Race, Caste, and the Model Minority Myth

If the construction of the “model minority” myth for Indian Americans rides on the back of their alleged casteless-ness, then their anti-Blackness, or at least a deliberate effort to separate themselves from marginalized Black Americans and other “less desirable” Indian immigrants, has also played a massive part in its edifice. 

Even as Indian Americans prefer to assert their model behavior by touting their selectively handpicked IT professionals, tech workers, and entrepreneurs, forgotten is the swelling population of undocumented Indians, which according to the Migration Policy Institute as of 2019 is approximately 553,000 (5%) of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. Nor included are the working-class Indians, some of whom moved to the United States in the late 1800s and continue to form a significant population of Indians, especially in areas like New York City and Philadelphia, and parts of California. 

Bengali Muslim peddlers and Punjabis from rural immigrant communities in the nineteenth century experienced and responded differently to discrimination from the largely “upper”-caste educated professionals during the time and were among the most targeted by the “yellow peril” racist American policies of that era. 

“While those who came to work the land, work in lumberyards, or work on the railroads bore the brunt of physical attacks, educated professionals who did not confront such direct hostility began crafting a racial politics that would distinguish them from their poorer compatriots, from other nonwhite immigrants, and from Black Americans,” notes [Harvard-based anthropologist Ajantha] Subramanian.

The notorious case of Bhagat Singh Thind—an Indian immigrant who, in 1923, argued to be considered white, since he was a “high caste Aryan full of Indian blood”—is a remarkable insight into the period’s eugenics-flavored “upper”-caste ideology, by which several “upper”-caste Indians considered themselves genetically superior to Dalits and Adivasis, and instead more aligned with white Caucasians. 

As Thind lost the case (ultimately leading to scores of Indians having their citizenships neutralized by 1926), equating “upper” casteness to whiteness became a losing strategy. However, by the 1960s, around the second big wave of Indian “upper”-caste immigration, identifying as “not Black” was quickly becoming a go-to for Indian Americans. “There was a common thread of understanding that emerged: the path to social and financial security was to avoid the taint of Blackness. While professional Indians no longer did so through recourse to whiteness, as had earlier elite migrants, they now leveraged class, nationality, and, most importantly, educational achievement, to fashion themselves as members of a model minority,” writes Subramanian in The Caste of Merit. 

Regardless, Indian Americans who moved to the U.S. over the last century were treated with racism, with many of them still considered “Black” regardless of their effortful delineations. During her interviews with [Indian Institutes of Technology] IIT graduates from the sixties, Subramanian discovered the tactics which several immigrant Indians employed to distinguish themselves as “not Black,” especially in the South, which was still in its Jim Crow era. Men started wearing a turban, whether or not they wore one back home in India, while women were encouraged to wear a sari to identify themselves as distinctly Indian. 

“I got the impression that the South was embarrassed to be mistreating foreign visitors,” one of the interviewees told Subramanian. “They had no problem discriminating against U.S. Blacks, but they went to lengths to ensure that we were fine.” This disposition, although prevalent in the “upper”-caste Indian immigrant professionals of the time, more or less ignored the efforts of the Black civil rights movement that, after decades of exclusion, made Indian immigrants’ reentry in the U.S. possible with the changes in the 1965 U.S. immigration laws. 

“Immigrants from India, armed with degrees, arrived after the height of the civil-rights movement, and benefited from a struggle that they had not participated in or even witnessed. They made their way not only to cities but to suburbs, and broadly speaking were accepted more easily than other nonwhite groups have been,” reads an Atlantic piece titled “The Truth Behind Indian American Exceptionalism.” Mindsets towards those who were “lower” than them on the hierarchy of caste among “upper”-caste Indian Americans easily transferred to those who they saw as now being “lower” on the hierarchy of race. 

By not treating Indian “foreigners” with the same disdain and disgust they did Black folks who had helped build their country, white Southerners, among others, inscribed a racial hierarchy, where Indians—neither the highest but not the lowest either—found themselves squarely in the middle. This new racial marker perfectly aligned with the self-ordained myths of “upper”-caste Indian tech graduates who, according to Subramanian, already equated their middle-class identity with a constructed idea of “upper”-caste merit, and further propelled this notion leading them to define themselves as different if not “better” than Black Americans. 

In her interview with the famous angel investor who launched the first Indian American company on Nasdaq, Subramanian finds him saying that Indians in Silicon Valley were “seen differently, as people who engaged in self-help, not asking for handouts,” echoing an anti-welfarist rhetoric targeted against Black and Brown Americans that is also often used against Dalits and Adivasis who avail reservations. 

The model minority ideal, created by “upper”-caste Indians with more than a little help from white Americans who first coined the term to describe Japanese immigrants, suffocates all other modes of existence and helps Indian Americans deny the existence of caste-based distinctions in the United States. There has been a long history of Black and South Asian solidarity, including the relationship between Ambedkar and W. E. B. Du Bois; the Dalit Panther Party; the early relationships between Black civil rights leaders and the gandhian movement (including Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin); and the rich tapestry of Bengali Muslim and Punjabi immigrants who settled in New York’s East Harlem and in Baltimore, New Orleans, and Detroit, and married and partnered with Black and Caribbean women since the early 1900s. 

Yet, they are rarely heard, recounted, or remembered. “It was the more prosperous sector of South Asians, the post-1965 professionals, who had the means to represent the community as a whole, so it was their image that came to dominate the image of South Asian-Americans,” says documentary filmmaker, historian, and MIT professor Vivek Bald, who painstakingly traced the narratives of Bengali immigrants in Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America. 

The lid has been held tight for too long. Breaking free from this mold will allow the Indian American community to not only reckon with their denial of caste but also allow more vulnerable members, Dalit, Adivasi, and otherwise, to get the attention, care, and justice they deserve. Caste has successfully escaped our attention for far too long, not in small part as a result of the concerted efforts by the Indian American “upper”-caste majority who have willfully erased, denied, and blurred its existence while continuing to benefit from the privileges their higher status provides them. It’s time to stop accepting wafer-thin excuses on why we should not pay greater attention to this damaging segregation and discrimination of people on the basis of their birth. And it’s time to start rethinking our models. 

Excerpted from Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir of Surviving India’s Caste System by Yashica Dutt (Beacon Press, 2024). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

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