{"id":373,"date":"2004-09-12T13:20:57","date_gmt":"2004-09-12T18:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com?p=373"},"modified":"2005-01-14T00:48:20","modified_gmt":"2005-01-14T05:48:20","slug":"the_outmarriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/2004\/09\/12\/the_outmarriage\/","title":{"rendered":"The outmarriage rate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Razib<\/a> plugs common desi names into Wedding Channel and comes up with a 38% outmarriage rate<\/a> for second-gen desis, which he says confirms his belief<\/a> that:<\/p>\n\n

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!\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n

Californian Sikhs in the early 1900s outmarried at a near-100% rate<\/a> 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<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n

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.<\/blockquote>\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n

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…<\/blockquote>\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n

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.<\/blockquote>\n\n

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<\/i> ethnicity.<\/p>\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n

And I heartily disagree with this sentiment:<\/p>\n\n

I don’t want to see the formation of a desi ethnic group which spawns its own political class.<\/blockquote>\n\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}