AITA for asking my non asian friend to stop calling himself asian.

I (late 20s F) live in a mid sized city. My friend group is fairly mixed but the majority of us are East or Southeast Asian. We have people who are Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese. I’m Japanese myself. There’s also one friend who is mixed (white and Filipino) and one friend who is Indian, originally from the UK.

This has been bothering me for a while but I finally said something recently. My Indian friend sometimes refers to himself as Asian in conversations with the group. For example when we talk about Asian food, Asian grocery stores, or “Asian parents” type jokes, he will include himself in that.

The thing is, when people say “Asian” they usually mean East or Southeast Asian. Things like Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese etc. When people talk about his background they usually say Indian or South Asian. The culture, food, and general experiences are pretty different.

This comes up quite a lot because of the demographics of our group. We cook together sometimes and talk about food a lot, and there’s a lot of “Asian supermarket” or “Asian snacks” type discussions.

The other day he said something like “yeah we Asians eat a lot of rice anyway” while we were talking about cooking, and I told him honestly that it was a bit confusing when he says that. I said when we say Asian in this group we aren’t really referring to the South Asian subcontinent and it would make more sense if he just said Indian instead.

I also tried to explain that even culturally the experiences are very different. For example things like the caste system exist in India which is a completely different social structure than anything in East Asian cultures. The food traditions, family expectations, and general cultural background are also very different. So when we talk about “Asian experiences” in the group it’s usually about a different set of things.

I also pointed out that he grew up in the UK and is honestly more British culturally than anything else anyway, so it’s not like he’s even strongly connected to India in the way we are with our cultures. Admitedly not all of us were born in Asia but we also have stayed connected and our parents were. His parents and grand parents are British.

He got pretty upset and said he is Asian and that I was gatekeeping. I said technically yes geographically, but in practice that’s not what people mean and it just makes conversations awkward when he inserts himself into things that clearly aren’t about his culture.

Later I asked a few of the others privately if I had been rude and most of them actually said they agreed with me and had noticed the same thing but never wanted to say it. The only person who didn’t really agree was the mixed friend who said they can kind of see both sides and didn’t want to get involved.

Now the Indian friend is still a bit cold with me and I’m wondering if I pushed something that wasn’t really my place.

AITA?