Sikh American identity

Blog post by Diditi Mitra, Brookdale Community College, USA

As I explore in my Identities article, ‘The socioeconomics of Sikh American identity’, semi structured interviews conducted with immigrant Sikh taxi drivers in New York City and with immigrant Sikh families show that socioeconomic differences are impactful in shaping the experiences and identities of non-white immigrants of the Sikh religious faith. The respondents of these interviews converged and diverged on their lived experiences and subsequently in terms of making meaning of themselves. While all the respondents converged on their encounter with racism, the specific form of those racist encounters was shaped by socioeconomic status.
 
The spaces occupied by the professional informants were typically suffused with colourblind racial ideology, making it challenging to identify it as such and as a matter of fact casting doubt on the professional respondents’ assessment of those encounters as racist. The taxi drivers, in contrast, reported routine and blatant experiences of racism from passengers, law enforcement and the taxi court judges. In my view, it was possible to remove the mask of liberalism, that usually conceals overt expressions of racism in professional workplaces, in dealings with non-white immigrant cab drivers whose work and social status ranked low in the social order. 

For the Sikh immigrants, American society was not the first place where they experienced being a minority. The informants migrated with that identity from (Hindu dominant) India itself, the effects of which were continued to be felt in the American diaspora. Interestingly, it was only the professional immigrants who reported encounters with prejudice from fellow non-Sikh ‘Indian’ Americans. Quite possibly, the professional immigrants, unlike the cabbies, were likely to share neighbourhoods and workspaces with fellow Indian Americans of non-Sikh backgrounds, which served to extend the group’s minority experience into the diaspora.
 
The respondents did not passively submit to their subordination, irrespective of whether the experience of ‘othering’ was from dominant American society or from ‘Indian’ Americans. Here too, socioeconomic status was a factor in the way they resisted. Contrary to the informants of lower socioeconomic background, drawing pride from their own 'success' allowed the professional informants to either keep racism at bay or completely ignore its existence. Their professional background was also a source of the requisite confidence to assert themselves directly when confronted with racist situations. Establishing themselves as equal to or even superior to whites was the resistance strategy deployed by the cabbies.
 
The ‘model minority’ characterization of Indian Americans additionally proved to be a useful tool to challenge both the Sikh cabbies’ race and class subjugation. They did so by pointing to the ‘success’ of all Indian Americans and the moral inferiority of other minority groups. At the same time, submission to the 'model minority' identity is where informants across socioeconomic backgrounds converged. There emerged a sentiment among the professionals to distance themselves from the ‘Indian’ identity because of the persecution of Sikhs in India compounded by perpetuation of prejudice as immigrants in America. I assert that the relative higher socioeconomic status of the professionals gave them the power to disassociate from 'Indian' and continue to at least preserve their higher socioeconomic status in the society.
 
Still, I do not argue that the Sikh American identity is meaningless. There is a common experience of ‘othering’ attributable to being seen as Sikh, both in India and America. The diversity of social position occupied by Sikh Americans (like all others) – socioeconomic status being one – necessitates a more complex conceptualization of the Sikh American identity that considers its intersection with other categories of social differentiation, akin to the diverse interpretation and practice of the Sikh religion itself.
 
Going forward, the scholarship on race and immigration should look at the various permutations and combinations of group identities and its relationship with social location, which subsequently illuminate how ‘groups’ make meaning of themselves and feel a sense of belonging in the society. Social justice workers must pay attention to complex identities that defy socially imposed categorization to better advocate for their constituents. 

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Image credit: Sikh Day Parade in Manhattan. Photo by ​Shashwati Talukdar, Four Nine and a Half Pictures. Used with permission.

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Read the Identities article:
Mitra, Diditi. (2024). The socioeconomics of Sikh American identity. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2388963

Read further in Identities:

Turbaned Northern Thai-ness: selective transnationalism, situational ethnicity and local cultural intimacy among Chiang Mai Punjabis

New immigrants in America: Contributions to ethnography and theory

Threading meaningful lives: respectability, home businesses and identity negotiations among newly immigrant South Asian women