since some askers keep conflating the two, i just want to make it clear as someone from the latter region that south Asia (the indian subcontinent) is a different region altogether from southeast Asia (the asean member states) with very different cultures
In lieu of this ask, maybe.
Which is why race, ethnicity, and nationality are all different. In the U.S., you'd be racialized as just Asian or south Asian. Your ethnicity is a clan, tribe, ethnoreligion, etc you were born into. Your nationality is, I'm assuming, Indian. what i have been trying to get to people is that Dornishmen are pretty varied in terms of ethnicity but can be racialized almost as a monolith/oversimplified as the very concept of race tries to do in real life (stony, vs sandy, salty).
It's why people tend to get ethnic Indians confused with those from south East Asia when they are a bit darker than what they think ethnic Asians look like. And many white people in the U.S. would still see (bc it's how they were taught to look at the world) you as similar "enough" to South East to be just "brown" Asian and call it a day. While they go crazy with the whole "I'm a natural blonde" vs "ginger" as if these are two different sub groups of human beings sometimes.
It's not so much "stupidity" so much as historical racialization in U.S. history. And it's why we had the whole Tyla controversy. Race is a tool of boxing people in boxes that never work but nonetheless determine a lot of sociopolitical and economic infrastructures and certain people's access to resources all over the world.