Scared and nervous, I walked through O’Hare International Airport hesitantly holding tightly onto my mom’s fingers. Immigrating halfway across the world was a shocking experience. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t surrounded by people who looked like me. They were all White; something my five-year-old self had never previously encountered in India. Throughout my childhood, I would continuously face such unique experiences that only Indian Americans would go through. I had to find my place and understand the complex position I held in American society, exploring that dynamic just as my five-year-old self explored an airport in an unknown country.
Years later, I came across the work of writer and activist Audre Lorde, whose words gave meaning to my experiences as an Indian American. “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we don’t live single-issue lives,” read her apt words. Lorde’s sentiments are applicable to the experiences of my people. The experience of Indian Americans is a complex one, one that is plagued with racism and casteism along with economic privilege and meritocratic stereotypes.
In the imagination of White Americans, this complex identity is often reduced to one stereotype: the “model minority.” The median annual household income of Indian Americans remains around $119,000, higher than that of all other racial or ethnic demographic groups. Time Magazine columnist Viet Thanh Nguyen describes a model minority as “the desirable classmate, the favored neighbor, the non-threatening kind of person of color,” simply due to the fact that Asian Americans have achieved higher economic success than Black and Latinx communities.
While this characterization appears benign and even favorable to some, the model minority myth is an arm of White supremacy utilized to pit communities of color against each other. Indian Americans are not inherently more successful or hard-working, as the myth would have us believe; rather, their socioeconomic success within the United States is a result of American immigration policies and caste discrimination.
This backstory to Indian success in the United States is apparent when considering the skills-based policies which have defined Indian immigration during the early 21st century. Forty-one percent of Indian immigrants residing in the United States came after 2010, most of them through the H1-B visa program. To even be considered for such a visa, an individual must have a bachelor’s degree and a sponsoring employer. Those coming to the United States already have achieved a measure of economic status within their home country, which in turn means that lower-caste and Dalit members of Indian society are much less likely to make their way to the West. As of 2003, less than 2% of Indian immigrants who came to the United States were Dalits or members of lower castes. It is unlikely that Dalits, who face immense systemic discrimination in the home country, can get a good education and achieve the economic stability needed to be considered for an H -1B visa.
Immigration policy and its preference for higher-caste and socioeconomically privileged Indians help fuel the model minority myth. This, in turn, aids White supremacy by stoking the narrative that Indian Americans are simply more hard working than members of other racial and ethnic communities. Black Americans within the United States have faced immense amounts of systemic discrimination through institutions like slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation. Such issues have stunted the ability of many people of color to accrue generational wealth and therefore achieve social mobility. As many Indian Americans have not had to face such systemic oppression within the United States, we experience different levels of economic prosperity. The model minority is, as the phrase implies, a myth.
Indians aren’t a model minority; they have been presented with a unique situation due to caste privilege and immigration policy that has led to an affluent immigrant population. We should not be used as a benchmark for other communities. Doing so denies the existence of racist systems and the need to dismantle them, and it ignores the part that caste and wealth play in populating the diaspora.
That is not to say Indian Americans do not face discrimination within the United States. Media representation of Indian Americans has left us as a joke. Think of Raj from The Big Bang Theory or Baljeet from Phineas and Ferb — accented caricatures of Brown people which portray us as unpopular individuals lacking any social competence.
Beyond the realm of television, many Americans adopt xenophobic mindsets that have broader social and political consequences for the Indian American community. One of my earliest memories living within America was being ostracized by the White students in my kindergarten class. Living within suburban Wisconsin, I was, unfortunately, the only Brown person that some of these children had ever seen. They refused to touch me. When we had to hold hands for an activity, my hand was the only one left unheld. When I reached out, a classmate looked at me with disgust, believing my Brown skin to be “dirty.”
Many Indian Americans face instances of individual-level racism, but what’s even worse are horrific examples of broader organized violence, largely due to the impact of 9/11. For example, in New Jersey, a group called the Dotbusters would single out and assault South Asian American members of the community. More recently, Sikh members of the Indian American community have been violently targeted after instances of hate crimes around the country and a mass shooting in Indianapolis. Although we have achieved a certain level of economic prosperity, many of us are still victims of racism. Instances of such violence call for us to work alongside other communities of color to combat the appalling impacts of white supremacy.
Still, while racist actions take place, higher-caste Indian Americans are not systematically oppressed in the same ways as other marginalized communities that find a home in the United States. Lower-caste Indians, however, do face systemic injustices. The small numbers of lower-caste individuals who make their way into the United States, possibly through success within India or alternate immigration methods like the lottery system, face discrimination not only from broader White society but also from their own community within the diaspora.
Such discrimination manifests frequently within tech companies. There are subtle methods higher-caste Indians utilize to discern other employees’ caste position. It can be as inconspicuous as a pat on the back to see if they are wearing a sacred thread underneath their clothing — an ornament worn only by higher-caste individuals. Those identified are often passed up on job opportunities, raises, and promotions, a form of discrimination furthered by the fact there are no caste protections written in the United States legal system.
While these protections remain absent, there has slowly been a growing public consciousness around the systemic challenges that Dalit individuals face in the United States. In 2020, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Cisco became a historic case confronting caste discrimination in the United States. A man of the Dalit caste reported constantly being treated as a lower class employee and reported blatantly receiving less pay than his higher-caste counterparts. Unfortunately, this is not a one-off. Equality Labs — a civil rights organization dedicated to ending inequity on the basis of caste, religion, gender, and race — received hundreds of complaints in the weeks following about caste bias from people working at prominent companies including Facebook, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. This is a horrific reality that as Indian Americans we must confront. Our focus should be to uplift Dalit voices and challege instances of discrimination as well as fight negative stereotypes of our nationality.
Intersectional issues of casteism, classism, and racism plague our community within our homeland and the diaspora. As Lorde said, we don’t live single-issue lives. We must understand and confront caste discrimination. We must deny the model minority stereotype and instead prioritize solidarity to grapple with the forces of White supremacy. We must critically analyze our experiences with both discrimination and privilege to understand what we can do to dismantle these interlocked systems of oppression.
