iSteve commenter Conatus asks:

[Asian] Indians are way way on the top of the list of income by ethnicity in wiki. 122K to 90K for the [second-place] Taiwanese

So my question is why would they be considered ‘socially disadvantaged’ for small business contracts with the Feds?

13 CFR(Code of Federal Regulations)
§ 124.103 Who is socially disadvantaged?

(a) General. Socially disadvantaged individuals are those who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias within American society because of their identities as members of groups and without regard to their individual qualities. The social disadvantage must stem from circumstances beyond their control.

(b) Members of designated groups.

(1) There is a rebuttable presumption that the following individuals are socially disadvantaged: Black Americans; Hispanic Americans; Native Americans (Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, or enrolled members of a Federally or State recognized Indian Tribe); Asian Pacific Americans (persons with origins from Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, Laos, Cambodia (Kampuchea), Vietnam, Korea, The Philippines, U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Republic of Palau), Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Samoa, Macao, Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, or Nauru); Subcontinent Asian Americans (persons with origins from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, the Maldives Islands or Nepal); and members of other groups designated from time to time by SBA according to procedures set forth at paragraph (d) of this section. Being born in a country does not, by itself, suffice to make the birth country an individual’s country of origin for purposes of being included within a designated group.

My recollection is that to defend your racial entitlement to affirmative action you can be required to write an essay for the federal government listing all the times you were discriminated against, much like the kind of essay kids write to accompany their college applications. As I wrote for VDARE.com in 2009:

Consider this example. In 2005, the Office of the Inspector General sent a report to the SBA: Criteria for Overcoming the Presumption of Social Disadvantage is [sic] Needed. A whistle-blowing citizen had filed a complaint about an Asian businessman in his mid-20s who had qualified for the SBA’s 8(a) minority business development programs. The whistle-blower argued that the entrepreneur was not really disadvantaged.

See, in theory you don’t qualify for taxpayer-subsidized loans just by being “Asian”. No, you have to be a socially or economically disadvantaged Asian. And how do you demonstrate you are disadvantaged? You fill out a form about how you’ve suffered under the lash of white bigotry.

Thus this Asian entrepreneur related a tale of woe on his application, including:

“I then watched as young, less experienced white men got the promotions and salary increases that I had been promised.”

But the affirmative action beneficiary was a real life version of the dreamboat love interest leading man of Crazy Rich Asians:

The Inspector General’s office discovered, however, that in the company where the victim toiled, his father was a senior officer and shareholder. In fact, this young martyr to social and economic disadvantage:

1. came from a wealthy family; e.g., according to a newspaper article, since 1996, three companies his parents founded and were affiliated with were sold for approximately $3 billion;

2. was raised in his parents’ home, which had an assessed value of $5.2 million as of January 1, 2005; …

5. was gainfully employed by the United States Senate, Goldman Sachs International … among others.

As the title of the 2005 report points out, after decades of handing out loans to each and every Asian who submitted a form claiming to be “socially or economically disadvantaged”, the federal government still hadn’t gotten around to developing criteria for “overcoming the presumption of social disadvantage”.

In other words, if you are Asian, the government just takes your word for it.