Being an Indian in the United States is no longer a point of diversity and celebration. Instead, openly revealing your Indian identity might get you attacked on the streets and targeted online. This isn't just a hypothesis, but a proven statement. A 2026 survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace examined the attitudes of the roughly 5.2 million Indian-Americans living in US. As per the survey, since the start of 2025, one in four Indian Americans have been called a slur. The survey also noted that one in five respondents shied away from wearing their religious identities such as bindis and tilaks in public.
Get breaking news anytime, anywhere. Download the TOI app now!
Those who still do, are targeted enough to inspire them to withhold wearing their identity in public. A case in point is an Indian-origin doctor in the US who faced racist comments on social media over wearing a bindi. In an Instagram video, Dr Karishma Reddy, a board-certified plastic surgeon with a following of 23K on Instagram, shared an incident from one of her rural rotations as a medical student studying at the College of Georgia.
She was seeing a patient for diabetes when his wife asked her why she wore a dot (bindi). "Before I could even explain, her husband was like I'll tell you why she wears that dot, when she gets married, her husband scratches it off and finds out if he won a motel or a gas station," said the doctor.
The comment was an off-handed racist remark on the doctor's Indian identity since many Americans believe that Indians come to the states and take up either of the businesses, owning or working at a motel or a gas station. "Not the Bindhi being a scratch-off lottery ticket. Anyway, my husband won a plastic surgeon, but this patient did make my dark passenger giggle deep down," she wrote in the caption.
