I'm Bangladeshi, rather than Indian, so I'm watching this from the sidelines. That being said, I'm of the opinion that activists suck up all the oxygen when it comes to discussions of race in the U.S. A Pew poll a few years ago noted that 90% of Indian Americans think discrimination against Indian Americans in America is a "minor problem" or "no problem at all": https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/16/miss-americ.... But the 10% that think it's a big problem get the biggest platforms.
In reality, it's probably impossible to understand how big or small a problem caste discrimination really is in context. The folks who don't face any negative experiences mostly aren't going to pipe up.
> A Pew poll a few years ago noted that 90% of Indian Americans think discrimination against Indian Americans in America is a "minor problem" or "no problem at all"
It’s all relative. My mum (in her 80s) is, as they say, “quite fair”. She’s lived in Boston for decades and when I was visiting a couple of weeks ago I could see she was still subject to the usual Boston racism. But I noticed it was mostly older people — ppl my age (50s) or younger were a lot better, and not just because they don’t notice older people.
I got a lot of appearance genes from my white dad so this issue doesn’t come up for me.
Where I live in Palo Alto the kids I interact with don’t appear to care at all and seem to mix pretty indiscriminately, which is great.
I disagree, but for what it's worth, in case you were not able to tell from my username, I'm an immigrant, from India.
While I have been here in the US for many years, much of my life, including college education and a few years after that, was in India. So, not sure if I'm afflicted by the American systemic racism.
I often attend a lot of events where you get diaspora from across the world, and one thing that all the Indians will agree on is that Indian American don't mix with natives as much as Indians in other parts of the world. This would be a type of racism in most European and Asian racism philosophies.
The other point is that most minorities in the US are highly assimilated into American culture and American norms. And most Americans have had very little experience of anything more drastic than Canada or possibly Hispanics (which is itself a very American concept). Americans drastically tend to underestimate just how different other cultures are and quickly jump to racism - I've been in a lot of situations in third countries where Indian Americans and other Americans call racism on "problems" they have that are considered normal in places like the UK or Australia.
Its insane the level of generalizations about Indians/Asians that are tolerated in "woke" spaces like this forum. If someone made a similar comment about black people, they would be excoriated (and rightfully so). As an Indian American who lived in SF, this perception of "unwantedness" was pervasive. People aren't outright racist but harbor views that imply that Indians/Asians are not part of the "in" group. We are seen as a monolith rather than as individuals. This hypocrisy really irks me and I will call it out when I see it.
Your rhetoric is not that different from Trump's. I get that there are anxieties about the familiar culture of the place you grew up in changing due to immigration/migration from other parts of the country. However, no place in the history of the world was culturally static.
Calling a group of people racist and then generalizing all Indian Americans as being ideal immigrants is about as contradictory as you can get in one argument
The issue is that Americans with half-baked knowledge think that all Indians have a caste assigned to them, or that India has a national level caste allocation policy. For Americans who hate India, this gives them more ammo to hate us.
I'm an Indian-American as well. Don't make assumptions.
In any case, there are some deeply problematic aspects to Indian culture, including that of my own community, and criticism of them is warranted, no matter the demographics of the critic.
I am late to the party but people here need to understand this whole issue from a factual data-based viewpoint rather than from biased anecdotal articles.
The above is the third in a 3-part series on Indian-Americans. Links to the other two are in the article and are worth reading.
This whole (non-)issue in the US is entirely due to the shenanigans of "Equality Labs" of dubious origins/connections/research (the data is from a survey they did on Reddit!). See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37333207
Horrible article. Its deeply internalized racism. I know many of the criticisms are true, and as a statistical generalization I might agree that an Indian is more likely to e.g seek a way to circumvent the system than someone else. An outsider looking at Indians as a homogeneous group and seeing those patterns might make negative inferences about all Indians.
But when a person who does not embody those flaws blames himself for the ones that do - its because he has become accustomed to seeing himself as an outsider does, as an interchangeable member of a group called "Indian" instead of as an INDIVIDUAL. Being stereotyped is simply not your fault.
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