We can count some of America’s most innovative and successful people as members of our diaspora—-doctors, authors, lawyers, musicians, and of course, the backbone of Silicon Valley. In 2010, the Pew Forum found that average household income for Indian Americans was $88,000 a year—-almost double the US average. 70% of adult Indian Americans had college degrees, higher than any other Asian-American groups and 2.5 time the US average. ...

...At its worst, though, it’s a reputation that’s given us contempt for other groups in the US that haven’t “mastered the system” in the same way. It’s a contempt that’s most often directed at Black Americans, who are derided as irresponsible, violent, scary, and worse....

Fears of a “Hindoo Invasion” and a “Turban Tide” swept American newspapers, and as Erika Lee documents in The Making of Asian America, brown people from Washington State to Florida were denied citizenship (despite American military service, in the case of Bhagat Singh Thind), beaten by white mobs, forcibly removed from entire towns, imprisoned if they sought to marry Caucasian women, and worse.

But where they did gain acceptance were the Black majority enclaves of all of these cities. In his brilliantly revelatory book, Bengali Harlem, Bald describes communities in Tremé, New Orleans, the west side of Baltimore, and East Detroit where scores of Desi men married local African American women and settled down....