Are Indians Asian?

[godofthunder9010]

Originally Posted by kinkytoes

The Great Debates forum said that polls aren't allowed. Their forum is too high brow for Kinkytoes. So I've opened the thread here.

I'm aware that India is technically in Asia. So are some Eastern European countries, if I'm not mistaken. What I'm asking is do you consider people from India Asian? Why or why not?

Well yeah. They are native to Asia. To limit "Asian" to those who are Chinese or physically similar to Chinese is idiotic. Indo-Europeans came from Central Asia and settled in Europe, India, the Middle East and just about everywhere else. Asia has several different sorts of native populations. The Middle East and Turkey are part of Asia. That makes Arabs, Jews, Turks and many white populations all Asians.

I think the root problem is having a non-offensive term for East Asians. You can't call them all Chinese, or Japanese or Korean or Vietnamese because that would offend them. There's significant mutual animosity between those nationalities, and calling a Korean "Chinese" just screams "I'm an idiot!" "Oriental" isn't PC enough apparently. So what do you call them? For some reason we settled on Asian -- which makes absolutely no sense at all. It'd be like limiting "white" to only Scandinavians with blonde hair and blue eyes.

[TylerJAX]

Indians are very much "Asian" in terms of U.S. law and geographic origin. There really isn't any sort of pan-Asian identity in Asia or amongst newly arrived immigrants from Asia. My take on why Indians are often not perceived as Asian by other Asians on college campuses when "Asian" issues come up are due to the peculiarities of group identity in American culture.

[lilyflower3191981]

In the US, Chinese and Indians are the dominant Asian populations with Filipinos at #3 making up 1.1%, 0.94%, 0.84% of the US population.

South Asians aren't part of the Yellow Peril, so Indians perhaps don't want to be asians

Let them be whatever they want to be. They can call themselves white. Many do anyway.

[TylerJAX]

Originally Posted by lilyflower3191981

In the US, Chinese and Indians are the dominant Asian populations with Filipinos at #3 making up 1.1%, 0.94%, 0.84% of the US population.

South Asians aren't part of the Yellow Peril, so Indians perhaps don't want to be asians

Let them be whatever they want to be. They can call themselves white. Many do anyway.

This is why Asians vote Democrat.

[ohhwanderlust]

In the UK, that's essentially what Asian means.

My stepfather is Indian, and I asked him exactly that once. That is, whether he considered himself as Asian as Chinese, Vietnamese, etc are.

He said, "yes, of course. Who decided that East Asians were the default Asians anyway?" Then he got carried away and started on how Indians are more Asian than Vietnamese since Vietnam was closer to another continent (Oceania) and India is nowhere near any other continent...or something like that.

[LS Jaun]

I am an American. Could be North, central, or South, and it would all be true??? No one confuses some one from China with Indian. I'll stick with calling some one from China Chinese, and India Indian. Saying Asian gives no indication of language, Race, Cultural, or any other identifier, other than a giant area of the globe.