Racial Classification of Indian Americans

The racial classification of Indian Americans has varied over the years and across institutions and is presently Asian American. Originally, neither the courts nor the census bureau classified Indian Americans as a race because there were only negligible numbers of Indians in the U.S. In 1923, the courts deemed Indians to not be white and be Asian instead which has continued to the present for the purposes of law. In 1980, the census bureau classified Indians as Asian, which has continued to the present for the purposes of demographics.

Read more about Racial Classification Of Indian Americans:  U.S. Courts, U.S. Census, See Also

Famous quotes containing the words racial, indian and/or americans:

    “Human beings will be happier—not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.”
    —Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)

    “Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
    To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf
    Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,
    The seeming truth which cunning times put on
    To entrap the wisest.”
    —William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    “My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, & I am not enough in sympathy with our “gros public” to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One’s friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don’t think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most déplacé & useless class on earth!”
    —Edith Wharton (1862–1937)