From: bjag@nwu.edu (Bharathi Jagadeesh)
Subject: Re: Mixed Marriages
Followup-To: alt.culture.us.asian-indian
Organization: Northwestern University
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 18:47:50 GMT

In article <8230@dove.nist.gov>, hira@cme.nist.gov (Ron Hira) wrote:
> NPR recently had a short story on bi-racial families, specifically 
> black & white couples. They interviewed a number of bi-racial 
> children. It was interesting to hear the spectrum of attitudes that
> the various young adults had. One of the questions was what race 
> do they fill in on forms. 
> 
> I'm curious to see what others out there think of mixed marriages,
> and specifically how the kids react to it. I've met a number of
> II-WA children and AfrA-WA kids, but let's try to focus on the
> II-WA and IA-WA offspring. This is an issue that most IAs are
> going to have to deal with sooner or later. Hopefully we'll get
> some input from some bi-racial people.
> 
> BTW, my nephew is IA-WA. 

There was also an article in Glamour (woman's magazine) about 5 months ago,
written by a black woman whose children were half white. Because she was
probably already quite mixed race, her children were very fair and looked
white. She wrote about how hard it was to convince her children that being
black was ok while living in such a white-dominated world, including
incidents where she had been discriminated against because she was black. 

I think there's a difference between black/white marriages & indian/white
marriages because most indians already live in the white world (in terms of
education, income, etc.). I doubt if indian/white children are particularly
more likely to identify with whites & the white culture than fully indian
children. An indian is less likely to be in the situation where she's
discriminated against while her children can "pass" as white. Add to this
the fact that some fully indian people don't seem obviously non-white and I
think the situation becomes very different. 

I know a few indian/american adults (about my age). In general, they do
seem to identify with whites, but then so do most indian/indian adults that
I know. All the indian/americans I know look like mildly "exotic" whites,
that is, no one can really identify their ethnic descent and identify them
as alternately, hispanic, italian, arabic, or persian. Also, because their
parents made these marriages in a much less tolerant age, and when there
were far fewer indians in the US, I think they were forced to "chose" a
culture to belong to more than children would these days. Their parents
were professionals, so in most cases, it seems that their parents chose the
white culture, which they were generally allowed to do in the us because of
their social status. 

Incidentally, I was looking at the instructions for filling out a National
Research Council fellowship the other day, and in its instructions, it
specifically told people from the Indian subcontinent to put check the
caucasian/white box on the form. Only "oriental" people were to check the
asian/american box. I thought this was very strange. Whatever the technical
description of "caucasian", most indians are certainly not white. I was
also perplexed by the fact that in general, in most forms, indian
subcontinent people check the asian american box (I certainly do). That
means that the diferent forms will have the same people identified
differently. 

Bharathi Jagadeesh                 bjag@nwu.edu
Newsgroups: alt.culture.us.asian-indian,soc.culture.indian