Presumed identities perceived difference: How children of South Asian Indian immigrants experience and negotiate being an American

Using qualitative data with second generation Christian Indian Americans, this article illuminates dimensions of Whiteness and practices of cultural citizenship to highlight the relational and embodied practices of identity. Specifically, the discussion elaborates on dynamics of recognition, shaped by how race, class, caste, and religion intersect for Indian Americans. Second generation Christian Indian Americans experience exclusion when White peers identify them as Hindu, a religious identity for many South Asian Indians. To fend off exclusion, participants identify class mobility and evangelical Christianity as ‘true’ criteria for being an American. I discuss how Whiteness informs how second generation Christian Indian Americans draw symbolic and social boundaries to assert being a ‘cultural’ American as they negotiate ‘othering’ to establish their own Americanness.