'Almost' everything you need to know about Asian & Pacific Islander Americans

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PRESIDENT OBAMA was born and raised in Hawaii with a couple of years in Indonesia. He is related to Asian Americans including his sister who is half-Indonesian. So he's no stranger to the Asian American experience.

In October of 20009, less than a year after taking office, he revived the White House Initiative on Asian and Pacific Islander Americans putting together a task force of highly respected members of those communities.

"It can be tempting ... for people to buy into the myth of the 'model minority' and glance over the challenges that this community still faces." said President Obama. "But we have to remember there are still educational disparities like higher dropout rates in certain groups, lower college enrollment rates in others. There are still economic disparities like  higher rates of poverty and obstacles to employment. There are health disparities like higher rates of diabetes and cancer and Hepatitis B.

"Of those who are new to America, many still face language barriers. Others, like Vincent Chin whom we lost three decades ago, have been victims of horrible hate crimes, driven b the kinds of ignorance and prejudice that are an affront to everything America stands for. So those are real problems, and we can't ignore them."

Last week the initiative launched a website with almost everything you need to know about Asian and Pacific Islander Americans. Data.gov/AAPI is pretty comprehensive since it draws from about 2,000 datasets and reports from all federal, state, county and city sources. Hopefully policymakers, marketers and advertisers can use this data to improve the quality of life of so many AAPI individuals. 

With the good things will come some bad things, too. It will also bring a host of ads, commercials, junk mail and those annoying phone calls to your mailboxes and landlines. (Hint: use voicemail as a filter if you don't want to hear this scripted sales pitches to buy this and or subscribe to that.)

The good - hopefully - will outweigh the bad. 

Here are some findings to whet your curiosity:

-Asian Americans is the fastest growing ethnic group in the country.

-By 2050, AAPIs, together, are expected to number 40.6 million people, or one in 10 persons in the U.S.

-Asian  American and black students have highest enrollment rates in remedial education in the first year of college.

-In just 5 years, the number of small businesses owned by Asian Americans grew up 4- percent.

-Asian Americans make up the fastest growing voting bloc in the South.

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Listen to Obama in this video about the new website.