Author Archives: Razib Khan

Where the browns be internationally

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This is an American-focused weblog, but the internet knows no borders, so there are browns from all over who leave comments and post. It’s interesting to get different perspectives (OK, most of the time!). But on the heels of Taz’s post on the 2010 US Census data release I thought it would be interesting to revisit how “South Asians” are distributed outside of South Asia. To do that I had to look around for ethnic data on a selection of nations with large South Asian populations.

There are some qualifiers here. Since the non-Indian South Asian data for the USA isn’t released yet, I just looked at Indian Americans. This is “good enough for government work” in the USA I think because the brown community is overwhelmingly Indian origin. In contrast that would be a really bad approximation in the United Kingdom, where half of the brown community is non-Indian (this includes into the Indian class those who arrived from East Africa I believe). The distinction between Indian and non-Indian also gets into the “not-even-wrong” category if you are looking at the West Indies, where most South Asians arrived before partition, and so were all “East Indian” no matter where they were from (though I know that in places like Mauritius there is sometimes a post facto identification with post-partition nation-states, often based on religious divisions). Finally, for some Gulf Arab nations the demographic data is nebulous and hard to get. Part of this is due to the fact that the South Asian Diaspora in places like Saudi Arabia is quite transient, and the probability of actually becoming a citizen is low. I couldn’t find Saudi data easily, though it seems likely that there are several million South Asian residents of Saudi Arabia at any given moment. But it seems agreed upon that the United Arab Emirates is about half South Asian, and this community is arguably the most rooted, even if they don’t hold citizenship, so I’m including it in the comparisons.

Below are two scatterplots which show the absolute numbers of browns vs. the % of browns in a given nation. The second plot is log-transformed percentage so you can compare the proportions at the low end of the scale. Continue reading →

Nikki Haley, kingmaker 2012?

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Nikki Haley has been the subject of posts on this blog going back to the middle of the last decade. Now Politico has the first of what are probably going to be many similar stories leading up to the 2012 South Carolina primary, Nikki Haley muscles up for 2012:

With noted smackdowns of two top GOP 2012 contenders, a high-profile presence at the May 5 Fox News debate and a schedule heavy with cable news show appearances, the first-term Republican governor is signaling her intent to use South Carolina’s key early presidential primary to claim a place on the national stage.

Haley’s recent muscle-flexing came at the expense of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, both of whom are still licking their wounds after her frank–and non-constructive–criticism of them.

Continue reading →

What do Hindu Americans think?

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In the comments on this weblog there are lots of debates about what person of religion X thinks. This has particularly been vexing to me when someone asserts “Christians believe Y,” based on interactions with a particular type of Christian. Though CUNY”s American Religious Identification Survey and the General Social Survey are excellent resources, probably the best clearing house on American religious data is Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey. Unfortunately Pew’s specific data is hard to link to, so I’ve had to repeat the same information over and over and given instructions on how to find the specific data through a series of clicks.

To get around this I decided to replicate some of the data points of possible interest to readers of this weblog. I extracted Hindus, Buddhists, Evangelical Protestants, Mainline Protestants, and Roman Catholics. The majority of South Asian Americans are of Hindu background, and even more of Indian Americans. Buddhists are diverse, but since they are of the same broad religious family (Dharmic) as Hindus I thought they’d be a good check. The Evangelical Protestants here are traditional white denominations, not the historically Black Protestant denominations. Mainline Protestants refers to the major establishment Protestant denominations, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans (note that a minority of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans, are evangelical, but the majority are not. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is not evangelical, but the Presbyterian Church in America is). Do remember that Hindus in particular are still predominantly an immigrant community in the United States (this makes sense of their peculiar age distribution). Continue reading →

Chindia in the South Bay

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Interesting article posted on the news tab, Indian population diversifying Bay Area’s Asian population. Here’s an infographic which tells the tale:

20110512_062829_asianpop.jpg

To some extent the story is a recycling of an old American dynamic of the ethnic shift of neighborhoods and communities as they’re impacted by different waves of immigrants, in this case from Chinese to Indians. It focuses on the city of Cupertino, which as of 2010 is 63% Asian American, 31% non-Hispanic white, 4% Hispanic, and 1% black. Continue reading →

We are Khan (?)

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evil.jpgEvil needs a face. In the 1980s that face was Ruhollah Khomeini. In the 1990s it was Sadam Hussein. In the 2000s it was Osama bin Laden. Setting aside whether these individuals were in fact evil, the reality is that for the American people they were the face of evil. They were personifications of a complex bundle of geopolitical concerns which came to the fore for a given span of time. Like it or not this was relevant to American brown folk. Apparently Sanjay Kumar, a Sri Lankan American who was later became the C.E.O. of Computer Associates, had to wear an “I am not Iranian” t-shirt in high school around 1980 during the hostage crisis. During the first Gulf War I encountered a weird comment that I looked like Saddam Hussein from an idiot in one of my classes (my own reaction was “what kind of crack are you smoking?!?!”, and my friends pretty quickly started mocking the kid who had thought to get one in at my expense). More recently in the 2000s the issue of “false positives” has been widely covered on this weblog, not without controversy. Continue reading →

Osama & me & we

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Osama_bin_Laden_portrait.jpgI began blogging because of Osama Bin Laden. This was not a necessary condition, but it was a sufficient one. I make that qualification because there are various aspects of my personality which indicate to me that I’d have started blogging when blogging became popular, no matter the details of the world around us. And, I suspect that blogging would have taken off, 9/11 or no 9/11. But in our world the path dependency played out so that political blogging and 9/11 have a strong relationship, with the latter leading to an explosion of the former.

And so I began my online adventure in April of 2002 in the wake of the rise of the “warblog.” My main interests were the War on Terror, web application programming (JSP/Servlets especially), and genetic engineering (in favor!). 9/11 had perturbed me from my default milquetoast libertarian isolationism, though I will admit that my initial starting position probably helped me be only mildly pro-war at the peak of the fever in March of 2003 (I recall throwing out 60 out of 100 in terms of how “warm” I was to the idea of invading Iraq, with 50 being neutral). As the years have passed I’ve rapidly retreated from the position of what I like to think of as my “neocon years.” One gauge of this may be that I used to check out Libertarian Samizdata every day in 2003, but drop in once a year to see if it’s still around now. Continue reading →

This is 2012 in America (almost)

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Ambassador_Jon_Huntsman.jpgI was just poking around for information on the potential Republican field in 2012 this morning, and I stumbled onto an interesting image of one of the candidates, Jon Huntsman, Jr.. In case you don’t know, Huntsman is the scion of a mega-rich Mormon political family, and viewed as a moderate Republican (though this is mostly because these terms are graded on a curve today, and I say this as a registered Republican). He was appointed by Barack H. Obama to be ambassador to China, but he resigned that position. The supposition is that he might be mulling a presidential run. I am of the set who believes that this is some bizarre joke or tactical feint, as a moderate Mormon has pretty much zero chance in the Republican primaries.

But why the post? First, check out this photo of Huntsman (alternate link if pop-up doesn’t work) with two of his daughters and his wife. How does it make you feel? Here’s an article about Huntsman’s religious pluralism: Continue reading →

Structure within Houston Gujaratis resolved?

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guj.jpgAbout two and a half months ago I brought your attention to the fact that there is population substructure in the Gujaratis of Houston. That might sound strange, but here’s the back story. Over the past ~10 years or so there has been a project attempting to catalog common human genetic variation, known as the HapMap. The HapMap began with East Asian, West African, and European groups. But over the years it has been expanding. The first South Asian population added to the database were people of Gujarati origin in Houston, Texas. Therefore, you had a situation where in the medical genetic literature there was a lot of talk about “Gujaratis from Houston,” as if that was a group of particular importance.

The ultimate pragmatic rationale for the catalog was to allow researchers to control for ancestry when attempting to fix upon genes implicated in disease. By illustration, if Chinese have disease X at a greater frequency than Europeans, if you had a common pool of Chinese + Europeans then all the genetic variants associated with the Chinese might come up as causal, when actually it’s just a correlation with ancestry. Continue reading →

A statistical snapshot of North American brown folk

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I’m really excited by the releases of 2010 Census. We’ll finally get some really fine-grained data. For example, we know from the American Community Survey that the Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, and Nepali, communities have grown a great deal over the past 10 years. But I’m curious about more than these sample based estimates, I want fine-grained stuff which the decennial Census provides. We’ll know for example whether the endogamy rate for marriages where individuals are Indian Americans who were born or raised in the USA remains ~55%. That means in a little over half of the marriages between an ABD and someone else, that someone else was also an Indian American (whether foreign born and raised, or American born or raised). One model might be that with the growth in the community you’ll see the outmarriage rate drop. Some social science has seen this tendency among Asian Americans in general. I’m probably leaning in that direction myself (as a descriptive matter of the population wide movement. I am not personally part of that trend).

But before we get to the point where we get lots of 2010 data releases, I thought I’d “dump” a statistical snapshot of sorts of South Asians in North America. I wanted to include the UK and other communities of the Diaspora, but labor hours are finite. Feel free to offer links/data in the comments. The data below are from the US Census, the 2001 Census of Canada, and Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey. It is interesting that even across the two North American South Asian communities there are large differences. In particular it struck me how much more nationally diverse Canadian South Asians are, while the American South Asian community is numerically dominated by people whose national or family origin is in India. Continue reading →