CRE 151 -The truth behind Indian American Exceptionalism

 

CRE 151 -The truth behind Indian American Exceptionalism

Many are unaware of the special circumstances that eased their entry into American life and the bonds they share with other nonwhite groups.

1)      Many immigrants came to the U.S. the author of this one’s parents came in 1969 -a devout Hindu mother, orphaned at early age, came in as middle class in Houston tx

2)      Her world was filled with Indian doctors and engineers

a.      Never stopped to consider how they rose into American society so fast

b.      Indians were family-oriented, education oriented and work oriented

3)      What is a model Minority -derives from sociologists William Peterson to describe the Japanese Americans that extended to other Asian Americans

4)      The flip side of problem minorities

5)      Terminology took life during social unrest, race riots that rocked the nation after assassination of MLK and the emergence of Richard Nixon’s racilly charged “southern Strategy”

a.      Many Americans take for granted Indian American success -the story of Dr. Patel stereotype -kids who consistently dominate Scrips National Spelling Bee

b.      Vice president presidential candidate Kamala Haris whose mother was Indian

c.      The fact that they have the highest median annual household group

6)      Most ignore the reality that before Indian Americans became a model minority they were regarded as a problem minority

a.      The U.S. engineered the conditions that allowed certain nonwhite groups to thrive

b.      Indian Americans do not see how much they have in common with other nonwhite Americans because they tend to live in a bubble -in comfortable university towns, tech hubs, and white-dominated suburbs.

7)      In late 1800s and early 1900s after the Chinese Exclusion Act halted most immigration from China, American employers in need of laborers turned to India and other Asian countries

8)      Leaflets blanketed Punjabi countryside promising opportunities of fortune making..with typically wages of $2 dollars a day for strong men.

9)      As numbers grew..Indian migrants primarily working as farm laborers and lumberjacks considered least desirable of all races

10)  Nativists warned of a tide of turbans

11)  Immigrants were overwhelmingly men

12)  Were legally prevented from bringing over wives or children

13)  Frequently subject to anti-miscegenation laws

14)  So they frequently married either Hispanics or Blacks

15)  1920- Oregon court granted citizenship to Bhagat Singh Thind -an Indian immigrant who served in U.S. Army during WWI

a.      A naturalization examiner objected -issue made it all the way to U.S. Supreme court

b.      The Court citing immigration and naturalization law of the time, ruled that Thind was not white in the understanding of common man and denied him citenzship

16)  In 1924 U.S. passed Johnson-reed Act -which effectively ended immigration from any Asian country.

17)  Vaishono Das Bagai -son of wealthy landowner in Peshawar arrived on Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay in 1915 with his wife, and their three sons, and $25,000 in gold

18)  He became a naturalized citizen in 1921, but this was revoked in 1923

a.      Forced him to liquidate his property and the store he owned..he committed suicide in 1928

19)  Attitudes began changing during WWII selectively to scrub exclusionary laws in a bid to build wartime alliances in Asia

20)  Counter propaganda by Germany and Japan

21)  Which took aim at American’s racial history

22)  Naturalization rights were extended to Chinese immigrants in 1943 and to immigrants from India and the Philippines in 1946

23)  Japanese Americans were still an exception as their loyalty was questioned, and they were rounded up during WWII and interned

24)  The nature of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. was always different from that of racism directed at Blacks

25)  Asian and Pacific Islanders population very small, in 1940 only 1/50^th the size of black population

26)  African Americans fought for decades more to end legal segregation and gain voting rights even as the doors to both were being open for Asians.

27)  As the countries across the world began to ease colonial controls

a.      The Philippine in 1946, India and Pakistan in 1947, Indonesia in 1949,

b.      The U.S. was trying to expand their sphere of influence without looking like they were imperial

How could American democracy be a beacon during the Cold War, and a model for those struggling against Soviet oppression, if the U.S. itself practiced brutal discrimination against minorities within its own borders.

 

28)  Dalip Singh Saund -became the first Indian American elected to Congress , a democrat from California

a.      In 1956 defeated Republican candidate -Jacqueline Cochran Odlum

b.      She was the first woman to break sound barrier, and found it difficult to believe that she had lost to a Hindu she never ran for office again.

c.      Saund had arrived in U.S. in 1920, at the height of anti-Asian sentiment, received a doctorate in mathematics, but became a successful farmer and a justice of the peace.

d.      As a Sikh he wore a turban, in the beginning, but stopped.-he sported suits, and a new kind of mid-century American.

e.      He made it on the CBS news the first day he was in office

f.        House Foreign Affairs Committee used him as a example of American democracy in practice as he did an international tour to Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines

29)  He and the committee hoped to counter what Saund believed was “the Communist lie that racial prejudice against Asians is rampant in America..

30)  TV interview in Miami -1959, Saund was praised for how far he had come, how far American had allowed him to go..as he was the son of parents who could neither read or write..

31)hart celler Immigration nationality  act

 

  In 1965, Congress made massive changes to U.S. immigration law

a.      Part of it was to demonstrate greater equity in the context of the Cold War

b.      And dozens of independent nations in Asia and Africa

c.      U.S. eliminated admittance formula that favored immigrants from Western Europe

d.      Prioritized family reunification and professional skills

e.      Asian immigrants ultimately leveraged both to their advantage

f.        No one at the time anticipated how this would radically alter our country’s demographics.

g.       Many came, as did the author of this article came to because of economic necessity and their ambitions to =do better

h.      Thus, some of India’s best and brightest left for the U.S.

i.        From 1966-1977 about 20,000 scientists immigrated from India to the U.S. along with 40,000 engineers and 25,000 physicians.

j.        These were a very narrow slice of Indian -people with social capital and intellectual means to succeed far from home, and the resources to make the journey

32)  Resulted in intense form of social engineering, largely unacknowledged

33)  Immigrants from India, armed with degrees, arrived in the height of the civil rights movement

a.      Benefited from a struggle they did not participate nor even witnessed

b.      They made their way not only to cities, but suburbs, broadly speaking, accepted more easily than nonwhite groups had ever been.

c.      Many Indians do not know of the history before they were a model minority, before the Immigration and Nationality act was amended..in 1965

34)  Living in the rich suburbs of Piney Point the author pointed out that 85 percent were white, 1 2 percent were Asian, but Blacks only accounted for .6 percent virtually nonexistent as it had been for decades.

35)  Middle-class Indians and Pakistani immigrants found they were closer to the track of white residents living in the more affluent neighborhoods on the outskirts

a.      their kids going to good schools. very distant from the Black residents

b.      brown flight -the roots of Indian subcontinent drilled in us that divide and rule, the most potent tool of colonial power.

c.      As they watched during Covid, the killing of unarmed Americans and the national outrage

d.      And the white counterprotests

e.      The American narrative is not neat and linear, nor is the dream available to all

f.        Consider the Indian born engineer killed in a bar in Kansas City in 2017

                                                              i.      As the killer shouted “Get out of my country”

                                                             ii.      Still many Indian Americans live the life of privilege where threats were sporadic

                                                           iii.      They therefore can isolate themselves in America’s best and whitest neighborhoods

                                                           iv.      But their kids know that they can be targeted and that they are not alone..and the fight that was to come…