Pink. Pulse – now that you mentioned it, I checked it and was shocked to find myself dead.

Taz, where are your sources? The U.S. Courts have toggled between classifying Indians as White and non-White pre-1923 but the crucial U.S. v Thind case by the Supreme Court established that Indians were non-White since 1923. No case has overturned this. And the courts have never established that Indians are Asian or spelled out whether it is a separate non-White race or part of another non-White race such as Asian. (source)

The Census Bureau (NOT THE COURTS) have described Indians variously as Hindu and then “Other Race” then White then Asian. Most anthropologists since 1893 and some earlier have classified Indians as Caucasian and later as biracial Caucasian and Dravidian. (Aryan is not a race, it’s a language group, as Max Mueller points out). And some newer anthropologists disagree with any science-based racial classification and opt for talking in terms of relativistic genetic distances between means from various population samples.

I agree with Charlie to some extent, but I think the South Asian category has to be broken down more.

The 1990 Census has significant issues with respect to Indian Americans. As you noted, it was the first time the “Asian Indian” category was used as a separate breakout. When you look at the numbers and the distributions, it becomes clear there was significant overcount (Many native Americans checked that box). There is also a small category of white people born in India and a slighly larger category of Anglo-Indians ancestry that may have checked the box — those numbers are so small it is impossible to do any real analysis there. Also, it is still very unclear about what Pakistani/Bangladeshi, Figian Indian and West Indian Asian populations did when they had to confront the box.

The real answer is to stop the whining about whatever number associated as “White”, and to focus on getting “South Asian” broken out into its own category — that would give everyone a much better sense of what these communities actualy look like and the real issues they face.

your nails and palms are black??? please check your pulse to see if you are dead…

Ennis, dear,

What does Bollywood Fugly do to our “ethnic regard” ?

Fugly is as fugly does.

what does this mean? how? huh? i’m so puzzled

I know of two families who are very “fair and light eyed” where the children are being raised as “white” and for all intents and purposes any reminder of being “brown” is absent in the house. The mother has bleached her hair blond etc. I feel disturbed each time but the kids are really smart and very well rounded and if I saw them walking down the street without the pretentious mom/dad I would think they were caucasian as well.

I used to know this chick who I worked with. She was Pakistani, 100% but she would tell everyone she was half Persian and half Brazilian. Yeah fake blond hair blue eyes the works and everyone used to think she was so exotic and the guys were always throwing themselves at her but yup she was still a phoney.