference between ethnicity and race is this: Ethnicity is defined by a person's cultural background whereas race is defined by a person's physical characteristics which are indigenous to certain parts of the world. Ethnicity is often at the heart of grassroots, but race is where the power is.

For example, CAPA's membership is ethnically Chinese-American. But in politics, we identify ourselves as Asian Pacific-Islander American (often abbreviated as APA or API), which is our current racial category. In time, APA is likely to become an ethnicity in itself. But as a racial category today, it carries more political clout than any of the ethnic groups within this category.