Not American Indians, Indians from India.
Every day I have to ask “government monitoring questions,” one of which asks about race. I’ve wondered about this, and asked several people at work, and it seems that no one else has even thought about this.
So which race classification do they fit into?
Depends what race classification you use. There are thousands of them. Some of them split them into several different races. Many consider the ‘Indians’ to be a distinct ‘Amerind’ race while the ‘Eskimo’ are Mongoloid. The older classifications consider them to be Mongoloid.
Race is whatever you define it as. Your workplace should have a specific classification scheme in place that you should use for work. Outside of work you can consider them any race you like. Race has no biological validity so your racial classification is as valid as anyone else’s for your personal use.
Depending on which classification system one uses, it varies, but if you are following either the Big Five races of Blumenbach or the Big Three races of his successors, Indians are Caucasian or white. (If you are an adherent of the National Alliance or some other odd organization, they are not “white,” but I don’t know what they are.)
I believe that for the purposes of the U. S. Census, (which is simply making sociological groupings, based on any group’s likelihood of being singled out for attention), they are white.
The OP is not asking about Native Americans.
Here are the six basic race categories as recognized by the US Census (cite):[ol][li]American Indian and Alaska Native[/li][li]Asian[/li][li]Black or African American[/li][li]Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander[/li][li]White[/li]Other[/ol]That page also discusses the issue of race in the census to some degree. It seems to me that they treat race as a self-identified property. That is, people decide for themselves what race they are. I couldn’t find any instances of the Census Bureau explaining these five racial designations in any detail aside from their names. With that in mind, an Indian could be any of the 63 possible race categories.
Well, I’m (3/4) Indian, and just about every other Indian I know, myself included, consider ourselves Asian. I know that many people in the West consider ‘Asians’ to be Chinese, Japanese and Korean and so on, and people overlook the fact that countries like India and Pakistan are also in Asia, although not that far east.
Is this kind of what you were looking for?
IIRC, there was a breakout on the US census where you could specify “South Asian”. Anyone know?
My answer is in respect to the classifications used by the US government. On the www.census.gov site, there is a Subjects A to Z index off to the left. There you can look up each of the 6 categories listed by Achernar and see what origins are classified under each race category.
The link below, defining the Asian category, specifically lists the Indian subcontinent.
Thanks for that. I hadn’t been able to find anything previously.
Ah HA! So the Census Bureau is not following the lead of the old ethnologists.
Thanks for the correction.
Broadly speaking Asian, but IIRC there are some Australoid Indians as well. Far down south.
Really they are extremely diverse. In certain areas, they are more mongoloid in appearance (Bengal). Others, they are mediterranean (eg Goa with its Portuguese influence). Others, they are Iranian/semitic looking (Parsees).
The Census Bureau seems to be following an old Supreme Court case that denied Indians the ability to gain US Citizenship. The gist of the case is that Indians were defined as not being “Caucasian”. The plaintiff had claimed that, since he was from an Aryan culture and spoke an Aryan language, he was as “white” as any other “Aryan”. The court decided otherwise.
-krs-one
My limited knowledge of race classification history leads me to believe that no one really took it too seriously after Blumenbach so a lot of people not mentioned here (most notable hispanics, and apparently Indians) are considered white.
Excuse me, but what does race have to do with citizenship? And just how old of a case are we talking about, here?
Thank you all for your answers! That helps considerably!
And please do answer, which case and how long ago??
Cisco, KRS-One is as bad at history as the stuff to which he objects. (Substitute the anonymous lyricists at Boogie Down Productions is KRS-One did not actually write the song.)
Linnaeus originally considered four “races,” based on location, and assigned them “personalities.” Blumenbach came after Linnaeus, made specific observations based on appearance and refused to create either a hierarchy of races or to assign them any attributes beyond those of appearance. He was adamant that he found no evidence to support a notion of superiority.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that “no one took it seriously.” Blumenbach’s Caucasians stretched from Britain and Ireland (or Iceland) in a great swath down to India, including Egyptians, Jews and Arabs, Persians, and all the nearby peoples in that geography. Later ethnologists eliminated the American and Malaysian groups from their classifications, but never got around to creating a separate Asian-not-Mongolian group, and the Indians remained among the Caucasian identification. However, they then added claims for qualities, (echoing Linnaeus), such as intelligence, industry, moral superiority, etc., that Blumenbach actively opposed ascribing without genuine evidence, (as opposed to the ad hoc arguments they were using). The whole “superiority of some races” movement was in full swing by the time he died in 1840. (His first publication on the subject On the Natural Variey of Mankind was published (ironically) in 1776.)
Blumenbach’s contribution was to attempt to define the groups, based on perveived physical features. his work was co-opted by ethnologists trying to create a hierarchy of races with whites at the top, but he had no hand in that misuse of his findings.
In 1923, an opinion of the Supreme Court in a challenge to the xenophobic immigration laws past in the preceding years, stated that while Indians were Caucasians, they were not “white.”
U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923)
If we were any species other than Homo sapiens ‘races’ would be classed as seperate species or at least sub-species.
Its amazing that our brain has developed to such a size that it has the ability to percieve these differences in some sort of order of value. Our own qualities of political correction have marred the purpose of the study of biology; one rule for animals another rule for humans.
‘Race’ does have a real meaning in the taxonmy of some species and I don’t think it implies such a strong degree of seperation than ‘sub-species’.
Racial schemes for humans have generally been debunked, with the differences in skull shapes between different peoples (once the favoured way of classifying someones ‘race’) was found to be the result mostly of diet and not genetics. In old racial schemes Indians were generally ‘caucasoid’ or ‘mongoloid’ as India contains a very diverse range of peoples
Actually, the exact reverse is true. Humans held onto “races” as a scientific belief with far less evidence than taxonomists have used to identify subspecies, or even races, within other animal groups. You are right that humans were treated differently, but the difference was that there was more (hair)splitting used on humans than there have been for bats or cats or other species.
Thanks for clearing that up tom. I had just assumed that no one had gone too far into race classifications after JSB because of reasons previously noted (the hispanics and indians being considered “caucasian”…etc) and because, well, you just don’t hear much about it these days.
Out of curiosity, what makes you think that krs-one didn’t write that song? Not saying you would make a claim without evidence but I always thought he was big on writing all of his own lyrics.
I did not so much assume that KRS-One did not write it as note that on the site where I found it, it was attributed to Boogie Down Productions. I have no opinion regarding authorship; I just didn’t want to cite the author in error.