Category: Ethnicity

American Caste (a)

Caucasian Intelligentsia

Some at Brown Pundits have expressed dismay at my using the phrase “caucasian intelligentsia”, maybe because they see this as a criticism of white people. To be clear I am not criticizing people of European ancestry or European influenced culture; but rather a very subtle, pernicious and dangerous colonization of the mind. Some caucasians and non caucasians are at the epicenter of this imperial oppressive hegemonic system. And many good caucasians and non caucasian are fighting against the caucasian intelligentsia. Malcom X and Ali ably describe this caucasian intelligentsia. They call this phenomenon the “white liberal.” Since many caucasian liberals fight against the caucasian intelligentia, I am uncomfortable with the term “white liberal.” I also do not completely agree every aspect of what Malcolm X and Ali say. With that caveat, please listen to the whole thing. the clip is only six minutes long. Some great quotes:

  • “The white liberals [caucasian intelligentsia] from both parties cross party lines to work together toward the same goal”
  • “The white liberal differs from the white conservative in only one way . . . the  liberal [caucasian intelligentsia] is more deceitful, more hypocritical than the conservative”
  • “Both want power but the white liberal [caucasian intelligentsia] is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the negroe’s friend and benefactor and by winning the friendship and support of the negroe the white liberal [caucasian intelligentsia] is able to use the negroe as a pawn or weapon”
  • Ali says that we should love our race and culture

Most but not all of the caucasian intelligentsia comes from post modernism. A sizable minority of the caucasian intelligentsia comes from other caucasian pathologies that can be elaborated on in another post. To massively oversimplify post modernism seeks to negate all metanarratives and universalist norms to observe the world as it truly is. In practice however, modern post modernists see the world through a very narrow incomplete, misleading and biased western ethnocentric filter. In practice they dispute the core of European Enlightenment liberalism and Eastern philosophy, three features of which are:

  • All humans are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, including the right of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness (eastern philosophy conforms)
  • All humans have the right to freedom of art, speech and thought (eastern philosophy conforms but adds freedom of intuition and feeling)
  • All human beings are potentially powerful, potentially wise and sovereign (eastern philosophy conforms but adds “divine”)

Post modernists disagree with all of these, seeing them as tools of oppression, hegemony, exploitation, colonialism, imperialism, sectarianism, bigotry, prejudice, racism. Post modernists see free expression, liberty or the concept of everyone being potentially wise, powerful and sovereign; as potentially violent and potentially oppressive.

Post modernists are trying to damage the self confidence (Atma Vishwaasa in Sanskrit) of black Americans of African ancestry similar to what they did to former European colonies in Africa and Asia during the 1800s and 1900s. To quote from a previous Brown Pundit post:

Continue reading American Caste (a)

On ethnicity


A really strange conversation on ethnicity broke out below. The primacy of lots of different variables was argued.

My family arrived in the USA ~1980 when there were not too many South Asians compared to today. Additionally, they have lived in major urban areas, small towns, and medium-sized cities. My parents grew up in (East) Pakistan, married and had their first children in Bangladesh, but have spent most of their lives now in the United States of America. Both speak English with a strong accent and are moderately religious Muslims. You wouldn’t call them secular, but neither are they visibly or ostentatiously Muslim. In American politics, they are staunch Democrats, while if they have an opinion on Bangladeshi politics they are Awami League (the ratio of discussion of American to Bangladesh politics in my family growing up was about 100 to 1 in favor the former).

Today my parents’ social circle, in a relatively large urban area, are Bangladeshis. Most of these people (almost all in fact) arrived in the United States much later than they did. But in the 1980s my parents had a much smaller pool of social acquaintances who were Bangladeshi. In the early 1980s, there were 15,000 Bangladeshis in New York City. Today there are probably closer to 200,000.

Here are some things I will observe in relation to my parents’ more diverse social circles in the 1980s. First, they were overwhelmingly South Asian. Those who were not South Asian were usually married in, and usually white. Second, a core group consisted of Bangladeshis. But the next group probably consisted by Indian Bengalis. A somewhat more established community. In fact, the boundary between Bangladeshis and Indian Bengalis were somewhat fluid. The two groups spoke the same language, and there was a large dietary overlap.

Next in order to the Indian Bengalis were a variety of other social clusters of South Asians that they met through various acquaintances and friends. For example, one cluster of friends consisted mostly of people from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, but with a large minority from other parts of India. Because there was ethnolinguistic diversity in this social group generally everyone spoke English, rather than Telugu, which was the most numerous language.

Another group consisted of people from Pakistan and Indian Muslims. This group also had some other token Bangladeshis. The unifying factor in this group was that all were South Asian Muslims. The de-unifying factor in this group is that the non-Bengalis would sometimes make the proactive case for Urdu as a unifying language, which my parents and the other Bengalis always objected to (because of their age, almost all the Bengalis in the group could follow the conversation in Urdu, since they grew up in Pakistan).

One issue in social circumstances with Pakistanis is that my parents found the food less palatable. This was a very important criterion for them for social interactions and a primary reason why sometimes they preferred going to parties thrown by their Hindu Bengali friends in preference to their Pakistan Muslim friends. By “less palatable”, I mean here that Pakistani cuisine was not “comfort food” for them.

My parents went to a multi-ethnic mosque several times a year. From what I could tell the South Asians kept to themselves, the Arabs kept to themselves, the Turks kept to themselves, etc. There was no real deep interaction. My parents never had any close Muslim friends who were not South Asian. In fact, we went to dinner with Chinese people (my father’s colleagues) more often than we went to dinner at a non-South Asian Muslim’s house.

That’s about it from me. Below are some genetic plots.

Brown Pundits