For one year, all the South Asians in the US were considered “white”Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Census/Demographics, Media Archive on 2017-11-20 02:40Z by Steven |
For one year, all the South Asians in the US were considered “white”
Quartz
2017-09-02
Stand and be counted. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
The history of classifying South Asians in the United States is fraught. For most of the 20th century, the census and courts did not consider South Asians as a distinct race, in part because their numbers were negligible. In 1970, the US census decided South Asians were white.
Racially designating South Asians, especially from the Indian subcontinent, is complicated. India is home to more than 2,000 ethnic groups. In the early 1900s, scholars believed that a major ancestral group, the Aryans, migrated to the subcontinent from Europe. They indisputably integrated into Indian culture—the Mahabharata, one of the most well-known ancient Indian epics, tells the story of Aryan warriors who fought among their families for political and spiritual legitimacy. They grouped into an elite, fair-skinned class, possibly explaining the diversity in skin tones of Indians today.
So what happened in 1970? Let’s go back to 1919…
Read the entire article here.