Where are you from, etc.

Where are you from, etc.

I have no idea how old Jordan is. But I’m 34. Here is my experience in a graph, where the Y axis represents frequency:

I look as brown as I used to, and I never dressed “ethnically.” So my own hunch is that the social environment has changed greatly since the early 1980s. When I was a little kid at my parents’ dinner parties there was a little mimeographed booklet titled “Bangladeshi people in the United States.” It was a directory of Bangladesh people who you could get in touch with all across the country. There were a few thousand. By 1990 this was probably outmoded, as there were ~12,000 Bangladeshis in the United States.

Razib Khan