Yeah , well surely we wouldn ' t tell them they ' re not Indian , but if they say they ' re British , we also wouldn ' t go , hold up you look Indian to me ! You know what I mean ? I don ' t think a Brit of Indian descent saying I ' m British would be seen as disclaiming any Indian heritage , he ' d just be disclaiming Indian as his identity . It ' s where his parents are from , or whatever , and it ' s a part of him but it ' s not who he is . He ' s British . As the Rt . hon . Ian Brown would say , It ' s not where you ' re from , it ' s where you ' re at . As for the racial part . It depends on the nonwhite persons ethnicity but if they look IndianPakistani I usually assume they ' re British . Exactly . Indianlooking people are so common in England that you wouldn ' t necessarily assume they weren ' t English . But , say , a Mexicanlooking person on Oxford St you ' d probably assume was from Mexico , right ? I left out a counterexample to my initial thing . I was going to say that you ' d probably assume a white person in Africa to be a foreigner , too . But then I remembered South Africa so in South Africa you ' d assume a white person was African , but maybe not in Egypt or Nigeria . So I suppose context matters . When you ' re visibly or audibly not of the main race that inhabits a particular area , you might be assumed to be foreign , and therefore have more of a pressure to explain your ethnicity or background . But that pressure might be alleviated if you ' re of some race that still has a strong likelihood of being in that area Indians in England , whites in South Africa , blacks in America . I bet Africans in America I mean , recent immigrants therefrom are assumed to be American until they speak , at which point their accent clues people in as to where they ' re from . But , say , Asians in America are probably more frequently assumed to be foreign . Maybe not in San Francisco . If an Asianlooking person says , I ' m an American , even with an American accent there might be an unspoken thing of , but you look Asian , so they feel a greater need to say I ' m FilipinoAmerican , which provides the explanation of how they can look Asian but be American . Whereas if a black or white person says I ' m an American the ancestry is assumed and no further questions may be required . So maybe that ' s why it ' s weirder for your white American grandchildren of Italian immigrants to claim Italian identity than it is for an Indianlooking Brit of Indian ancestry to claim Indian ancestry . He might feel he needs to account for the way he looks , whereas the ItalianAmericans don ' t have that social pressure , however mild it is , and are therefore making a bigger deal out of their ancestry than they need to .