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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   29483 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I've been thinking about Indians today. In my current management position in tech, I deal with a lot of Indians. On one hand, Indians are some of my most trusted colleagues and friends who I rely on who have a CS degree from a legit US college like University of Colorado Boulder or Ohio State. These people are the best and I love working with them. These are people who went to school in the US and are legit. Not only that, but my favorite two teachers in college in math and CS were both Indians who taught CS.

On the other hand, the Indians we hire as support are absolute trash. You compare them to Philipno or Eastern European people we hire as support, and they are so bad. The funny thing is that the Indians that are in the US are our best people for support. Obviously, there is a massive selection bias, but what the hell is going on with this?

I actually have a real world example. I worked at a telecom company as a software engineer and most of the managers were former Army or Air Force people. The majority of the people in the US who were doing support are/were Indian. But these people were Indians in America and everyone liked them and they all eventually got promoted. But the overnight people in India were again absolute trash.

What is going on in India with their leadership? Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good? I know this is probably a best fit for the questions thread, but this legitimately puzzles me.

And obviously Indian-Americans I don't include in this. They are just like all other Americans.

And obviously Indian-Americans I don't include in this. They are just like all other Americans.

No, they're really not. If they were you wouldn't need what comes before the hyphen, you would just call them Americans. They are different, and are thus referred to differently, which you knew and understood. I also find this particularly offensive because I am ethnically American and you casually erase that as if it's the most normal thing in the world.

Please, just because you are either unable or unwilling to trace your ethnic origin or mix back a few hundred years when your (European) ancestors showed up doesn't mean that you get to call yourself just "American" and consider anyone else of a different skin color as being something entirely. The only relevant characteristic in a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants is whether they hold citizenship. Have it? Congratulations, you've just been transmuted into an American, here's your card letting you call yourself a member of the Greatest Nation in the world (unironic endorsement).

Ethnically American, not even indigenous, can't make this shit up if you tried.

Have you never heard of unhyphenated Americans (as opposed to nonspecific Americans of any background)?

I'm not sure who coined the phrase or brought the group to prominence, but I heard of it from here:

Here’s something else cool. We can’t track Borderers directly because there’s no “Borderer” or “Scots-Irish” option on the US census. But Albion’s Seed points out that the Borderers were uniquely likely to identify as just “American” and deliberately forgot their past ancestry as fast as they could. Meanwhile, when the census asks an ethnicity question about where your ancestors came from, every year some people will stubbornly ignore the point of the question and put down “America” (no, this does not track the distribution of Native American population). Here’s a map of so-called “unhyphenated Americans”, taken from this site:

I think that there is a vast gulf between the phrase "unhyphenated American" and the phrase "ethnic American".

I do not find the former objectionable, people are free not to care about their past. But the later term implies that there is a distinct American ethnic, i.e. that the US is an ethnostate, which seems both objectionable and wrong. If you only count people who only have ancestors which inhabited the British Colonies, then the "ethnic Americans" would probably have be a small minority for a century. And if you include people with ancestors who were immigrants to the US and mixed with others, then there is not much of an ethnic left.

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