Cause Right Now the World is Flat: New Asian Indian Immigrants and Racial Ambiguity

• In Event: 303 - Regular Session. Asians and Asian Americans

Abstract

While a growing literature in the last fifteen years has attested to South Asian “racial ambiguity” and resistance to being “raced,” there is little in-depth qualitative evidence of how South Asians or Asian Indians immigrants in particular racially identify or avoid racialization. Twenty-three in-depth interviews were conducted with both men and women of Asian Indian origin who entered the United States after 1985, and are currently residing in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of North Texas. The data collected uncovers a crisis of understanding when the interpretation of racialized experiences and emerging non-racial (or racial) identities do not align with the actual experience of U.S. style racialization and deliberate racialized actions (choices, decisions, racial positioning, etc. Two ideal types (“disidentifier” and “relational”) emerge, that depict two ends of a spectrum that represents how the study participants approached their racial ambiguity in the United States.

Author

• Kavitha Koshy, Texas Woman's University