Razib plugs common desi names into Wedding Channel and comes up with a 38% outmarriage rate for second-gen desis, which he says confirms his belief that:
the first Asian Indian generations are in the same statistical ball-park as Japanese who have been resident in the United States for 100 years!
A 38% outmarriage estimate strikes me as inaccurately high due to least two forms of sampling bias. One is obvious, online wedding registries disproportionately draw from people of higher socioeconomic status. The other is less so: it samples outmarriage from age groups at the leading edge of population cohort and subculture formation.
Californian Sikhs in the early 1900s outmarried at a near-100% rate because they were barred from bringing over Sikh wives. Similarly, older second-gen desis met fewer desis in college and grad school because there weren’t many others in their cohort. And they didn’t have as thriving a popular subculture and identity within the U.S. to play with, as Vinod ably demonstrated:
We were at the bleeding edge of the Desi demographic wedge — the children of the first wave of Indian professional parents… demography has provided a critical mass of other Desi’s… The turning point here was somewhere around my senior year in college (1995)… 5-10 years of additional Desi penetration into America has made all the difference and provides them with a college experience quite distinct from mine… Desi is now a “3rd culture” that’s neither mainstream American nor FOB Indian.
The outmarriage rate will most likely follow a trinomial path where it reverses twice: high in the beginning, sharply lower as cohort size increases, and then gradually increasing as assimilation progresses. Razib notes but then glosses over this argument:
there are likely to be more South Asian partners on the market than there were for the children of the late 60s to early 80s…
A separate, more contentious issue is whether the formation of a desi ethnic identity is desirable. The question is somewhat moot as the identity already exists. Razib argues:
the creation of a desi identity will likely retard the diminishment of the aura of exoticism that many South Asian youth wish to flee from.
But it’s quite the opposite: for second-gen desis, the implicit choice is not whether to be purely first gen in culture. Rather, it’s whether to adopt parts of the desi subculture, other subcultures (black, Jewish, Greek), or neutral American culture. None of these choices imply exoticism; indeed, just as Brits are quite familiar with British Asians, desi subculture will be yet another American ethnicity.
I have no quarrel with picking and choosing one’s degree of ethnic affiliation; I freely mash up cultures which appeal to me, including many derived from avocation rather than ethnicity. But to say that such affiliation is intrinsically bad is both silly and moot.
And I heartily disagree with this sentiment:
I don’t want to see the formation of a desi ethnic group which spawns its own political class.
These desires are contradictory. The very definition of integration is that one feels at home enough to participate in local politics. And no sizeable ethnic group has ever done so without also pushing back on issues that affected its members. In fact, any political org which ignored its own members’ issues would soon find itself twisting on the pike of irrelevance.
i disagree with a lot of those points. but i need to go eat some chinese food…. 🙂
“Where the white women?”
census outmarriage stats here. 46% for men, 38% for women.
outmarriage rates for american born south asians that is.
And no sizeable ethnic group has ever done so without also pushing back on issues that affected its members. In fact, any political org which ignored its own membersÂ’ issues would soon find itself twisting on the pike of irrelevance.
the problem with this is that i don’t see unifying issues that should mobilize south asians as south asians rather than liberals, libertarians, conservatives, feminists, environmentalists, pro-life activists, etc. etc. etc. in the 1960s there was a clear reason that black americans spoke with (relatively) one voice, the majority lived under an apartheid state and the minority that did not still suffered daily prejudice. in the 19th century the irish had to suffer anti-catholic prejudice and were excluded from political participation and the patronage jobs that that entailed. after 1967 the israeli state was seen to be under imminent threat from arab attack, and the yom kippur war was a close thing (relatively), so the american jewry (majority) mobilized.
on the other hand, there are italian american and german american and swedish american organizations that maintain a sense of nostalgia and that celebrate their heritage, but there seems little political activism because there is no unifying ’cause’ (to give one reason). the relatively civilian nature of these subcultures mean that the identificable political class enmeshed in an organization like the NAACP or ADL or the ‘chicago machine’ has not emerged. terms like ‘self-hating swede’ or ‘self-hating italian’ seem not to pop up often, at least in comparison to ‘self-hating black’ or ‘self-hating jew.’ the latter often are used as insults to disparage political dissent from the ‘group consensus,’ because an ethnic political class exists which elaborates on ‘what is good for the jews/blacks/etc.’ politically.
these are complicated topics, but ultimately, i feel uncomfortable when i read about ‘the best vote from an islamic perspective’ or ‘the best vote from a jewish perspective’ or the ‘the best vote from a black perspective.’ these neglect intragroup variance that means that individuals are all in different circumstances and so their calculations are situational. this isn’t always true, as in the case of blacks in the 1960s who all suffered apartheid in the south, or the vast majority who suffered prejudice in the north. when there is no intragroup variance a common political approach seems tenable. when there is intragroup variance i think one should be cautious about making explicit formulations of identity, something that institutional organizations are really good at.
Razib — I’ve pointed out the Canadian intermarriage statistics to you before. With a proportionately much larger Desi comunity (about one thirtieth of the pop, concentrated in Toronto/Vancouver) Desis have the lowest intermarriage rate of any visible minority group in Canada (13%).
http://www.statcan.ca/english/studies/11-008/feature/11-008-XIE20040016882.pdf
I expect that in time, the US stats will converge to the Canadian ones over time, as the Desi community increases in size.