Sunday, April 08, 2007

Americo-Browns & sex   posted by Razib @ 4/08/2007 09:50:00 PM
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Abhi @ Sepia Mutiny points me to this study, "Sexual Decision-Making of Immigrant East Indians: Risky or Not?". You can see the data in the chart to the left. The sample size was hella small, and possible bias in their subjects is a pretty clear critique. That being said, this study illustrates a general trend, and that is the assimilation of 2nd gen browns into American culture despite the wishes of their parents, who often came here for economic opportunities denied them in brownland, but were intent on preserving 1972 brown values in the USA (haircuts and all). As I've pointed out before, a very significant minority of American browns are already marrying outside of their putative ethno-racial community (higher for 2nd gen as opposed to 1.5ers, the data in that table doesn't distinguish). One must also remember also that from the perspective of parents marrying across intra-brown ethnic/caste lines is also not endogamy, but those numbers will be masked in the data cited (endogamy being a metric which measures the influence on parental instruction of the values of children). The number of browns is far higher today than when I was a child, so one might assume that the outmarriage rates would be lower in the future as the pool of potential spouses born in the USA increases. Interestingly, the authors cite research from Canada which indicate that browns born in the cold north are more traditionalist than other Canadians, suggesting preservation of "values" across generations from their parents. But the dynamic might be different because of the Canadian policy of multiculturalism and the larger number of individuals from South Asia in relation to the overall population has allowed for the emergence of brown peer groups. These peer groups could serve as enforcers of "traditional" values derived from their parents. Of course parent-child values transmission does occur in some ways in the USA, for example, the nominal religion of brown Americans is generally not Christianity (and a likely majority of Christians are from families in Kerala which were Christian to begin with). To compare the impact of peer groups and parental values one must look at the overall context.

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