With 'Latinos' its even weirder. Cubans are almost never treated as minorities (disclaimer: I'm Cuban). White-mexicans are treated as if "you're not really who we're talking about." I have a sneaking suspicion that minority is doublespeak for brown people, but even Indians get excluded from this category... for some reason. Even though I've heard countless heart breaking struggles about first generation Indian-Americans dealing with the pain of culture shock, exclusion, and discrimination...
In the end, everything breaks down when you frame things in terms of race, because framing things in terms of race is lazy and dumb. In fact, "race" is a dumb concept. It only makes sense in Middle Earth. What is the significant difference between a "white hispanic", and a "non-white hispanic"? Is there a "hispanic-hispanic"? What about "black hispanics"? Do we call these folks African American (they're not from Africa), or are they Latino? Why do we lump all these cultures together anyways? Is it because they all speak (various dialects) of Spanish? Then what about Brazilians? Are Spanish speaking people from Europe called anything? "Asian" is another absurd category that lumps hundreds of diverse ethnicities and cultures into one.
For some reason, the government (and most other institutions) desperately seems to want to lump you into one of 4 or 5 unscientific categories. All the categories are old racist ones with PC wrappers. It's all anti-intellectual. IMO we should culturally wean ourselves off of using these categories.
> Do we call these folks African American (they're not from Africa)
My favourite example of this was a black British model, whom an American commentator called "African-American". She was born and grew up in the UK, and was neither African nor American.
Or the white guy from South Africa who emigrated to America and tried to get a scholarship as an "African American". By all quantifiable measures he should get to use that label.
As someone who isn't a native English speaker, I've long noticed that, as you mention, "minority" doesn't mean "the opposite of majority" (I'm not sure since when, or exactly what it does mean; you say success is key, but success in what field - chess, boxing, beer-making? Listing just a dozen fields is probably enough to demonstrate that no minorities exist according to the "success" definition.)
However, to return to grandparent's comment - I, similarly to its author, have never noticed that the word "color" had been similarly redefined. Isn't "a person of color" the opposite of "white", where "white" means a having skin with a color at a mostly-agreed-upon pinkish/palish range?
Success means general economic success and low crime rate. "Minority" outside the context of politics means what you describe above - let's call this "minority_1". "Minority" as used by progressives (lets call it "minority_2") seems to mean a group of people that share uncommon visible characteristics who are also less successful (in the sense defined above) on average than the majority. Racism certainly exists - though progressives use a non-standard definition of racism, such that any member of a minority_2 can not be racist against a successful minority_1 or the majority. In fact, even discrimination against a successful minority_1 by the majority is seen as unworthy of note - an example of this is how no one seems to care about the obviously racist (by any common sense definition) discrimination against Asian students by Ivy-League universities. Asians need much higher SAT scores than white or black students to get a place in same.
"Person of color" is essentially a tortured, PC, language construction intended to enable people to avoid saying "non-white" (which, while descriptive, is apparently insensitive or something like that).
So, for example, mixed-race President Obama is a person of color, his African father is a person of color, and his White mother is not a person of color.
It's fairly situational and the lines are relatively blurry - for example, if I have one Japanese grandparent, am I a person of color or a White person?
I'm not sure how a first-generation immigrant with skin 80% as dark as a random African-American who celebrates Diwali instead of Christmas, follows cricket instead of (American!) football, and favors rice puddings to apple pies is actually statistically deserving of the "no longer considered minority" flag in America, financially successful or not.
It sounds more like some people are changing their criteria as they go along to lend the rhetorical power of a cry against Racism to a potentially-interesting point, an exercise in intellectual dishonesty which undermines the point if the listener realizes it. Perhaps if we used words to accurately describe the situation we could actually communicate.
I don't know if you intended it this way, but you seem to be portraying Indian culture as just American culture s/Jesus/ganpati/ s/baseball/cricket/ etc. These things, while accurate, barely scratch the surface.
It really is different here, and not just the food. E.g., asking about family is routine (in a manner uncommon in the US), and I intuitively grasp certain social mixing/separation that is just different from the US.
From what I've observed, these gaps are vastly larger (read: earth/jupiter vs earth/moon) than the gap between various western subcultures.
In order to accurately describe the situation, we have to first understand that the concept of race is bullshit. It's a societal one, not a biological one.
Imputing racism on high-status institutions is a politically useful tool; one can even extract rents through the purification ritual of diversity training - modern opinions on race are best modelled as sacred beliefs. Disproportionately succesful minorities such as East Asian and Indian immigrants are considered functionally white for propaganda purposes, as their success in these institutions is significant evidence that they are not discriminating in favour of whites.
Of course they are. Indians remain Indians no matter how successful they are. Same with Germans, Frenchmen, or Asian/African Americans, for that matter. They are still part of the respective minority, which is not something bad to begin with by the way…
no, they're considered model minorities and become the poster kids for 'if you put down your head and work hard you could overcome the all-encompassing structural racism that defines this society'
is a person's worth to you determined by how successful they are? that's like the argument about steve jobs: 'we should let in syrian refugees because they might end up fathering a brilliant tech entrepeneur' - no, we should let in syrian refugees because it's the right thing to do.
In the end, everything breaks down when you frame things in terms of race, because framing things in terms of race is lazy and dumb. In fact, "race" is a dumb concept. It only makes sense in Middle Earth. What is the significant difference between a "white hispanic", and a "non-white hispanic"? Is there a "hispanic-hispanic"? What about "black hispanics"? Do we call these folks African American (they're not from Africa), or are they Latino? Why do we lump all these cultures together anyways? Is it because they all speak (various dialects) of Spanish? Then what about Brazilians? Are Spanish speaking people from Europe called anything? "Asian" is another absurd category that lumps hundreds of diverse ethnicities and cultures into one.
For some reason, the government (and most other institutions) desperately seems to want to lump you into one of 4 or 5 unscientific categories. All the categories are old racist ones with PC wrappers. It's all anti-intellectual. IMO we should culturally wean ourselves off of using these categories.