The name of a new museum in Washington, D.C. perpetuates a historical mistake. In the 21st century, the Smithsonian still saw fit to call it the National Museum of the American Indian. In a farcical juxtaposition, even the hometown paper calls them Native Americans throughout the very same story.

Researching desis in the U.S. has always been a pain because the injection of American Indian in search results forces you to use ever more tortured qualifiers like East Indian (which really means Bengali, Bihari, Oriya, Assamese…), Asian Indian, Indian-American, South Asian and South Asian American. This museum’s name just makes it worse. (I suppose it’s too late to ask the West Indies to choose a new moniker.)

The sexy, curvy new museum sits on the National Mall between the Capitol and the spectacular aerospace museum.

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…

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Sigh. This editorial cartoon by Pat Oliphant (9/8/04) just ran in the New York Times and the Washington Post, among other papers. Using an emaciated, half-naked beggar sitting next to a cow to represent Indian high tech: it’s Temple of Doom all over again (thanks, S.K.).

Let Universal Press Syndicate know how you feel: content@uclick.com. Takes only 30 seconds. I just wrote in.

For a funny, thinly-disguised take on outsourcing, check out ‘Dilbert’ on the fictional country of Elbonia.