Via Sepia comes this article in The New York Times about caste in the United States. Being from a Muslim family I’ve never heard anything about caste in the United States. After getting to know a few brown Americans in more detail caste has been mentioned now and then so I have inquired among brown Muslims I have met through the web about the salience of this social structure among them and everyone claims they have never noted its persistance in the US. In South Asia Muslims do have caste, but my hypothesis is that it can only flourish in a South Asian context because unlike Hinduism Islam does not explicitly condone it, so without the support of a cultural matrix it dissolves (the rhetorical social egalitarianism of American society has its Muslim cognate).
But I wanted to focus on one snippet from the article:
…And Dr. Das’s losing battle to uphold tradition is about to suffer yet another setback: a grandson plans to marry a non-Indian Christian from Chicago whom he met at Harvard.
I have debated with Manish the possible future extent of inter-ethnic marriage and the eventual solvation of the South Asian identity because of this porcess several times (see here). Nevertheless, I grant that one of Manish’s points, that the younger South Asians have a more articulated and concrete brown identity is probably correct (though we differ on the degree of importance this might have in reversing the trend toward inter-ethnic marriage).
You see, my sister watches Hindi movies.
What’s wrong with that say you? Well, nothing. But of late I have realized that she is an example of the kind of ethnic identity formation that Manish has spoken of. I have two siblings about 15 years younger than me, and one who is only 4 years younger. In many ways we are two generations, and perhaps the most striking one is that in some ways the younger generation, especially my sister (thank god my youngest brother seems more interested in video games), are more explicitly brown-identified.
I believe there are two major factors that influence this.
1) A larger brown community means that she has peers who are brown (peers really matter!).
2) She has recounted to me episodes where her teacher approvingly suggested that she speak about her “heritage,” and it is quite clear her “diversity” is encouraged and looked upon positively by the school system (I started noting that by the end of high school I started to become “educational” and teachers would want me to speak about Islam and my own view of God, which was hard since I was in an atheist).
On the first point, I was not always the only South Asian kid in any given educational circumstance, but generally there were only two of us and I never felt any need to form a friendship with someone else because of their racial similarity to me (in fact, when there are only a few co-ethnics in a population I would not be surprised if a repulsive force would be at work because a group of 2 or 3 just increases your alien profile without being large enough to give you the benefits of a clique). On the second score, though my ethnic identity was obvious to my teachers and friends, there was little comment on it. In fact, I remember my 6th grade teacher, a white liberal supporter of Jesse Jackson, expressing unconcealed disgust when I mentioned offhand that my parents had an arranged marriage. She blurted out, “that’s medieval.” I can’t imagine a white liberal teacher saying something like that today with the rise of multiculturalism (though those who are younger might educate me on this, and there is no doubt great inter-regional variance on this issue).
So certainly I grant some of what Manish is saying. Nevertheless, I constantly make fun of my sister for her preference in movies, and note that she has many non-South Asian friends (her South Asian friends still tend to be separated by distance since they live in neighboring communities). This would not be an issue in many large urban areas where critical mass has been attained and the process of congealing of an ethnic minority can proceed faster.
I think a good analogy is to imagine a large jawbreaker vs. an equivalent volume jawbreaker broken up into 100 pieces. Clearly the latter would melt in your mouth first. My own personal preference is to work for policies that break the jawbreaker to pieces. That is why I prefer a education based immigration system (well educated professionals move more often and meet non-co-ethnics in the workplace). Also, moderating the stream of immigration would staunch the flood of new people from the old country that would be the gluten in the cake of identity.
Posted by razib at 10:45 AM