Between the 1950s and 1970s, South Asian Indians once again experienced confusion about their racial status during this time. Due to their complicated history around their racial identity, many South Asian Indians chose “white” or “other” on the U.S. Census. It was not until 1980 that they were racially categorized under the Asian classification by the U.S. Census Bureau at the request of Asian Indian migrants. Some South Asians do not identify as “Asian” (Kibria 1998); their experiences are distinct from Chinese, Japanese, and other ethnic groups that have been lumped into this classification. For South Asians, their racial identification has been fluid from the moment they came to the United States, with a history of inclusion and exclusion in whiteness.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on how US census categories construct race and how South Asians were once considered white under immigration law despite legal whiteness being denied in court cases.

Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, loc. 94