Race and Ethnicity in the South Asian American Diaspora

Abstract

Though not much has been written about the South Asian diaspora and race in the U.S., that which has been written is germinal work. [existing list here] among others are works that serve as the foundations for this essay. As South Asia is a broad category with complex diversity that is further complicated when exploring the diaspora, it is not truly possible to write about it as a homogeneous group. To effectively explore South Asian U.S. diaspora and its relationship to race, one must examine focuses on South Asian racialization vis-à-vis U.S. laws; the South Asian diaspora’s complexities marked by class, caste, religion, region, nation, migratory generation, migrational cohort, and migratory trajectories; and the ways that they are collapsed, erased, and/or misarticulated, to shape the communities’ racial and ethnic trajectory in the United States. There are, however, connective threads among the diaspora. One such thread is the model minority narrative. This narrative is a highly racialized concept, as articulated by several scholars, including S. Bhatia & A. Ram, A. Bhatt, E. Chou & J. Feagin, S. Koshy, Lopez, Mahalingam and A. Pathak have articulated that this is a highly racialized concept. This narrative has been deployed to evade racial identification in the U.S. Black–White spectrum and the ways in which that deployment collapsed in the face of September 11, 2001, this narrative has often been deployed to evade racial identification in the U.S. Black-White race spectrum. It is important to examine how that deployment collapsed in face of September 11, 2001, which was a watershed moment that brought South Asians and Muslims under scrutiny by dominant groups, especially in terms of race. Up against that scrutiny, it is important examine the interplay of the violence against South Asians and Muslims and the violence against Black/African Americans, especially with the emergence of Black Lives Matter, as these moments illuminate how communities of color both navigate how to stand in solidarity with each other, while confronting how anti-Blackness functions within the South Asian diaspora. These conversations about race and racism in the United States are occurring in concert with conversations of casteism, anti-Dalit discrimination, Islamophobia, and rampant violence against minority groups in South Asia. South Asians are simultaneously confronting their own histories around discrimination and violence as they experience the historical trajectory of racial violence in the United States. The South Asian diaspora is at a precipice of change regarding how it names itself in terms of race and ethnicity, how it participates in the sociopolitical landscape of the United States, and how it reckons with its own regional histories and oppressions.