Here at Sepia Mutiny, we often get into long debates in the comment thread of Indian-American versus the South Asian American. With elections right around the corner and all the focus on ‘issue based politicizing,’ the conversations often revolve around people who identify as Indian-American tend to care more about South Asian foreign policy and less about their lives here in America as an ‘American’ first, and vice versa for people that identify as South Asian American.
So the real question I see is as ‘Americans’, whether South Asian or Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani/Sri Lankan – American, are our issues domestically really that different? Should we be asking ‘what issues are desis interested in’ when we really should be asking ‘what issues affect the the desi community?’
Let me present you the information, and you make the educated judgement for yourself…The following numbers are based on the national demographics profile recently released by key APIA research organizations.
- Education: We know the model minority sterotypes — desis are ‘supposed’ to be the most educated. The truth is 23% of Bangladeshis have less than a high school degree, higher than national average of 20%. Pakistani (19%), Asian Indian (15%), and Sri Lankan (14%). On the other hand, as far as college education is concerned, 61% of Asian Indians have a bachelors or advanced degree, 42% of Pakistanis and 45% of Bangladeshis.
- Poverty: One doesn’t think that poverty affects the desi community — looking simply at the median household income we see that it is higher than the national and higher than non-Hispanic whites at $45,576 for Pakistanis, $52,392 for Sri Lankans, and $61,322 for Asian Indians. Bangladeshis we see fall the lowest at $37,074. When delving further we see that 15% of Bangladeshis and Asian Indians have 3 or more workers per family. Pakistani at 14%, Sri Lankan at 12% — the national number is 12%. But when comparing these numbers to the percentage of people below poverty level we see that all South Asians have a higher percentage than whites (8%): Bangladeshi 23%, Pakistani 18%, Sri Lankan 10%, and Asian Indian 10%. Seeing such ‘high’ numbers of poverty in our community, it’s sad to see that public assistance for this community is far less: 4% of Bangladeshi, 2% Pakistani, 2% Asian Indian and 1% Sri Lankan.
- Housing: Though nationally, 66% of Americans own homes, and 72% of whites own homes, the numbers for South Asian Americans is less than this. 25% of Bangladeshis, 40% of Pakistanis, 47% of Asian Indians, and 50% of Sri Lankans. Unfortunately, the overcrowded housing issue is far worse — 6% nationally live in over crowded housing, 2% of Whites, where as 43% of Bangladeshis, 31% of Pakistani, 21% of Sri Lankans, and 18% of Asian Indians.
- Assimilation: Though the immigration laws that gave South Asians our immigration boom happened in 1965, we still see a high rate of foreign – borns in our community: 83% of Bangladeshis, 79% of Sri Lankans, 74% of Pakistanis and 73% of Asian Indians. Comparatively, the national foreign born rate is 11%, for whites 4%, and for Latino 40%. The naturalization rate of foreign-born is 31% for Bangladeshis, 38% of Sri Lankans, 40% of Asian Indians, and 40% of Pakistanis. Nationally the rate is 40% and 55% for Whites.
Of course, the issues mentioned above are based on data we have access to from the the national Census. What about the types of information where data doesn’t exist and thus inferences for our community has to be poorly estimated based on the data we do have? Such as healthcare — with such an economically divided community, how many in our community are unable to afford healthcare? What are the health disparities within our community, such as higher rates of ovarian cancer, diabetes, and low birth weight babies? What is the divorce rate for our community, life span in our community? Rate of domestic violence and sexual assault?
Domestically, I feel that our issues, as South Asian Americans, are not just narrowed to racial profiling and hate crimes, but rather, we have a breadth of issues that affect our community. I largely believe in two things with regards to South Asian American issues — the first is that not enough research is being done for and by our community to really investigate what issues are affecting us and the second is the community is not being educated enough about themselves. I challenge you to ask your family if they had realized that the numbers were so drastic as in the issues I listed above in education, housing and poverty. I highly doubt anyone (in our family) knows that these types of disparities exist. Though some are making differences, even more needs to be done.
Sure, we can ask South Asian Americans what issues are important to them, but the chances are they will answer in the typical with ‘economy, education and foreign policy.’ But I do believe that if we educate the community on the issues that are affecting them, as well as encouraging dialogue within the community, that the answers will be different. Are there issues that will potentially unite desis? I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t think we are there yet. Should we identify as Indian American or South Asian American? Domestically and politically, especially looking at these above issues, I think we have too much at stake to not identify as a South Asian American political community. But I’m not here to tell you how to think, just present for you the research and facts. I’ll let you make the educated decision yourself.
All data pulled from A Community of Contrasts: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States, a demographic profile created by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center and the Asian American Justice Center. The report is not online, but can be ordered through the AAJC.
vivek, the trend in US politics has been away from class as an organizing principle and toward touchstone cultural issues. i would suspect that most people on this blog are more culturally than fiscally progressive (or at least, they give more thought to the former than the latter). i don’t think class is an emotionally salient bond across religion and ethnicity. i thought world war I proved that as ‘patriotic’ socialists sent the workers to the trenches? additionally, one thing that cropped up early on this blog when s-man was hangin’ was that bringing up class tended to undermine identity politics, or come into clash, and many people here are very down with identity politics, whether it be from the progressive ‘we-are-people-of-color’ left or the ‘hindu-nation-is-number-one’ right. i actually backed up s-man a few times early on because i did think that the identity politics kind of went out of control and neglected class sometimes, as when upper-middle-class brown americans analogize their plight to the oppressed of the nation.
brown, brown, brown, brown, brown, brown, and then some!
Weird right? Especially since the comment thread has degenerated to it’s usual spin by the time it reaches 150+ posts on SM. And especially since domestic stats were given. C’est la vie- it’s the way of the comment threads at SM.
Class is an issue, and it’s a difficult issue. Helen Zia talks about it well in her book the Asian American Dream where she compares the taxi worker movement to the Bay Area Tie group and how disconnected they are. It is something that I’ve struggled with as a SAA voter organizer- an issue that some in the pass the roti circles would call classist organizing amongst desis 😉
Those Americans are very silly. And so are those Indians. Browns.
“To prevent comment spam, please type the word brown below:”
Razib, clearly it’s not working. What do we call this? Brownian…non-Motion?
razib and taz,
Thanks for the responses. I wish I had something intelligent to say, but I’m too sleepy. I’ll get back to y’all in the morning…
Aha! I have it!
“Brownian Emotion.”
ultrabrown.com vs. ultradesi.com vs. ultrasouthasian.com ?
I hate my job. But I love Photoshopping (even if I only really have MSPaint).
ULTRABROWN! ULTRRRRAAAABROWN!
I think “Ultradesi” has quite a nice ring to it 🙂
Anyway, I thought I should clarify my reasoning a little further, to complement the points I made in my previous post.
Along with what I said before, I should mention that — as very long-term visitors to SM will know — I tend to have a “human first” attitude; meaning, I don’t mentally subdivide people up into “races” in the literal sense. I know that there is some medical basis for “race”, at least in terms of some groups being more susceptible to certain ailments than others, but beyond that I don’t consider it at all. It may sound like a cliche, but I only regard there as being one race — the human race — and beyond that it’s just a matter of people being from different countries (which are very artificial geographic/political delineations created on the planet by humans themselves anyway).
Because of this, personally I agree with the attitude in the UK of using geographical origin, not skin-colour, as a form of ethnic identification; it’s because, in my view, the latter just sets up another barrier between people and inadvertantly promotes the notion of “race” as some kind of semi-separate “species”-type classification, as someone else mentioned higher up in this thread.
Also, the risk is that using skin-colour as a primary form of self-identification can inadvertantly reinforce preoccupations with such matters and perpetuate excessive self-consciousness about one’s own skin-colour (and that of other people), instead of actually eradicating such attitudes.
For various historical reasons this may have been the dominant attitude within the United States, but there is such a thing as perpetuating something which was a mistake in the first place, especially a misguided and generally nasty approach which has its roots in the Victorian era.
Along with my previous post, this has been the basis of my arguments from Day 1 — again, as some very long-time visitors to SM will be aware.
However…..It is becoming very clear to me these days that, in some aspects, there are considerable cultural differences between the South Asian community in the UK and our counterparts in North America, so beyond a certain point it would not be appropriate for me to comment excessively on this matter, especially as someone who doesn’t actually live in the US. It’s apparent that you are all still trying to hammer out the various issues regarding “identity” etc.
I’m sure you guys know what’s best for yourselves and can therefore figure out the right course of action and the right approach to take 😉
Don’t you think going forward, say, in a couple generations when we are grandparents, that ‘desi’ and ‘asian’ and ‘south asian’ will have less umph as identities and typecasts? Btw, I’m thinking of America, the UK is a different beast. America is quite good as a factory for producing Americans.
Brown seems more plausible than the others (but still not sufficient).
A toast to brown. For now.
I think you’re confused.
It is not in the best interest of Indian-Americans to ally themselves with the other SA communities for one main reason: the primary issue of interest to most Indian Americans is pro-India foreign policy. Of course we can agree on issues such as skilled immigration, minority protections, etc, but these we have in common with many other communities. If you look at it objectively Indian-Americans share interests more with Jewish Americans than with other South Asians, both are wealthy but small minorities with an exclusive unified interest in promoting their homeland, and particularly protecting Israel, India and America from radical Islam. In fact, these similarities are playing themselves out on the political stage as we can see the USINPAC already allying with the AIPAC and other pr-Israel organizations.