As you may have noted if you have followed this blog or many others relating to matters South Asian and authored by people racialised in the United States, there is a substantial amount of debate about what various terms mean or which ones to use. The constancy of this debate is interesting in and of itself, even if its content is tired for people who have already participated in them - why do South Asian Americans or whatever we call ourselves create spaces that continuously and neverendingly debate what the label for the community is?
I. I saw a programme today on the tele which interviewed young people about what they thought of a school programme that allows them to pay for their food with their fingerprint. The fingerprint is hashed into a number, which is then stored in a fairly unsecure room on a server, according to a school official. The school official said that it would be impossible to reconvert the number back into a fingerprint, which the show later pointed out has already been done by a team in Japan.
The influx of immigrants from South Asia, lured by the same good schools and suburban-style living that attracted their predecessors, had begun in earnest by 1990. By one estimate, Asians, mostly from the Indian subcontinent, today make up nearly a third of the neighborhood’s population of about 20,000.
The transformation has come as a shock to many of the neighborhood’s earlier settlers, some of whom say they wonder whether magazines tucked into seatbacks on flights between Mumbai and Kennedy Airport advertise homes in Bellerose.