No, not okay. The point is that we do not need to be Indian to be Sikh.
The point is that you do not need to keep dancing around the extremely plain intention of the character's original delivery while pretending that's not what you're doing, as again here. Your
private rationalizations are your business; you don't get to pretend they're general facts applying to the rest of us or that your counter-intuitive readings are somehow convincing and obvious and set the parameters of the debate.
When I say "evasive bull," that's the kind of stuff I mean. It's obfuscation, and if you don't know you're doing it, I'm telling you: you're doing it. And you shouldn't. It makes you look like you're bending over backwards to make excuses for casual racism, pure and simple. And that's bad.
I think you're putting way too much importance on this piece of fiction.
And this kind of put-on condescension looks even worse. You don't get to pretend that your personal preferences make it your business to dictate who places importance on what. If you don't know that that's what you sound like: that's what you sound like. You should stop doing that. That's bad.
And you can try to play rubber-and-glue all you want, but at the end of the day
you're still the one dancing around trying to make excuses for a form of casual racism. And you're not going to convince me that calling you on that is more dickish than doing it in the first place. That's a silly thing for you to try to do, and you should stop doing that. It's bad.
my point still stands. Even if my failing memory doesn't. 
I don't care whether they said it in the 80s or 2010s.
