Indian Ethnicity Quotes

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter).

Never mind that Britain has a German royal family, a Norman ruling elite, a Greek patron saint, a Roman/Middle Eastern religion, Indian food as its national cuisine, an Arabic/Indian numeral system, a Latin alphabet and an identity predicated on a multi-ethnic, globe-spanning empire

Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish culture and Italian culture and American culture - the latter, as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet.

Authenticity in casting is when you cast someone into a role that is authentic to that role's race and ethnicity. When you are casting a role for an American Indian, cast an American Indian actor. When casting a role for a Chinese, cast a Chinese heritage or Chinese actor, not another Asian ethnicity. That is true authenticity in casting, and does not perpetuate the stereotype that 'All Asians look alike' which is very offensive and not true.

Never mind that Britain has a German royal family, a Norman ruling elite, a Greek patron saint, a Roman/Middle Eastern religion, Indian food as its national cuisine, an Arabic/Indian numeral system, a Latin alphabet and an identity predicated on a multi-ethnic, globe-spanning empire – ‘fuck the bloody foreigners’.

North Americans had two distinct ways of looking at food trends brought from other cultures: foreign and ethnic. Foreign was refined, upmarket, and expensive. Ethnic was exotic, downmarket, and cheap. French and Japanese were foreign. Chinese, Mexican, and Indian were ethnic. With ethnic, “people start to complain if a meal costs more than $10,

The fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives in our terms.

Well there's a vacancy. We're one down." "What?" "Melanie, she's gone. The landline's down and it was the last straw." "Christ, you're kidding? It's like Agatha effing Christie and the Ten Little Eskimos." "Indians." "What?" "Ten Little Indians. In the book." "It was Eskimos." "It bloody wasn't. " I sat down on the bed. "It was the N word, actually, if you're going for the original, then Indians, then soldiers when they decided that offing ethnic minorities was maybe a bit strange. It was never Eskimos." "Well, whatever." Nina dismissed the Eskimos with a wave of her hand. "Is there any coffee down there?

More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.

The four presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore had all supported the ethnic cleansing of the Indian.

And yet my perspective as a Jew made me empathize strongly with all the likely Romeos and Juliets over thousands of years of Indian history whose loves across ethnic lines have been quashed by caste.

The United States of America has a white majority that remembers a history of discovery, opportunity, expansion, and exceptionalism.  Meanwhile our communities of color have the lived experiences of stolen lands, broken treaties, slavery, Jim Crowe laws, Indian removal, ethnic cleansing, lynchings, boarding schools, mass incarceration, and families separated at our boarders.  Our country does not have a common memory.

All this simply shows us that communalism and terrorism are nothing but opposite sides of the same coin. They keep feeding on each other in a vicious cycle, resulting in a society full of violence, hatred, sorrow and intolerance. Every communal act is used as a justification for mindless acts of terrorism . Similarly , each act of terrorism is used as a justification for such horrible atrocities like genocide and ethnic cleansing. And, it is always the innocent who get killed. This is the sad truth.

Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for "making poetry" is the same as the verb "to breathe." Such tidbits of ethnic lore delighted Amanda, and she vowed from that time onward she would try to regulate each breath as if she were composing a poem.

Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority—but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority. The notion that one’s culture is superior to all others solely because it represents the traditions of one’s ancestors, is regarded as chauvinism if claimed by a majority—but as 'ethnic' pride if claimed by a minority. Resistance to change and progress is regarded as reactionary if demonstrated by a majority—but retrogression to a Balkan village, to an Indian tepee or to the jungle is hailed if demonstrated by a minority.

One recent statistical study of all African states after independence, for instance, finds that there were much higher numbers of coup attempts in those countries where there was a “mismatch” between the proportion of the ethnic group in the army and that in control of politics.

India’s post-independence leadership eschewed parochial nationalism in favor of civic nationalism where the rights and privileges of being Indian were conceived as arising not from some pre-existent modes of belonging—religion, race, or ethnicity—but instead from participation in a collective political endeavor.

How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash and sink into the stewpot of North America.

Very well. So, if we accept that the Indian reservations were the first enforced concentrations of groups of people, ethnic in this case …” “Which I don’t,” said Winkelmeier, “it was more complicated than that.” “Surely, surely,” smiled Akim. “It’s always more complicated to explain when the crimes are your own, Winkelmeier, isn’t it?

The U.S. Air Force Academy likewise sought racial “diversity” through double standards. A 1982 memorandum on Air Force Academy stationery, with the notation “for your eyes only,” listed different cut-off scores to use when identifying possible candidates for the Academy from different racial ethnic groups. Composite SAT scores as low as 520 were acceptable for blacks, though Hispanics and American Indians had to do somewhat better, and Asian Americans had to meet the general standards. For athletes “lower cut-offs” were permissible.52 Given that composite SAT scores begin at 400 (out of a possible 1600) a requirement of 520 is really a requirement to earn only 120 points out of a possible 1200 points earned.

Table 6.1 Median Family Income of Ethnic Groups in the United States, Ranked by Percentage of the National Average, 1969 Jewish 172% Japanese 132% Polish 115% Chinese 112% Italian 112% German 107% Anglo-Saxon 105% Irish 103% National Average 100% Filipino 99% West Indian 94% Cuban 80% Mexican 76% Puerto Rican 63% Black 62% Indian (American) 60%

In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of three centuries of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. As the events of the Indian Revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the best way to curb nationalist sentiment was to classify the indigenous population not as Indians, but as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc. The categorization and separation of native peoples was a common tactic for maintaining colonial control over territories whose national boundaries had been arbitrarily drawn with little consideration for the ethnic, cultural, or religious makeup of the local inhabitants. The French went to great lengths to cultivate class divisions in Algeria, the Belgians promoted tribal factionalism in Rwanda, and the British fostered sectarian schisms in Iraq, all in a futile attempt to minimize nationalist tendencies and stymie united calls for independence. No wonder, then, that when the colonialists were finally expelled from these manufactured states, they left behind not only economic and political turmoil, but deeply divided populations with little common ground on which to construct a national identity.

A traditional Eurocentric bias that lumps undifferentiated masses of “Africans” into one single category and undifferentiated masses of “Indians” into another, while making fine distinctions among the different populations of Europe, permits the ignoring of cases in which genocide against Africans and American Indians has resulted in the total extermination—purposefully carried out—of entire cultural, social, religious, and ethnic groups.

The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. The question is not, can you, given an individual's skin color, hair texture, or language, infer something about their ancestry or origin. That is a question of biological systematics -- of lineage, taxonomy, of racial geography, of biological discrimination. Of course you can -- and genomics as vastly refined that inference. You can scan any individual genome and infer rather deep insights about a person's ancestry, or place of origin. But the vastly more controversial question is the converse: Given a racial identity -- African or Asian, say -- can you infer anything about an individual's characteristics: not just skin or hair color, but more complex features, such as intelligence, habits, personality, and aptitude? /I/ Genes can certainly tell us about race, but can race tell us anything about genes? /i/ To answer this question, we need to measure how genetic variation is distributed across various racial categories. Is there more diversity _within_ races or _between_ races? Does knowing that someone is of African versus European descent, say, allow us to refine our understanding of their genetic traits, or their personal, physical, or intellectual attributes in a meaningful manner? Or is there so much variation within Africans and Europeans that _intraracial_ diversity dominates the comparison, thereby making the category "African" or "European" moot? We now know precise and quantitative answers to these questions. A number of studies have tried to quantify the level of genetic diversity of the human genome. The most recent estimates suggest that the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs _within_ so-called races (i.e., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) within racial groups (the geneticist Richard Lewontin had estimated a similar distribution as early as 1972). Some genes certainly vary sharply between racial or ethnic groups -- sickle-cell anemia is an Afro-Caribbean and Indian disease, and Tay-Sachs disease has a much higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews -- but for the most part, the genetic diversity within any racial group dominates the diversity between racial groups -- not marginally, but by an enormous amount. The degree of interracial variability makes "race" a poor surrogate for nearly any feature: in a genetic sense, an African man from Nigria is so "different" from another man from Namibia that it makes little sense to lump them into the same category.

I came to recognize the landscape of my life in the lives of many women. Their stories and the places they spoke of spanned a world beyond my experience, from mill towns to suburbs, from logging camps to ethnic neighborhoods, from inner cities to Indian reservations. Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience. Listening to their stories, I came to understand how women can be isolated by circumstances as well as by distance, and how our experiences, though geographically distinct, often translated into the same feelings. Away from the physical presence of my past, I found it easy to argue that what mattered most was the story, the truth of what we tell ourselves, the versions we pass along to our daughters. But as I stood in the living room of my rock house that afternoon, I was again reminded of the enormous power of this prairie, its silence and the whisper I made inside it. I had forgotten how easily one person can be lost here.

The affirmation that Indian democracy would be founded entirely on a shared citizenship centered on upholding liberal principles and participatory institutions rather than religion, race, or ethnicity ensured that the many particularities that might have otherwise divided India were in one fell swoop deprived of any fundamental political meaning. This did not imply that the particularities themselves ceased to exist or that they ceased to provoke contention. Rather, they simply ceased to be privileged attributes that endowed their possessors with either greater rights or natural claims on power.

The insidious reasons for a brown girl’s self-loathing won’t be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations—and what they mean about your worth—might not dawn on you while you’re playing cricket in the sand. What’s at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards.

Never mind that Britain has a German royal family, a Norman ruling elite, a Greek patron saint, a Roman/Middle Eastern religion, Indian food as its national cuisine, an Arabic/Indian numeral system, a Latin alphabet and an identity predicated on a multi-ethnic, globe-spanning empire – ‘fuck the bloody foreigners’. Never mind that waves of migration have been a constant in British history and that great many millions of 'white' Britons are themselves descendants of Jewish, Eastern European and Irish migrants of the nineteenth century, nor that even in the post-war 'mass migration' years, Ireland and Europe were the largest source of immigrants. And, of course, let's say nothing about the millions of British emigrants, settlers and colonists abroad - conveniently labeled 'expats'.

Lest you think that this pattern has occurred only in connection with Jewish moneylenders and the Knights Templar, let me remind you of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the East Indians from Uganda in 1972, the East Indians were highly represented in the banking business and of the treatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam in the 1970s, including their expulsion. Whenever you have an out-group to whom an in-group owes a lot of money, “Kill the Creditors” remains an available though morally repugnant way of cancelling your debts. Note: you need not resort to murder as such. If you make people run away very fast, they’ll leave all their stuff behind, and then you can grab it. And burn the debt records: that goes without saying. You’ll notice I got through this part without mentioning the Nazis. The point being that I didn’t have to. For they have not been alone.

There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.

It Was Never Stolen Land. It Was Bought and Paid For. Now the Indians Are Trying to Renege.” By James Fulford, December 4, 2020, VDARE [Fulford is quoting Felix S. Cohen:] Fortunately for the security of American real estate titles, the business of securing cessions of Indian titles has been, on the whole, conscientiously pursued by the Federal Government, as long as there has been a Federal Government. The notion that America was stolen from the Indians is one of the myths by which we Americans are prone to hide our real virtues and make our idealism look as hard-boiled as possible. We are probably the one great nation in the world that has consistently sought to deal with an aboriginal population on fair and equitable terms. We have not always succeeded in this effort but our deviations have not been typical. It is, in fact, difficult to understand the decisions on Indian title or to appreciate their scope and their limitations if one views the history of American land settlement as a history of wholesale robbery." The quotation is from The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers Of Felix S Cohen,1960.

India’s success in building a modern state that defied predictions of its demise derived from its thorough insistence on institutionalizing what was Mahatma Gandhi’s greatest bequest to the freedom movement: the construction of a new Indian nation, not by suppressing its many particularities but by incorporating them into a new composite identity that preserved in “marble-cake” fashion all its constituent diversities across ethnic, religious, and racial lines. These diversities, far from being obliterated, acquired salience depending on context but, being enmeshed and free-flowing, they erased the boundaries between the insular and national identities, congealing the latter even as they preserved the former. The modern Indian polity, therefore, emerged not as a nation-state since, given its myriad diversities, it could not be so—but rather as a nations-state. Under the rubric of “unity in diversity,” its different ethnic, religious, and racial groups combined to create a novel, multilayered political identity. However confusing that reality may be to the outside world, it is authentically and indisputably Indian.

At 5pm every weekday,,,JB got on the subway and headed for his studio in Long Island City. The weekday journey was his favorite: He'd board at Canal and watch the train fill and empty at each stop with an ever-shifting mix of different peoples and ethnicities, the car's population reconstituting itself every ten blocks or so into provocative and improbably constellations of Poles, Chinese, Koreans, Senegalese; Senegalese, Dominicans, Indians, Pakistanis; Pakistanis, Irish, Salvadorans, Mexicans; Mexicans, Sri Lankans, Nigerians, and Tibetans - the only thing uniting them being their newness to America and their identical expressions of exhaustion, that blend of determination and resignation that only the immigrant possesses.... The other aspect of those weekday-evening trips he loved was the light itself, how it filled the train with something living as the cars rattled across the bridge, how it washed the weariness from his seat-mates' faces and revealed them as they were when they first came to the county, when they were young and America seemed conquerable. He'd watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hairs into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine.

Pierre Eliot Trudeau's gift of an official policy of multiculturalism appeared in our midst in a period of rapid influx of third world immigrants into Canada, as well as in a moment of growing intensity of the old English-French rivalry....In this context the proclamation of multiculturalism could be seen as a diffusing or muting device for francophone national aspirations, as much as a way of coping with the non-European immigrants' arrival. It also sidelined the claims of Canada's aboriginal population, which had displayed a propensity toward armed struggles for land claims, as exemplified by the American Indian Movement (AIM). The reduction of these groups' demands into cultural demands was obviously helpful to the nationhood of Canada with its hegemonic anglo-Canadian national culture....It is not an accident that Bissoondath, who confuses between antiracism and multiculturalism, should fall for a political discourse of assimilation which keeps the so-called immigrants in place through a constantly deferred promise....As the focus shifts from processes of exclusion and marginalization to ethnic identities and their lack of adaptiveness, it is forgotten that these officially multicultural ethnicities, so embraced or rejected, are themselves the constructs of colonial - orientalist and racist - discourses.

As the conference continued it occurred to me finally that it wasn't really about Indian history as it was written, but really about rewriting it by taking a fresh look at race, ethnicity, gender, and a mix of sociocultural questions... I just couldn't believe how far along the desi scene was, not just socially but intellectually, how many people were out there thinking about it. This whole event so far rocked my world, muddled me still more, and delivered a series of tiny epiphanies, all at the same time. To be honest, I was quite intimidated by the dialogue going on, as well as by the passion and conviction of these people on so many subjects which I, frankly, had never really even thought about. ...A history of a people in transit -- what could that be card catalogued under? And the history of the ABCD. Everyone seemed to know about this ABCD thing -- that didn't seem very confused to me! And it was a relatively new phenomenon; it had never occurred to me that things going on now could have a history already. The moments that made up my life in the present tense seemed so fleetingly urgent and self-contained to me: I'd always felt my life had very little to do with my parents' and especially their parents' histories...and that it would have very little effect on anything to come. But the way these people were talking -- about desis in Hollywood; South Asian Studies departments; the relatively new Asian Indian slot on the census -- was hummingly sculpting the air, as if they were making history as they spoke. Making it, messily but surely, even simply by speaking. I was feeling it, too -- a sense of history in the making. But where did I fit in to any of it? And how come no one had told me?

The more that injustice, exploitation, inequality, unemployment, poverty, hunger, and misery prevail in human society, the more Che's stature will grow. The more that the power of imperialism, hegemonism, domina­tion, and interventionism grow, to the detriment of the most sa­cred rights of the peoples-especially the weak, backward, and poor peoples who for centuries were colonies of the West and sources of slave labor-the more the values Che defended will be upheld. The more that abuses, selfishness, and alienation exist; the more that Indians, ethnic minorities, women, and immigrants suffer dis­ crimination; the more that children are bought and sold for sex or forced into the workforce in their hundreds of millions; the more that ignorance, unsanitary conditions, insecurity, and homelessness prevail-the more Che's deeply humanistic message will stand out. The more that corrupt, demagogic, and hypocritical politicians exist anywhere, the more Che's example of a pure, revolutionary, and consistent human being will come through. The more cowards, opportunists, and traitors there are on the face of the earth, the more Che's personal courage and revolution­ary integrity will be admired. The more that others lack the ability to fulfill their duty, the more Che's iron willpower will be admired. The more that some individuals lack the most basic self-respect, the more Che's sense of honor and dignity will be admired. The more that skeptics abound, the more Che's faith in man will be admired. The more pessimists there are, the more Che's optimism will be admired. The more vacillators there are, the more Che's audacity will be admired. The more that loafers squander the prod­uct of the labor of others, the more Che's austerity, his spirit of study and work, will be admired.

Whereas the slave cargoes gathered on the African coast reconfigured the normative boundaries of social life, the slave communities in the Americas exploded those boundaries beyond recognition. If an Akan-speaking migrant lived to complete a year on a west Indian sugar estate, he or she was likely by the end of that time to have come into close contact with unrelated Akan strangers as well as with Ga, Guan, or Adangbe speakers in the holding station on the African littoral, with Ewe speakers on the slave ship, and with Angolans, Biafrans, and Senegambians on the plantation. This was the composite we call diasporic Africa—an Africa that constituted not the continent on European maps, but rather the plurality of remembered places immigrant slaves carried with them. Like any geographic entity, diasporic Africa varies according to the perspective from which it is surveyed. Viewed from a cartographic standpoint (in essence, the view of early modern Europeans), diasporic Africa is a constellation of discrete ethnic and language groups; if one adopts this perspective, the defining question becomes whether or not the various constituent groups in the slave community shared a culture. Only by approaching these questions from the vantage point of Africans as migrants, however, can we hope to understand how Africans themselves experienced and negotiated their American worlds. If in the regime of the market Africans’ most socially relevant feature was their exchangeability, for Africans as immigrants the most socially relevant feature was their isolation, their desperate need to restore some measure of social life to counterbalance the alienation engendered by their social death. Without some means of achieving that vital equilibrium thanks to which even the socially dead could expect to occupy a viable place in society, slaves could foresee only further descent into an endless purgatory.

We still talk a lot about ‘authentic’ cultures, but if by ‘authentic’ we mean something that developed independently, and that consists of ancient local traditions free of external influences, then there are no authentic cultures left on earth. Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences. One of the most interesting examples of this globalisation is ‘ethnic’ cuisine. In an Italian restaurant we expect to find spaghetti in tomato sauce; in Polish and Irish restaurants lots of potatoes; in an Argentinian restaurant we can choose between dozens of kinds of beefsteaks; in an Indian restaurant hot chillies are incorporated into just about everything; and the highlight at any Swiss café is thick hot chocolate under an alp of whipped cream. But none of these foods is native to those nations. Tomatoes, chilli peppers and cocoa are all Mexican in origin; they reached Europe and Asia only after the Spaniards conquered Mexico. Julius Caesar and Dante Alighieri never twirled tomato-drenched spaghetti on their forks (even forks hadn’t been invented yet), William Tell never tasted chocolate, and Buddha never spiced up his food with chilli. Potatoes reached Poland and Ireland no more than 400 years ago. The only steak you could obtain in Argentina in 1492 was from a llama. Hollywood films have perpetuated an image of the Plains Indians as brave horsemen, courageously charging the wagons of European pioneers to protect the customs of their ancestors. However, these Native American horsemen were not the defenders of some ancient, authentic culture. Instead, they were the product of a major military and political revolution that swept the plains of western North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a consequence of the arrival of European horses. In 1492 there were no horses in America. The culture of the nineteenth-century Sioux and Apache has many appealing features, but it was a modern culture – a result of global forces – much more than ‘authentic’.

Asian Americans, like Native Americans, are not evenly distributed across the United States. To lump these people together ignores the sharp differences between them. Any examination of Asian Americans quickly reveals their diversity, which will be apparent as we focus on individual Asian American groups, beginning with Asian Indians.

Like several other Asian immigrant groups, Asian Indians (or East Indians) are recent immigrants. Only 17,000 total came from 1820 to 1965, with the majority of those arriving before 1917. These pioneers were subjected to some of the same anti-Asian measures that restricted Chinese immigration. For example, the Supreme Court (1923) ruled that an Asian Indian could not become a naturalized citizen because they were not White and therefore were excluded under the 1917 law that applied to all natives of Asia. This prohibition continued until 1946.

In old census reports, I found a hint of how British administrators had vivisected Sri Lanka in the early 20th century. In 1901…the census classified people into seven categories—Europeans; Burghers, Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors, referring to Muslims of south Indian origin; Malays; and the indigenous Veddahs of eastern and south-eastern Sri Lanka. “A mere 10 years later, the matrix had exploded. By ethnicity, a Sri Lankan in 1911 could identify himself in any one of 10 ways, and then again in any one of 11 ways by religious denomination—a multiplicative tumult of identity. Slender distinctions were now officially recognized. A Sinhalese could be a low-country Sinhalese or a Kandyan Sinhalese; a Tamil could be a Ceylon Tamil or an Indian Tamil, depending on how recently his family had settled in Sri Lanka; a Christian could be a Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Wesleyan, Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist, or a Salvationist, or he could belong to the Church of England or ‘Other Sects.’ Assembling legislatures based on such muddled ethnic loyalties helped the British by disrupting solidarity and nationalism because, as Governor William Manning once wrote to his secretary of state in London, ‘no single community can impose its will upon the other communities.

Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Quoting page 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a labourer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labour was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty labourer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…

The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals may have arrived from abroad, and their progenitors might initially have harked back to distant cities in the Ferghana Valley as their idea of ‘home’, but they settled in India and retained no extraterritorial allegiance. They married women from India and diluted their foreign blood to the point that in a few generations no trace remained of their foreign ethnicity. Akbar’s son Jehangir was half-Rajput; Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan also came from an Indian bride; Aurangzeb was only one-eighth non-Indian. Of course, the Mughal emperors were all deeply aware of their connections to Ferghana; they would ask emissaries from there about the conditions of their ancestors’ Chingisid tombs and donate money for their upkeep. The past was part of the Mughal identity, but their conceptions of themselves in the present and for the future became more rooted and embedded in India. The British, in contrast, maintained racial exclusivity, practised discrimination against Indians and sneered at miscegenation. Yes, the Mughal emperors taxed the citizens of India, they claimed tributes from subordinate princes, they plundered the treasuries of those they defeated in battle—all like the British—but they spent or saved what they had earned in India, instead of ‘repatriating’ it to Samarkand or Bukhara as the British did by sending their Indian revenues to London. They ploughed the resources of India into the development of India, establishing and patronizing its industries and handicrafts; they brought painters, sculptors and architects from foreign lands, but they absorbed them at their courts and encouraged them to adorn the artistic and cultural heritage of their new land. The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions provided by Indian taxpayers.

Page 259: The bottom line is this. Democracy can be inimical to the interests of market-dominant minorities. There were good reasons why the Indians in Kenya and whites in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and America’s Southern states resisted democratization for generations. Market-dominant minorities do not really want democracy, at least not in the sense of having their fate determined by genuine majority rule. Some readers will surely protest. Many market-dominant minorities—the Chinese in Malaysia, for example, or Jews in Russia, and Americans everywhere—often seem to be among the most vocal advocates of democracy. But “democracy” is a notoriously contested term, meaning different things to different people. When entrepreneurial but politically vulnerable minorities like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, or Jews in Russia call for democracy, they principally have in mind constitutionally guaranteed human rights and property protections for minorities. In other words, in calling for democracy, these “outsider” groups are precisely seeking protection against “tyranny of the majority.

['A]lamgir [Aurangzeb] came to formulate a very different model of sovereignty for himself and for the empire he ruled. In this new dispensation, the kingdom would be governed not by a charismatic, semi-divine king, but by a impersonal law -- namely, the 'shar'ia' of Hanafi Sufis -- administered by a reconstituted and vastly empowered judiciary guided by a reformed, thoroughly codified legal style. [...] In the courts of local judges in Gujarat, Hindu artisans, merchants and Brahmins commonly invoked the 'shar'ia' in transactions pertaining to buying, selling, renting and mortgaging property, or in pursuing litigation in law courts. Hindu women in particular used Islamic law in their attempts to resist patriarchal domination. The same held true further north. In the Punjabi town of Batala, writes the historian J. S. Grewal, 'the brahmin, the Khatri, the goldsmith and the Hindu carpenter frequented the qazi's court as much as the sayyid and the Muslim mason'. And in Malwa, the vast majority of attesters in court documents, excepting those dealing with Muslim marriages, were non-Muslims. While acknowledging religious difference, moreover, such courts did not draw legal boundaries around India's ethnic or religious communities. Significantly, the word 'shari'a' as used in local courts was not understood as applying to Muslims only, as it is today. Rather it carried the ordinary and non-sectarian meaning of 'legal'. Until the 1770s, when East India Company officials codified separate legal systems for Muslims and Hindus, Islamic law as it was administered in Mughal courts had functioned as common law. 'Alamgir's project of basing Mughal governance and sovereignty on a standardized codification of that law therefore built upon legal practices that, even though applied differently across the empire, were already in place in the Indian countryside.

Quoting page 148: … the SBA [Small Business Administration] next, in 1982, considered a petition [for inclusion in the 8(a) program] on behalf of Asian Indians. SBA guidelines required petitioners to provide evidence of several factors, including “evidence of long-term prejudice and discrimination in American society suffered by an overwhelming majority” of the petitioning group, and evidence of “past and present effects of discriminatory practices” that together “have resulted and continue to result in substantial economic deprivation for an overwhelming majority” of the group, including “substantial impediments in the business world.” This would seem to be a tall order for Asian-Indian Americans. … In 1980, the percentage of college graduates and managers or professionals among Asian Indians was 52 and 49 percent, respectively, while for all Americans it was 16 and 23 percent. In 1989, Asian Indians had the highest median household income ($48,320 in 1989 dollars) of all immigrant groups in the country. … The SBA, avoiding socioeconomic data and comparisons, added India to the presumptively eligible list in February 1982.

In 1991 the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won many seats in India’s general election. These were gained by a clear religious appeal to Hindus to make India a Hindu nation. This has often been accompanied by criticisms of Christians and Muslims for being aliens, not true Indians. Sikhs are fearful of the rise of Hindu militancy for two reasons. If the Hindus tell them that they are really Hindus (as the Vishnu Hindu Parishad, a Hindu religious and political group, suggests, calling them ‘Keshdhari Hindus’) their distinctive identity is threatened. If churches and mosques are attacked they fear that gurdwaras will be the next chosen targets. Some Sikhs have moved to the Punjab from other parts of India, anxious to avoid this danger. Occasional Sikh attacks on Hindus in Punjab should be seen in the context of creating an exclusively Sikh state de facto by forcing Hindus to flee, if the Hindu government, as they see it, will not grant them one de jure. This is a form of ethnic cleansing. In every respect it goes against the teachings of the Gurus.

In uncertain times, Mr. President,” the prime minister said, “the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it’s not so hard for politicians to exploit that, in India or anywhere else.” I nodded, recalling the conversation I’d had with Václav Havel during my visit to Prague and his warning about the rising tide of illiberalism in Europe. If globalization and a historic economic crisis were fueling these trends in relatively wealthy nations—if I was seeing it even in the United States with the Tea Party—how could India be immune? For the truth was that despite the resilience of its democracy and its impressive recent economic performance, India still bore little resemblance to the egalitarian, peaceful, and sustainable society Gandhi had envisioned. Across the country, millions continued to live in squalor, trapped in sunbaked villages or labyrinthine slums, even as the titans of Indian industry enjoyed lifestyles that the rajas and moguls of old would have envied. Violence, both public and private, remained an all-too-pervasive part of Indian life. Expressing hostility toward Pakistan was still the quickest route to national unity, with many Indians taking great pride in the knowledge that their country “had developed a nuclear weapons program to match Pakistan’s, untroubled by the fact that a single miscalculation by either side could risk regional annihilation.

What is often lost in the critiques of the Federal Acknowledgement Process is the fact the leaders of the Five Tribes and other Indian nations do not see it as an entirely foreign, nonaboriginal regimen. They were actively engaged in its creation during the 1970s, and they continue to support the process because they view it as the best method available to determine which groups are viable indigenous nations today. By supporting the government process, Five Tribes leaders are engaging in an ongoing Native project that seeks new ways to define their peoples using both precontact, “traditional” measures and criteria borrowed from the dominant, Euro-American society. Ventures that seek to delineate and measure “Indianness” and “tribes” are no less troublesome from the tribal persepective. However, how native leaders perceive unrecognized individuals and groups is important to understanding modern Indian identity. The Five Tribes and related groups have exerted their sovereignty by extending government relations to formerly unrecognized tribes in the Southeast. They have also chosen to withhold recognition to groups they feel are inauthentic. While they support the process of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, tribal leaders us their own definitions and “ways of seeing” when making these decisions. Their criteria generally represent a complex mixture of indigenous and non-Indian notions of ethnicity and authenticity. The Five Tribes and other long-recognized Native nations have always been actively engaged in tribal acknowledgement debates. Today they have important reasons for remaining involved. Recognition politics involving established tribes, unrecognized communities, and non-Indians exposes the fundamental truth about ethnic and racial identities: they are constantly evolving and negotiated.

Confusing the matter is the fact that there are three often-conflicting definitions at play: American Indians are the only people defined as an ethnic group, a racial group, and by reference to membership in a recognized tribe (politically). Many individuals do not comprehend the distinctions. Because of the confusion, the Five Tribes and others came to demand citizenship in a federally recognized tribe as the gold standard for Indian identification.

I’D NEVER BEEN to India before, but the country had always held a special place in my imagination. Maybe it was its sheer size, with one-sixth of the world’s population, an estimated two thousand distinct ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages spoken. Maybe it was because I’d spent a part of my childhood in Indonesia listening to the epic Hindu tales of the Ramayana and the Mahābhārata, or because of my interest in Eastern religions, or because of a group of Pakistani and Indian college friends who’d taught to me to cook dahl and keema and turned me on to Bollywood movies.

Under Narendra Modi, the rich have become richer, and inequalities have increased. A 2018 Oxfam report revealed that 10 percent of the richest Indians garnered 77.4 percent of the nation’s wealth (against 73 percent the year before)119 and that 58 percent of it was in the hands of India’s “1 percent” (while the world average is 50 percent). The earnings made by this handful of people in 2017 were equal to India’s budget for that year. Also in 2017, the fortune of India’s 100 richest tycoons leaped by 26 percent. The richest of them all, Mukesh Ambani, increased his wealth by 67 percent, according to Forbes India120—a publication, moreover, that belongs to this billionaire. Ambani’s fortune again rose by 24 percent in 2018.121 Going slightly beyond the 100 richest, the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List identified the 953 richest Indian families and gave figures showing that their fortune represented more than 26 percent of the country’s GDP122—which meant that if a tax rate of 4 percent was applied to the nation’s 953 richest families, it would give the government the equivalent of 1 percent of India’s GDP.123 According to Crédit Suisse, the number of dollar millionaires in India jumped from 34,000 in 2000 to 759,000 in 2019,124 which means that the country has one of “the world’s fastest-growing population of millionaires.”125 The average wealth level of these millionaires increased by 74 percent over this period.

This strategy, together with the partial dismantling of measures to fight poverty, partly explains the continuous rise of inequalities in India. However, some of the rich have become richer for other reasons as well, including the close relationship between the Modi government and industrialists. FROM CRONY CAPITALISM TO COLLUSIVE CAPITALISM While the Modi government is not responsible for the enrichment of Indian tycoons, which began in most cases prior to the BJP victory in 2014, it continued to help them. In Gujarat, the Modi government had apparently granted unwarranted advantages to industrialists, including the sale of land below market prices, dispensations from environmental standards, unjustified tax rebates, interest-free loans, and so on.136 After forming the central government, the NDA government allegedly shielded Indian industrialists from banks to which these men owed billions. Such collusion has contributed to destabilizing a banking system undermined by dubious debts—particularly those held by these big investors, who do not pay back their loans.137 Even if the problem began under the previous government, it has persisted in part owing to collusion between businessmen and the ruling class. The government’s cronies continued to receive huge loans from public-sector banks (whose heads have trouble disobeying the government),138 which they proved unable to pay back. In May 2018, nonperforming assets (NPAs) vested in public banks—in other words, loans for which the borrower had not made payment on either the interest or the principal in at least ninety days—accounted for 12.65 billion dollars, or about 14 percent of their total loans (compared to 12.5 percent in March the previous year139 and only 3 percent in March 2012).140 A small number of borrowers were largely responsible for this evolution, among whom were prominent large industrialists.141 In 2015, in a fifty-seven-page document, Credit Suisse gave a detailed analysis of the astounding level of debt of ten Indian corporations that continued to borrow even though all the red flags had gone up.142 In 2018, 84 percent of the dubious loans were owed by major corporations, and twelve of them accounted for 25 percent of the outstanding NPAs.143 Among them is the group owned by Gautam Adani, a supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi since 2002.144 In 2015, the group increased its debt level by 16 percent to acquire a seaport and two power plants. Consequently, its debt soared to 840 billion rupees (11.2 billion USD), compared to only 331 billion rupees (4.41 billion dollars) in 2011.145

The economics exam at Lucknow University for the bachelor of commerce (BCom) asked students to evaluate schemes launched by Modi, such as Digital India (to develop digitization throughout the country) and Startup India, or to describe job-creation schemes.86 The civil service exam went even further. In Madhya Pradesh, candidates to join the state administration were thus asked in 2016: “The Swachh Bharat campaign led by the honorable Prime Minister has a great impact on the society because 1) People understood the importance of cleanliness, and 2) People across the country like the campaign.”87 The trap was obviously only discernible to Modi supporters: both answers were correct! The nationalist tone of textbook rewriting deliberately extols ancient Indian knowledge systems over contemporary science.88 For instance, the minister of state for human resource development responsible for higher education, Satya Pal Singh, denied the validity of the theory of evolution89 and in one of his speeches claimed that it was an Indian who invented the airplane.90 The deputy chief minister of Uttar Pradesh maintained that the test-tube baby procedure had existed in ancient India because Ram’s wife, Sita, was born in an earthen pot, while the chief minister of Tripura, Biplab Kumar Deb, explained that the technologies of satellites and the internet existed in ancient India.91 In the same vein, the education minister of Rajasthan claimed that the law of gravity had been discovered in India in the seventh century.92 And along the same lines, another BJP minister—health, education, and finance minister in Assam—claimed that cancer patients were paying for their “sins.”93

The Uttarakhand BJP president declared similarly that pregnant women could avoid caesarean deliveries if they drank water from a river in the state.94 Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself claimed that India invented reproductive genetics and plastic surgery. In October 2014, he told a gathering of doctors and other professionals at a hospital in Mumbai: “We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realize that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb. . . . We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”95 Remarks such as these were met each time with protestation from “rationalists,” a category of intellectuals often affiliated with the communist Left. Three of them, known for their criticism of Hindu nationalist sectarianism and obscurantism, were murdered between 2013 and 2015: Narendra Dabholkar, the founder of the Maharashtra Blind Faith Eradication Committee; Govind Pansare, a long-standing member of the Indian Communist Party; and M. M. Kalburgi, former vice-chancellor of Kannada University in Hampi96 (see chapter 7). For obscurantists (whether they belong to a religious sect or an ethnonationalist movement), rationalists are key targets because they are viewed as blasphemers and pose a threat to their belief system by exposing the myths in which they believe.

The Crusade against “Liberals” Promotion of Hinduism went hand in hand with an incessant fight against “liberals,” a highly derogatory term in the mouths of Hindu nationalists, which they use to refer to academics, NGOs, and journalists that do not adhere to their ideology. Bringing Universities to Heel—the Case of Jawaharlal Nehru University Universities with a “progressive” reputation have long been a Hindu nationalist target, but tensions further intensified after 2014. They have been subjected to two types of interference. First, the government appointed men from the Sangh Parivar or fellow travelers to head them with the task of reforming them. Second, the RSS student wing, the ABVP, could finally try to call the shots on university campuses with the government’s blessing. This dual strategy is most clearly apparent in the treatment inflicted on Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This institution, known for the excellence of its teachers—especially in the social sciences—had drawn bitter Hindu nationalist criticism as soon as it was founded in the 1960s due to the leftist leanings of many teachers and some of its main student organizations.97 In 2016, the Modi government appointed Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar vice-chancellor of JNU. This electrical engineering professor had been teaching at the nearby Indian Institute of Technology until then, and he had allegedly played an active role in Vijana Bharati, an organization under the Sangh Parivar umbrella that aims to promote indigenous Indian science.98 He brought about drastic budget cuts—academic spending was almost halved over three years99—and a decline in student recruitment, while systematically hampering the activities of student unions and faculty opposed to the RSS. The political disciplining of the campus took various routes, such as the harassment of professors who were openly hostile to the Sangh Parivar.

Page 311: Moreover, within the economic sphere there are no common standards of conduct beyond those prescribed by law. The European has his own standard of decency as to what, even in business, ‘is not done’; so also have the Chinese, the Indian and the native [of Burma]. All have their own ideas as to what is right and proper, but on this matter they have different ideas, and the only idea common to all members of all sections is the idea of gain. In a homogeneous society the desire of profit is controlled to some extent by social will, and if anyone makes profits by sharp practice, he will offend the social conscience and incur moral, and perhaps legal, penalties. If, for example, he employs sweated labour, the social conscience, if sufficiently alert and powerful, may penalize him because aware, either instinctively or by rational conviction, that such conduct cuts at the root of common social life. But in the tropics the European who, from humanitarian motives or through enlightened self-interest, treats his employees well, risks being forced out of business by Indians or Chinese with different standards. The only deterrent to unsocial conduct in production is the legal penalty to which those are liable who can be brought to trial and convicted according to the rules of evidence of infringing some positive law. In supply as in demand, in production as in consumption, the abnormal activity of economic forces, free of social restrictions, is an essential character of a plural society.

The magical triangle of these three competing ethnic communities (Americans—Indians—Germans) is, of course, no accidental construction; rather, it expresses a negative, almost obsessive passion of the German people: America

Gilder G, 1996. The Moral Sources of Capitalism. In: Gerson M (ed.), The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., pp. 151-159 Quoting page 154: The next step above potlatching was the use of real money. The invention of money enabled the pattern of giving to be extended as far as the reach of faith and trust from the mumi’s tribe to the world economy. Among the most important transitional devices was the Chinese Hui. This became the key mode of capital formation for the overseas Chinese in their phenomenal success as tradesmen and retailers everywhere they went, from San Francisco to Singapore. A more sophisticated and purposeful development of the potlatching principle, the Hui began when the organizer needed money for an investment. He would raise it from a group of kin and friends and commit himself to give a series of ten feasts for them. At each feast a similar amount of money would be convivially raised and given by lot or by secret bidding to one of the other members. The rotating distribution would continue until every member had won a collection. Similar systems, called the Ko or Tanamoshi, created saving for the Japanese; and the West African Susu device of the Yoruba, when transplanted to the West Indies, provided the capital base for Caribbean retailing. This mode of capital formation also emerged prosperously among West Indians when they migrated to American cities. All these arrangements required entrusting money or property to others and awaiting returns in the uncertain future.

Page 83: The Chinese hold equally strong prejudices about the Thai. With them, however, derogatory opinions are rarely expressed publicly, either in newspapers or by Chinese leaders. The typical Chinese meets any unpleasantness with a smile or a resigned shrug. Yet by associating with the Chinese one soon realizes the depth of their contempt and bitterness. The Thai are characterized as indolent if not outright lazy, untrustworthy, and slippery in business dealings. A Chinese merchant will rather employ an Indian as a watchman or chauffeur than hire a Thai. Almost universal is the belief among the Chinese immigrant group that Thai women are morally loose and therefore undesirable as wives. This is certainly an instance of a double standard for the signs of blatant promiscuity on the part of Chinese males are everywhere apparent. Scores of houses of prostitution are located in the Chinese districts of Bangkok, and virtually every Chinese hotel in the country doubles as a call house.

Research tends to indicate that American Indians on average fare relatively poorly across a number of outcomes, such as educational achievement and income. American Indians have been, and continue to be, marginalized in a number of ways, such as spatially and economically, that contribute to their disadvantaged position. A challenge when examining American Indian outcomes is that, because of the group’s relatively small population, less data are available about them in nationally representative surveys than for most other groups. Moreover, it is difficult to gauge the change in outcomes over time among American Indians because of changing patterns of self-identification among people with some American Indian ancestry.

Mexico itself gained its independence from Spain after a protracted war from 1810 to 1821, and its population generally consisted of a mix of three groups: a Spanish-origin elite population; mestizos (those of mixed European and Indian ancestry), who were mostly landless but who occupied many middle-tier positions in society (working, for example, as craftsmen, soldiers, laborers, and traders); and, finally, Indians, who remained outside of Spanish-speaking society and who farmed land in a traditional manner.

The first census in 1790 essentially just collected information on whites and blacks. In the nineteenth century, inspired by the eugenics movement that was popular at the time, there was some experimentation with differentiating among blacks with categories such as “black” and “mulatto” (the latter referring to a black and white mix), and in 1890 even “quadroon” and “octoroon” (categories for one-fourth black and one-eighth black, respectively). The category for American Indian first appeared in the 1860 census, which was also the first year in which there was a category for Chinese. Mexican was an option in 1930, though it disappeared until the Hispanic origin question was introduced in 1970.24 People were first able to choose more than one race beginning in the 2000 census. Even today research continues on whether we should further revise the race and ethnicity question, such as combining them into one that collects information on people’s “origins.”25

Asian Americans have been stereotyped as highly successful, suggesting that the American Dream is their reality (perhaps more so than that of other racial minorities), though the uncomfortable truth is that there are wide economic disparities among Asian Americans. Some ethnic groups, such as the Japanese, Chinese, and Indians, have been described as “outwhiting the whites” in terms of economic success, while some Southeast Asian American groups who immigrated to the United States as refugees with few resources (such as Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Laotians) are trapped in intergenerational poverty; in fact, some of these ethnic groups lag well behind Latinx and African Americans in terms of socioeconomic status.

None of this ethnic shit. This was the influence of the saffron brigade, The Party’s concerted effort to force everyone to return to their Hindu roots, even those who had none. An absurd attempt at Indianizing students in a missionary school run by Jesuit nuns inside an uber-Westernized town.

Historian Francis Parker simplistically summed up the situation when he said, “Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him.”6 It

For nearly a thousand years, communities on the Indian subcontinent had coexisted in a cultural melting where religious identity was less salient than ethnic or linguistic identity. “A hybrid Indo-Islamic civilization emerged,” according to the historian of India William Dalrymple. “In the nineteenth century, India was still a place where traditions, languages, and cultures cut across religious groupings, and where people did not define themselves primarily through their religious faith.”51 Much as communities had negotiated means of coexistence in pre-Mandate Palestine only to see them unravel during British rule, the subcontinent’s communal arrangements corroded when the full weight of Britain’s colonial state bore down on them. The Raj’s divide and rule policies produced a chemical-like reaction, shattering long-standing traditions of coexistence and interacting with local personalities who had their own ambitions, passions, and allegiances. It was another liberal experiment in empire gone horribly wrong, and on a scale so epic that once history’s chain of contingent events combusted, no one could contain it.

Her maternal grandfather is South Indian, her grandmother is Scottish, her dad is an ethnically ambiguous Californian, and she has roots in all those places like I do.

Gabby transferred to my school in the fourth grade. She had blonde hair and blue eyes and was tanner than most of the other White girls in my class for no apparent reason. In one of my clearer memories of her, her face is snarled and in a shrill, whiny voice she is saying to me, "Stop lying, you're not an Indian!" Nine-year-old me didn't have many years of experience with racism. This was the first time someone had even questioned the validity of my ethnicity, let alone outright called me a liar. Back then, I didn't have the ability or knowledge to point to the media representation of Native Americans to show Gabby how she had been taught to think that my culture was gone. At nine years old I lacked the words to explain that her ignorance did not and would never define who I was. Those tools simply hadn't been given to me yet. So I punched her in the face.

The main dance that still attracted the largest crowds remained the Medicine Dance and Feast. Christian Indian Lorenzo Lawrence revealed some of the society’s secrets. He noted that Indian mentors of the dance continued to “teach him [the initiate] to make feasts.” Henry Benjamin Whipple, the new Episcopalian bishop of Minnesota, who visited the reservation in spring 1862, noted the growing debate over feasts versus hoarding. It led to constant “councils . . . and a strange restlessness among the Indians.” For the first time, he wrote, “Indians refused to shake hands with white men.” Even worse, the Scalp Dance was on the rise: “Each day there was either a scalp dance, a begging dance, a Monkey dance, or a Medicine Dance.” During the Scalp Dance, Whipple saw

Mahmud’s highly mobile army rarely fell below the force of 100,000 that he amassed to attack Balkh in 999.5 In recruiting and deploying his slave soldiers, Mahmud was blind to color, ethnicity, and religion. He did not hesitate, for example, to send Hindu forces against the Turkic, Persian, or Indian armies that were defending Muslim cities. Even his own household consisted mainly of slaves. Far from being constrained by his Muslim faith, Mahmud believed that the highest religious authority, the caliph, had validated his actions and confirmed all the dubious privileges he so freely exercised.

Envision, though, this imagined setting: if the entire 2.3 million imprisoned were placed in one huge outdoor arena and grouped in accord with how race/ethnicity is constructed in the U.S., one would see a massive group of 40 percent as black, the other large group, at 39-40 percent, as white. Then, one would find Latinos at 19 percent of all U.S. incarcerated, and American Indians and AAPIs each at 1 percent. Surprisingly, perhaps, in spite of the fact that there are many more Hispanics in U.S. prisons than American Indians, both American Indian and Hispanic groups have approximately the same percent in prison relative to their numbers in the U.S. population (about .8 percent).[88] The presence of these groups reminds us that we dare not think of the imprisoned only in terms of the black and white dichotomy.

Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers.' Huntington concludes (regretfully) this was no longer possible by the late sixties. Why not? Presidential authority was eroded. There was a broad reappraisal of governmental action and 'morality' in the post-Vietnam/post-Watergate era among political leaders who, like the general public, openly questioned 'the legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, discipline, secrecy, and deception—all of which are, in some measure,' according to Huntington, 'inescapable attributes of the process of government.' Congressional power became more decentralized and party allegiances to the administration weakened. Traditional forms of public and private authority were undermined as 'people no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.' ¶ Throughout the sixties and into the seventies, too many people participated too much: 'Previously passive or unorganized groups in the population, blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women now embarked on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges, which they had not considered themselves entitled [sic] before. [Italics mine.] ¶ Against their will, these 'groups'—the majority of the population—have been denied 'opportunities, positions, rewards and privileges.' More democracy is not the answer: 'applying that cure at the present time could well be adding fuel to the flames.' Huntington concludes that 'some of the problems in governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy...Needed, instead, is a greater degree of moderation in democracy.' ¶ '...The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. In the past, every democratic society has had a marginal population, of greater or lesser size, which has not actively participated in politics. In itself, this marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic but it is also one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively. [Italics mine.]' ¶ With a candor which has shocked those trilateralists who are more accustomed to espousing the type of 'symbolic populism' Carter employed so effectively in his campaign, the Governability Report expressed the open secret that effective capitalist democracy is limited democracy! (See Alan Wolfe, 'Capitalism Shows Its Face.')

All men are created equal,” at the time, was certainly not intended to include women, slaves, or Indians. It was a radical concept for its day, regardless of its limited scope. Beyond that, as Wood and others have maintained, the concept of equality served as a blueprint for the future, pointing in a direction which would eventually extend across the lines of gender and to all racial, ethnic, religious, or political minorities.

1)  In Europe, especially France, ethnic civil war will break out, with Islam for its banner. It has already begun in a diffuse but clear fashion, a war of internal conquest that aims quite simply at making our continent a new Muslim land (Dar al-Islam)[99] where people of European stock are called upon to become subject minorities and the populations that came from the South intend to become the majority. If the initiative succeeds, it will be a case of the pure and simple disappearance of European civilisation, which was born 3,500 years ago. 2)  On the world scale, we are going to witness a global Islamic offensive, on the European front (from France to the Balkans) and the African front, but also in Russia, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Far East. 3)  The American superpower can only decline, especially in the face of the formidable rise in Chinese power. Taking account of the atavistic militarism of the USA, a major confrontation between Americans and Chinese cannot be excluded. All the same, we can count on America’s clumsy militarism, which starts fires without ever succeeding in eliminating its designated enemies, to multiply hotbeds of war throughout the world.

the disease largely spared the “other Bombay” of wealth, elegance, and broad boulevards. In this other Bombay a tiny Indian elite—merchants, bankers, industrialists, and professionals—experienced death rates as low as those of resident Europeans. So pronounced was the differential impact of plague by ethnicity that it reinforced racialized conclusions in medical science.

India is touted today as the most multicultural, ethnically diverse country in the world. This country is home to four major racial groups, which overlap due to racial admixture: Caucasoids, Australoids, Mongoloids and Negritos. With over two thousand ethnic groups, four major families of languages, and multiple religions (Hindus do comprise the vast majority at 80.5% with Islam at 13.4%), India, in the words of Coon, is ‘the most complicated geographically, racially, and culturally’.[38] Yet all these racial groups are descendants of waves of invaders centuries ago; immigration is practically non-existent today, apart from a trickling of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Burmese migrants. With its endogamous rules, India has remained racially stable for centuries; its caste divisions have been historically deep, with limited gene flows across racial boundaries. The racial differences that exist can still be traced back to the migrations into India before Christ. The Indian racial populations can be well demarcated as separate from most of the other Asian populations, from the Persian Gulf, Arabia, Burma, China, Vietnamese and Malayan lands. It is not a complicated land to locate on a map; historically the country has always been located more or less in the same place.

A land acknowledgement or territorial acknowledgement is a formal statement, often spoken at the beginning of a public event, that it is taking place on land originally inhabited by or belonging to indigenous people. In Canada, land acknowledgements became popular after the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (which argued that the country's Indian residential school system had amounted to cultural genocide) and the election of liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau that same year.[2] By 2019, they were a regular practice at events including National Hockey League games, ballet performances and parliament meetings. Critics of land acknowledgements have described them as excesses of political correctness or expressed concerns that they amount to empty gestures that avoid actually addressing the issues of indigenous communities. Ensuring the factual accuracy of acknowledgments can be difficult due to problems like conflicting land claims or unrecorded land exchanges between indigenous groups. In the United States, the practice of land acknowledgements has been described as "catching on" as of 2020.

Deprived of their direct ties with Central Asia -- and with it their access to Turkish slaves, mercenaries and war horses -- the later Ghaznavids lost their wider, imperial vision an acquired the character of a regional, North Indian state. They were certainly not seen as menacing aliens who might have posed a civilzational threat to Indian culture. Contemporary Sanskrit inscriptions refer to the Ghaznavids not as Muslims but as 'turushkas' (Turks), an ethnic term, or as 'hammiras', a Sanskritized rendering of 'amir' (Arabic for commander), an official title. For their part, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Ghaznavid rulers in India issued coins from Lahore bearing the same legends that had appeared on those of their Indian predecessors, the Hindu Shahi dynasty (c.850-1002). These included Śiva's bull Nandi and the Sanskrit phrase 'śri samanta deva' (Honourable Chief Commander) inscribed in Devanagari script. Such measures point to the later Ghaznavids' investment in establishing cultural and monetary continuity with North Indian kingsdoms. Moreover, despite the dynasty's rhetoric about defending Sunni Islam, religion posed no bar to military recruitment, as Indians had always been prominent in Ghaznavid armies. In 1033 Mahmud of Ghazni gave the command of his army stationed in Lahore to a Hindu general, and in Ghazni itself Indian military contingents had their own commanders, inhabited their own quarter of the city, and were generally considered more reliable soldiers than the Turks. Crucially, the Ghaznavids brought to the Punjab the entire gamut of Persianate institutions and practices that would define the political economy of much of India for centuries to come. Inherited from the creative ferment of tenth-century Khurasan and Central Asia under the Samanid rulers of Bukhara, these included: the elaboration of a ranked and salaried bureaucracy tied to the state's land revenue and military systems; the institution of elite, or military, slavery; an elaboration of the office of 'sultan'; the courtly patronage of Persian arts, crafts and literature; and a tradition of spiritually powerful holy men, or Sufis, whose relations with royal power were ambivalent, to say the least.

You see, while the people in the colonies were being told Britain was their mother, much of white Britain had convinced itself that these undeserving niggers - Asians were niggers too, back then - had just got off their banana boats to come and freeload, to take 'their' jobs and steal ‘their’ women. Never mind that Britain has a German royal family, a Norman ruling elite, a Greek patron saint, a Roman/Middle Eastern religion, Indian food as its national cuisine, an Arabic/Indian numeral system, a Latin alphabet and an identity predicated on a multi-ethnic, globe-spanning empire- ‘fuck the bloody foreigners'. Never mind that waves of migration have been a constant in British history and that great many millions of ‘white' Britons are themselves descendants of Jewish, Eastern European and Irish migrants of the nineteenth century, nor that even in the post-war 'mass migration' years, Ireland and Europe were the largest source of immigrants. And, of course, let's say nothing about the millions of British emigrants, settlers and colonists abroad - conveniently labelled 'expats'.

Maya Angelou’s 1992 Inauguration Day poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” mentions the Irish, Scandinavians, blacks, women, Hispanics, Native Americans, West Indians—everyone except the ethnic group that originally created the American republic. History as diversity, then, comes to mean a “reverse exclusion”: pushing Anglo-Saxon white males and their institutions out of memory, or at least showing them to be dependent on those groups that have been subordinated to their cultural and political control.

As is jalapeño—though according to psychologist Paul Rozin, Mexican dogs, unlike American dogs, enjoy a little heat. Rozin’s work suggests animals have cultural food preferences too. Rozin was not the first academic to feed ethnic cuisine to research animals. In “The Effect of a Native Mexican Diet on Learning and Reasoning in White Rats,” subjects were served chili con carne, boiled pinto beans, and black coffee. Their scores at maze-solving remained high, possibly because of an added impetus to find their way to a bathroom. In 1926, the Indian Research Fund Association compared rats who lived on chapatis and vegetables with rats fed a Western diet of tinned meat, white bread, jam, and tea. So repellent was the Western fare that the latter group preferred to eat their cage mates, three of them so completely that “little or nothing remained for post-mortem examination.

Look to the Southeast, where, as Taylor has noted, “colonial societies sustained a slave system more oppressive than anything practiced in Europe” and “the slave-owners relied on Indians to catch runaways.” There, too, the native groups, descended from Mississippian societies, were far more hierarchical and autocratically ruled than the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking groups in the Northeast. As Gallay has documented, indigenous societies cooperated fully with the slave-trading system, sending war captives to colonists for sale overseas. In the Northeast, by contrast, the Wendat (Huron) and Haudenosaunee either killed or, more common, adopted captives; involuntary servitude, though it occurred, was strikingly rarer. On the map, the division line between slave and non-slave societies occurs in Virginia, broadly anticipating the Mason-Dixon line that later split slave states from free. The repeated pattern doubtless has to do with geography—southeastern climate and soil favor plantation crops like tobacco and cotton. And southern colonists’ preference for slavery presumably reflected their different ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds. But

Indian country is a means of forecasting where the larger society may be headed. The bicentennial inspired much enthusiasm for recapturing individual ethnic heritage, and the intense desire of non-Indians to have some Indian ancestry or activity may be a part of that movement. Unfortunately, we do not seem to have the patience to find both our own heritage and the place in which heritage can make a positive contribution to the larger society. We are in the process of establishing a new kind of American identity, apart from the Pilgrim tradition, and it is a very painful process of sorting out values. We must not take any easy or superficial answers.

Pakistani officers consider the most regressive clerics patriotic because, after all, they would never make common cause with Pakistan’s external enemies—the Indians and whoever else Pakistani intelligence might know or imagine as conspiring against the country at any given moment. Liberal and secular thinkers, on the other hand, are permanently suspect. If they speak up for any ethnic group, they must want Pakistan’s disintegration; if they ask for a secular state, they could be asking for eliminating Pakistan’s identity and a virtual reincorporation into India; and if they question the army’s political role or its budget, they must be in league with ‘the enemy’.

On the last page of his book The Descent of Man, Darwin expressed the opinion that he would rather be descended from a monkey than from a “savage.” He used the words savage, low and degraded to describe the American Indians, the Andaman Island Pygmies and the representatives of almost every ethnic group whose physical appearance and culture differed from his own. . . . Charles Darwin labeled “the low and degraded inhabitants of the Andaman Islands” in this book The Descent of Man. The Ituri Forest Pygmies have been compared to “lower organisms

the Oikoumene is where the Eurasian and African landmasses converge, with many outlets to the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, making it ultra-strategic, as well as a stew of migration patterns and consequently clashing ethnic and sectarian groups.

and ethnicity are fed into a computer

Being the Eternal Natural Way, Sanatana Dharma is a world-view that is universal in nature, and that can be followed by all. It is not relegated only to a particular people, nation, ethnicity or geographical region. Dharma is not a race, a parochial cultural expression, a nationality, or a geographically-bound phenomenon. Rather, Dharma is as universally applicable a truth and a systematic methodology as are the knowledge-revealing intellectual realms of mathematics, science, logic, or philosophy. As a result of the universalism of Dharma, this path is open to any sincere seeker on Earth, regardless of the person's national or ethnic heritage. Sanatana Dharma is not a race, a nationality or an ethnicity. Sanatana Dharma is not Indian, Asian or Eastern. Sanatana Dharma is he Eternal Natural Way, and it is the spiritual inheritance of all living being. (p. 28)

Being the Eternal Natural Way, Sanatana Dharma is a world-view that is universal in nature, and that can be followed by all. It is not relegated only to a particular people, nation, ethnicity or geographical region. Dharma is not a race, a parochial cultural expression, a nationality, or a geographically-bound phenomenon. Rather, Dharma is as universally applicable a truth and a systematic methodology as are the knowledge-revealing intellectual realms of mathematics, science, logic, or philosophy. As a result of the universalism of Dharma, this path is open to any sincere seeker on Earth, regardless of the person's national or ethnic heritage. Sanatana Dharma is not a race, a nationality or an ethnicity. Sanatana Dharma is not Indian, Asian or Eastern. Sanatana Dharma is the Eternal Natural Way, and it is the spiritual inheritance of all living being. (p. 28)

I realised that ideological unrest should not be treated as mere ethnic disturbance and that there was no military solution for that. To keep a people with the country the country should also convince the people that it was worth a paradise to live and die for. I still nurse this value. But Manipur was not the last horizon of India’s imbalanced approach to its own people. I had chanced to face the similar crisis of faith in Punjab, Kashmir, Assam and other areas of internal conflict.

Natesh’s parents were both Indian. While he would never admit as much in an American society dominated by political correctness, he preferred women that were from a similar ethnic background to his own.

Clearly, our immigration policies should be reexamined. A convincing case can be made on environmental grounds alone that a nation of 300,000,000 needs no more people, especially since it would enjoy natural growth if the borders were closed tomorrow. How can we possibly claim to be fighting environmental degradation or hope for energy independence when we import a million or more people every year? How can we claim to be fighting poverty, crime, school failure, or disease when we import people who are more likely than natives to be poor, criminals, school failures, and to suffer from strange diseases? Immigration is even harder to justify when many newcomers speak no English, maintain foreign loyalties, or practice disconcerting religions. It is profoundly unwise to add yet more disparate elements to a population already divided by diversity. [D]emographers and economists are making dire projections based on the lower likelihood of blacks and Hispanics to become productive workers. These people go on to insist that the solution is to improve education for blacks and Hispanics, but the United States has already made enormous efforts to that end. There is no reason to think some kind of breakthrough is imminent. Clearly, the solution to the problems posed by an increasing Hispanic population is to stop Hispanic immigration. However, [...], our policy-makers are too afraid of accusations of racism to draw such an obvious conclusion. Americans must open their eyes to the fact that a changing population could change everything in America. The United States could come to resemble the developing world rather than Europe—in some places it already does. One recent book on immigration to Europe sounded a similar alarm when the author asked: “Can you have the same Europe with different people?” His answer was a forthright “no.” It should be clear from the changes that have already taken place in the United States that we cannot have the same America with different people, either. Different populations build different societies. The principles of European and European-derived societies—freedom of speech, the rule of law, respect for women, representative government, low levels of corruption—do not easily take root elsewhere. They were born out of centuries of struggle, false starts, and setbacks, and cannot be taken for granted. A poorer, more desperate America, one riven with racial rivalries, one increasingly populated by people who come from non-Western traditions could turn its back on those principles. Many people assert that all people can understand and assimilate Western thinking—and yet cultures are very different. Can you, the reader, imagine emigrating to Cambodia or Saudi Arabia or Tanzania and assimilating perfectly? Probably not; yet everyone in the world is thought to be a potential American. Even if there is only a small chance that non-Western immigrants will establish alien and unsettling practices, why take this risk? Immigration to the United States, like immigration to any nation, is a favor granted by citizens to foreigners. It is not a right. Immigration advocates often point to the objections Anglo-Americans made to turn-of-the-century immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Hungary, and other “non-Nordic” countries. They point out that these immigrants assimilated, and insist that Mexicans and Haitians will do the same. Those advocates overlook the fundamental importance of race. They forget that the United States already had two ill assimilated racial groups long before the arrival of European ethnics—blacks and American Indians—and that those groups are still uncomfortably distinct elements in American society. Different European groups assimilated across ethnic lines after a few generations because they were of the same race. There are many societal fault lines in “diverse” societies—language, religion, ethnicity—but the fault line of race is deepest.

Asians are still a small minority—14.5 million (including about one million identified as part Asian) or 4.7 percent of the population—but their impact is vastly disproportionate to their numbers. Forty-four percent of Asian-American adults have a college degree or higher, as opposed to 24 percent of the general population. Asian men have median earnings 10 percent higher than non Asian men, and that of Asian women is 15 percent higher than non-Asian women. Forty-five percent of Asians are employed in professional or management jobs as opposed to 34 percent for the country as a whole, and the figure is no less than 60 percent for Asian Indians. The Information Technology Association of America estimates that in the high-tech workforce Asians are represented at three times their proportion of the population. Asians are more likely than the American average to own homes rather than be renters. These successes are especially remarkable because no fewer than 69 percent of Asians are foreign-born, and immigrant groups have traditionally taken several generations to reach their full economic potential. Asians are vastly overrepresented at the best American universities. Although less than 5 percent of the population they account for the following percentages of the students at these universities: Harvard: 17 percent, Yale: 13 percent, Princeton: 12 percent, Columbia: 14 percent, Stanford: 25 percent. In California, the state with the largest number of Asians, they made up 14 percent of the 2005 high school graduating class but 42 percent of the freshmen on the campuses of the University of California system. At Berkeley, the most selective of all the campuses, the 2005 freshman class was an astonishing 48 percent Asian. Asians are also the least likely of any racial or ethnic group to commit crimes. In every category, whether violent crime, white-collar crime, alcohol, or sex offenses, they are arrested at about one-quarter to one-third the rate of whites, who are the next most law-abiding group. It would be a mistake, however, to paint all Asians with the same brush, as different nationalities can have distinctive profiles. For example, 40 percent of the manicurists in the United States are of Vietnamese origin and half the motel rooms in the country are owned by Asian Indians. Chinese (24 percent of all Asians) and Indians (16 percent), are extremely successful, as are Japanese and Koreans. Filipinos (18 percent) are somewhat less so, while the Hmong face considerable difficulties. Hmong earn 30 percent less than the national average, and 60 percent drop out of high school. In the Seattle public schools, 80 percent of Japanese-American students passed Washington state’s standardized math test for 10th-graders—the highest pass rate for any ethnic group. The group with the lowest pass rate—14 percent—was another “Asian/Pacific Islanders” category: Samoans. On the whole, Asians have a well-deserved reputation for high achievement.

YOU LEARNED ABOUT this period in high school: The standardized global curriculum calls for a month focused on it. Those decades just before the establishment of Shareholder Government, when we brought ourselves to the verge of a global breakdown. The system of economic interdependence created after World War II and reinforced after the Cold War had succeeded, more or less, in its original goal: keeping countries’ fortunes so intertwined that they could no longer afford major wars. Other benefits emerged as well. Fewer people were poor than ever before. Fewer infants died, fewer mothers. More children were enrolled in school, more young adults in universities. So many people in once-poor countries—China, India—were becoming rich that inequality between countries had fallen for the first time since the 1820s. This would seem like a positive development. But then why, the question had emerged forcefully at the turn of the twenty-first century, did people seem so upset, so convinced that the whole setup was bad for them? It had to do, it turned out, with fast-growing inequality within countries. If you were an Indian citizen who wasn’t among the newly rich, you weren’t gladdened by your countrymen’s suddenly acquired wealth. If you were an American or European who had always been poor, learning that children of Chinese peasants were becoming billionaires didn’t charm you. The defining sentiment of this late capitalist period was disaffection, and it began to take alarming forms. Mass murders became so frequent that they no longer trended on Social. Sure, you could go through the exercise of psychoanalyzing each killer in an attempt to classify him, as they used to, terrorist or psychopath, but what good did that do at this scale? The only useful conclusion was the broadest one, which was that the world order itself was making people murderous. But then, the politicians most equipped to address the unrest were those least invested in ending it. Race-baiting nationalists from oligarchical families began winning elections all over the world. It was the oldest trick around, promising the poor members of your own ethnic group that you’d help them become as rich as yourself, in large part by making sure that the poor members of other ethnic groups stopped stealing your group’s opportunities, thus dividing the poor so that they wouldn’t rise up together against the rich.