My race changed when I moved from Britain to the United States two years ago. I don’t mean that I tick a different box now. I remain born to Indian immigrants, a person with obviously brown skin. In both countries, I’m categorized as Asian. What changed when I crossed the Atlantic was what my race signified.
British Asians, the United Kingdom’s largest ethnic minority group by a sizable margin, faced some of the highest mortality rates in the country in the early months of COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, meanwhile, deaths among Asian Americans were the lowest of any group.
This can be explained in large part by demographic variations, rooted in different histories of immigration. But the figures also prove that race isn’t a static quantity. It depends on context. If I had moved to the United States in 1971 rather than 2021, I wouldn’t have been categorized as Asian at all. Officially, I would have been labeled “white” because I would have been seen as belonging to so-called Indo-European stock. Even now, not all Americans consider Indians to be Asian, since Asian Americans are commonly seen as being of East Asian heritage.
When it comes to race, the where and the when make
