Showing posts with label Immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Immigration. Show all posts

"Believing They Are White" -- Talking about Ta-Nehisi Coates and Whiteness with my Students

Yesterday we started Ta-Nehisi Coates' book Between the World and Me in my first-year writing class.

We had a vigorous discussion of the following passage. At the end of the hour I felt good about the level of engagement, but perhaps also aware that not everyone in the room was convinced by Coates' scathing assertions about whiteness in particular. The key passage comes right at the beginning of the book:

Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white. (7) 

There are two difficult ideas here. Let's pull them apart to try and understand them better.

1. Where did Racism come from? 

The first is a historical one (crystallized as "race is the child of racism, not the father"). After a certain amount of talking it through, my students seemed to get it. Since Coates isn't really giving us a detailed history of the emergence of scientific racism here, or talking about various kinds of tribalism and ethno-nationalism that exist outside of the Euro-American framework (i.e., with whiteness on top), I had to fill in some blanks.

To help my students get there, I suggested to them that before modern race science (modern racism), various societies certainly did have versions of tribalism in which outsiders were denigrated and contrast to "our people." Sometime in the early modern period -- probably coinciding with the inception of the transatlantic slave trade -- that changed in Europe and North America. A new, overarching theory of Race ("capital R") was invented, displacing minor tribalistic racisms with a Theory that could now be applied to all forms of cultural difference.

Fateh Singh Makkar, 1924-2017

I recently delivered a eulogy for my grandfather, who passed away at the age of 92. This is a slightly edited version, with most names removed to protect my relatives' privacy.

My grandfather and me, at the Air and Space Museum, 1982

Thank you all for coming today to help us remember and honor my grandfather, Doctor Fateh Singh Makkar. (We called him “Bhapaji.”)  Bhapaji passed away in Ludhiana, Punjab last week at the age of 92; my parents were there to be with him in his last few days, as were my father’s sisters. It happened right around the 11th anniversary of the death of my grandmother Bhagwant Kaur, and they had come together in Ludhiana in part as part of the family's annual commemoration of her death.

Bhapaji was a larger-than-life figure for us -- a big man with a huge personality, beloved by four generations in a large family with that is now mostly dispersed over northern India with a couple of branches here in the U.S. Today I'm going to talk for a couple of minutes about his life and give some details that help give a sense of who Bhapaji was with a somewhat historical, documentary angle (others today will speak more "from the heart").

I think of people of Bhapaji's generation -- there are fewer and fewer of them with each passing year -- as a bridge in some ways to our collective history as people of South Asian descent. Bhapaji, born in 1924, lived through the last years of the British Raj, the Partition, and then essentially the whole of postcolonial Indian history up to this point. We don't, I don't think, pay enough attention to the lessons of that history.

Like many Sikhs, our family history started in what is today Pakistan. Bhapaji was born and raised in a Muslim-majority village called Musakhel in a rural part of western Punjab; his own father was a kind of village doctor -- in Indian languages, a Hakim. I once asked him if he remembered anything about his own grandfather. He told me that he too was a hakim -- so the medical tradition goes back a long way in our family (my own father is a doctor). Bhapaji later moved to a village called "Chak Number 90," where my father was born. As much as that area of Punjab was home, politics interceded, and with Partition approaching it became abundantly clear that they couldn't stay. In 1947, the family migrated on foot from Pakistan into India, covering an astonishing 160 miles with a nine month old baby -- my father -- in their arms in the midst of terrible violence.

After a brief time in a refugee camp, the family resettled in the town of Bharatpur, Rajasthan, where Bhapaji set up a medical practice and a dispensary. He soon became known and respected throughout the town. He was the head of the local Sikh Gurdwara society in Bharatpur, but he was so well respected by the local Hindu community that he was also elected head of the Bharatpur Punjabi Hindu temple.

I felt that sense of importance when I would go to visit Bharatpur as a child. It's not an especially nice-looking town; there's an old Mughal fort there, but otherwise it's a forgettable place in the middle of the desert. But when we went there we felt like VIPs. My family had what felt like a huge compound there, with high walls and lots of rooms and pathways. (I haven't been back in many years, so it's possible that it seemed bigger to me as an eight year old than it actually was.) I was in awe of the cavernous main hall where we would play cards and chess for hours, and I was amazed at all the wild animals one would see in the streets and alleys of the town -- pigs, goats, dogs, cows. When we slept on cots on the roof during the hot summer months (no air-conditioning back then), we had to watch out for aggressive monkeys that came out at dawn to harass us poor humans. I was in awe, too, of Bhapaji’s antique shotgun, sometimes used for hunting game, though in the midst of the riots of 1984 Bhapaji had to fire it in the air to dispel a murderous mob that had gathered at the doors of the compound. 

It happened again: a place that felt like home suddenly didn't. The family was shocked by 1984 -- by the sense that neighbors could turn on them without warning -- and decided to move to Punjab for the greater sense of security and belonging. (My mother’s parents did something similar at that time after going through a similar experience, relocating from Delhi to Chandigarh.) Bhapaji and my father's brother settled in Ludhiana, where Chachaji opened up a medical practice of his own.

Even as he seemed to remind us of our past, Bhapaji also enjoyed and embraced modernity -- whether it was modern medicine or modern technology. He enjoyed getting to know young people; I was always impressed by how good he was at sizing people up and debunking the kind of hot air and bloat that Indian men of a certain age are sometimes prone to. I remember one relative at a dinner once bragging about how many Crores of Rupees he was supposedly making in his factory; Bhapaji laughed it off: Bhaisaab, you must be confusing Lakhs for Crores. And when another relative seemed to get a little too carried away reminiscing about the Kulchas that are famous in Amritsar, he gently chided, "You should eat to live, friend; don't live to eat." 

Another sign of his modernity was his respect for women; Punjabi men of his generation tended to be intensely patriarchal. And yes, both of Bhapaji's sons became doctors, but one of his daughters too is a practicing doctor in Lucknow; another is a teacher (now retired). In the 1960s and 70s, it wasn't so common in traditional Punjabi households like ours for daughters to get post-graduate degrees. And more recently Bhapaji showed great respect for the women in the younger generation who are working professionals, including my wife and my brother's wife.  

Bhapaji had six children -- two sons and four daughters. All are thriving, with twelve grandchildren (my generation) as well as, now, eleven great-grandchildren. Of the six children, three ended up in medicine as well -- my father, my father’s sister (my Bhuaji) in Lucknow, and my Chachaji in Ludhiana. In the next generation again (my generation) there are three doctors too. So the long and proud tradition of medical work in our family continues. (And yes, neither my brother nor I went to medical school; perhaps one of my kids will find their way back to the family "line.") 

Many of us in the room are getting older. Bhapaji taught us how to age gracefully and to enjoy life’s later years. He lived healthily in spite of longstanding issues with heart disease -- he had his first heart attack at age 57 and underwent what was then (this was 1982) a rather risky bypass operation. It worked; he went on to live well, by and large, for another 35 years. Even after becoming a widower a decade ago, he continued eating extremely carefully, doing yoga, and going for regular constitutional walks until just the last year of his life, when his health started to falter. That discipline is incredibly impressive. I think of my own struggles to eat healthy and exercise. Bhapaji didn’t need an app or a device to get him to be healthy. He just had the discipline and did it.

Bhapaji was the last of my four grandparents. He was also the grandparent my brother and I knew best, in part because he spoke the best English of any of the four. That said, I had wished many times that my Punjabi was better so I could have experienced the full force of his legendary wit and humor. Bhapaji expressed the desire that my kids and my brother's kids grow up speaking better Punjabi than we did. We’ve been trying to honor that request.

Near the end of his life, Bhapaji and my father went back to Musakhel in Pakistan -- the village he had left behind now more than 70 years ago. The village is still there; the house is still there, and the old folks in that village, remarkably, still remembered Bhapaji. It was remarkable to my father on that trip to see how quickly Bhapaji could reconnect with old childhood friends he hadn't seen in so long; it says something pretty profound about Bhapaji's personality and how well he was loved. But I think it also tells us something about the way time can heal wounds. The bridge between two communities that was broken in 1947 can be mended; it wouldn't be that hard to do. And we can begin to move forward, together. 



Spring Teaching: Immigrants and Refugees

(I wrote this up for an informal talk at Christ Church Neighborhood House in Philadelphia. I ended up not using much of the actual text of it since the event was a more informal, salon-type conversation. Thanks to Colleen Clemens for inviting me.) 

I’ve been teaching a first-year writing course called “Nation of Immigrants” this spring with a combination of literary texts and films and a strong non-fiction component emphasizing refugees. Earlier in the course we read books like John Okada’s No-No Boy, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, and T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, to open up a space of conversation about different immigrant histories and experiences. What are some of the dilemmas immigrant communities face as they follow the path towards acculturation into the American mainstream? What is lost and what is gained along the path to becoming an American?

We used the Boyle novel, which was published in the wake of the Proposition 187 debates in California, as an opening to talk about the huge and yawning problem of America’s undocumented immigrant population. I had the students read debates about immigration in the press at that time (including op-eds by Governor Pete Wilson and others); it was remarkable to see how much overlap there is between what was being said then and what is being said about undocumented immigrants now. I also showed the students Jose Vargas’ documentary, Documented, to give them an example of an undocumented immigrant who looks and sounds a lot like themselves. And we of course talked about how the Presidential candidates have been discussing the issue of undocumented immigrants in the current election cycle.

In the last few weeks of the course we’ve been focusing on refugees. I built the unit around the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, a remarkable event where 125,000 Cuban migrants entered the U.S. without documentation or prior approval, and were immediately granted parole (parole: temporary legal status and work authorization; the first step towards permanent residency). The vast majority of them would later be granted green cards under the Cuban Adjustment Act – a policy which has enabled hundreds of thousands of Cubans to come to the U.S. and gain legal status without the same kinds of resistance experienced by undocumented immigrants from other national backgrounds. While we talked about this unique event in class, I also gestured to my students about the contrast between the American response to this extraordinary influx of immigrants in 1980 and our current response to the prospect of admitting increased numbers of Syrian refugees fleeing the devastating conflict in their home country.

The Problem With H.R. 158

BBC Journalist Rana Rahimpour, a British and Iranian dual citizen, after being denied entry to the U.S. earlier this week.

Even as the end of strict sanctions represents a step forward for U.S.-Iranian relations this week, new visa restrictions recently passed by Congress are starting to take effect, causing many Americans with dual citizenship with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Sudan to feel like second class citizens. These restrictions were passed in the House last December with broad bipartisan support and little public discussion. Even as Donald Trump’s fantasy of banning all Muslim immigration to the U.S. has been widely discussed--and universally criticized--a real law has been enacted that's causing serious hindrances to a large number of American citizens, including many Muslims.


The law in question is H.R. 158, the “Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015.” The law cancels the current Visa Waiver program that allows citizens of 38 nations to visit the United States without a visa if those citizens either have dual citizenship with any “country designated as one that has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism,” or if an individual has visited one of those countries since March 2011. The intent of the law, which was passed immediately in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks last fall,  is evidently to try and make it more difficult for American citizens who may have trained with organizations like ISIS while visiting these nations to return to the U.S. and wreak havoc here.


Given the timing and the focus on ISIS, the inclusion of Iran in particular on the list of nations to which the new law applies is puzzling, as ISIS is very much a Sunni organization (and therefore totally absent from Iran), and none of the attackers in any recent international incident have been Iranian. Indeed, some have speculated that the Republican-controlled Congress included Iran and Iranian Americans on this list specifically to embarrass President Obama at the very moment when sanctions on Iran were about to be lifted.


Laws passed by Congress in the heat of the moment -- think the Patriot Act -- often end up being bad laws, and this one is no exception. H.R. 158 adds a new area of bureaucracy and an array of travel restrictions that the more than half-million American citizens of Iranian descent are calling discriminatory. It also does precious little to actually help fight the threat of Paris or San Bernardino-style attacks. Tashfeen Malik had been radicalized in Saudi Arabia, not Iran, Iraq, or Syria; her husband, Syed Farouk, had been raised in the U.S. and had only visited Pakistan. (Neither of those countries are on the list of nations affected by the new restrictions).


The law also has some odd side effects. For one thing, the American Visa Waiver program operates on a principle of reciprocity with the 38 countries that are party to it. These include many European union countries as well as Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. That reciprocity is positively- as well as negatively- reinforcing. So if the U.S. no longer accepts a certain class of dual citizens (say British subjects who were born in Iran) via visa waiver, that same class of dual citizens will now need visas and embassy interviews to travel to those countries as well. Thus if anticipated reciprocity takes effect, Iranian-Americans and others may soon need visas to visit many countries that previously would have allowed them to enter simply based on the fact of their possessing an American passport.


It should also be mentioned that Iran considers people who were born there or who are descended from Iranians to remain citizens even if they become citizens of another country. This is true even if they exclusively travel on an American passport and give up their Iranian passports. So Iranian Americans who hold U.S. passports and have not visited Iran since the days of the Shah may very soon find that they need a visa to go to London, Paris, or Seoul.

There is at present quite a bit of confusion regarding when and how H.R. 158 will be applied. BBC journalist Rana Rahimpour, a dual British and Iranian citizen, learned this the hard way this week when she was denied entry to the U.S. Rahimpour had been on her way to visit family and celebrate the birthday of a nephew, as the Guardian has reported.  Rahimpour has worked for the BBC Persian service, but has not visited Iran for many years (ironically, because Iranian officials frequently harass BBC journalists). On January 19, she Tweeted, “Three days after lifting Iran sanctions, US denied ESTA/visa waivers for me and another two British citizens because we have Iranian nationality too.” In addition to live-Tweeting the denial of her visa, Rahimpour posted an image of herself and her daughter in tears at Heathrow airport.
                                           
The State Department’s web site  does not clarify matters, as it only announces that the program will begin to roll out soon. It does not give details as to who exactly is affected and what steps they might need to take to get around potential travel restrictions. The expectation is that the bill will go into effect on April 1, 2016, but Rahimpour’s experience suggests that the implementation of the law has already begun.

More evidence that the law is already in effect comes in the form of emails that dual citizens have begun receiving from the U.S. State Department. The following email was posted to a Facebook group by the spouse of an Iranian / Swedish dual citizen:




Iranian American groups have begun mobilizing to raise awareness about the unfairness of H.R. 158. Links to the recent Guardian story about Rana Rahimpour are generating a lot of social media uptake, and Facebook groups like “See You in Iran” and “Stop HR 158” have been created.


Most critics agreed that Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslim immigration would be both unconstitutional and totally ineffective (indeed, it lends fuel to Jihadist organizations, who use the recent history of the American abuse of Muslims to recruit new volunteers).  H.R. 158, which is apparently already in effect, is likely to equally ineffective, and raises troubling questions about lawmakers’ failure to treat American citizens fairly -- or to think through the potential fallout from laws designed, even perhaps with “good intentions,” to combat terrorism.




"Serial" as an Asian-American Story

I had been hearing a lot about Serial for weeks this fall, though I didn't actually start listening to the podcasts until I heard family members discussing it at Thanksgiving. And then I pretty much devoured it, listening to episodes 1-10 in a single week on my way to and from Lehigh. It was addictive in the best way; for that week at least, my long commute pretty much flew by.

For weeks, various Asian American writers have been criticizing aspects of the podcast. It's not surprising, given that this is a story where the three principal players are people of color (Adnan Syed, Hae Min Lee, and Jay _____ ). Meanwhile the entire reporting and production team behind Serial are white.

It's a thankless task to say that a given cultural artifact isn't racist or exploitative -- you get much more traction on social media if you're angry than if you are pleased with something -- but I'm going to do it anyways. I'm here to say that I think Sarah Koenig and company do a pretty responsible job dealing with issues related to the respective cultural backgrounds of the three main characters in the story. I think of Serial as in effect a new part of the canon of Asian American literature.

I've come across a couple of different examples of writers criticizing Serial along race/ethnicity representation lines,  but both seem like flawed critiques. Jay Caspian Kang's essay in The Awl raises a number of issues early in the series, mainly focusing on the first few episodes. To my eye it seems like he's nitpicking more than making substantial criticisms:

Jay Caspian Kang, Serial and White Reporter Privilege

Conor Friedersdorf has a pretty solid response to Kang here:

Conor Friedersdorf, The Backlash Against Serial -- and Why It's Wrong

And more recently, there's an essay by Aditya Desai at The Aerogram that I have been discussing with friends on Facebook today:

Does Serial Fail South Asian Americans?

I find the main point of Desai's essay harder to suss out than Kang's. Indeed, the author himself doesn't appear to have a clear answer to the question about Serial he raises in the title to his piece. At various points he seems to be accusing Koenig and her team of sensationalizing the murder to create a True Crime potboiler -- and there are certainly elements of the podcast that work that way (though the issue has nothing to do with the race/ethnicity question). At other times he suggests that Koenig is out of her depth dealing with the multiethnic cultural stew of Woodlawn and the Baltimore suburbs, but he doesn't point to any concrete aspects of that cultural space that Koenig gets wrong.

I myself wasn't thrilled about the "Rumors" episode (Serial episode 11) initially, but then I read Rabia Chaudry's funny and quite insightful long blog post about the episode here. Rabia actually liked the episode despite its triviality (can anyone really care that Adnan once pocketed a few dollars from the mosque collection fund?), because it showed us something true about the local Pakistani community:

I come now to what I think was the heart of this episode, which is community. What it means to be a community, and what it means to rely on a community.
Sarah pulled back the curtain ever so slightly on the inner-workings of what most insular religious communities are like. People deeply connected to each other, but not always liking each other, spreading rumors quietly, doing things secretively, coming together in times of crisis, but not always being in solidarity. There should be no surprise when things like this happen in any group of people, on some level all communities operate like the Jersey Shore. Its just a bit of a shame when it’s religious community.
And it was not just a shame but deeply painful for Adnan when, after he was convicted, the community interest and support waned. I’ve gone on the record a few times and called the community out (it’s easier for me to do because I wasn’t raised in that community and my ties aren’t so deep) for abandoning Adnan. I’ve gotten some pushback and my mom has told me people in the community don’t like my stance on it. (Rabia Chaudry)
So while people who might be looking for ammunition to critique Serial for the way its handled Adnan's ethnic background might find it in "Rumors," one of Adnan's closest friends and strongest advocates actually seemed to see the value in airing some of that community dirty laundry.

I would also recommend Rabia Chaudry's commentary on episode 10 of Serial, which is the episode where Sarah Koenig deals at length with the questions of racial bias in the prosecution's case against Adnan Syed. That bias was definitely there -- and it was definitely troubling -- and it's possible that had Adnan been of a different ethnic or religious background it might have been easier for the jury to see him as innocent. It's also likely that a better defense attorney might have handled Syed's ethnic background more intelligently. But Adnan's religion and ethnicity by themselves weren't the core of the case; that core was in Jay's testimony and the cell phone records.

According to Rabia's account, Sarah Koenig did seem initially clueless when faced with that weird document that a consultant had drawn up for the prosecution ("An Overview of Pakistani Muslim Thought and Culture"), which talks about Pakistani blasphemy laws, punishment for fornication, the debasement of women, etc. Rabia says that when Sarah first showed her that document, she was livid at the misrepresentations in the document, but that Sarah seemed not to know what to think ("So this isn't true...?) Ouch. However, by the time this document is discussed in the podcast, Koenig seems to be pretty clear -- perhaps Rabia helped her see it more clearly -- that this is a nutty piece of anti-Islamic propaganda that has nothing at all to do with the mindset of a teenager like Adnan Syed. There is a real and lingering worry that anti-Islamic and anti-Pakistani bias was a factor in Adnan's conviction, but I don't think Rabia Chaudry is critical of Koenig for how this topic was handled on the podcast itself. And the possibility that anti-Islamic bias was a factor in Adnan's conviction lines up with the overall attitude of the show (as encapsulated in the final episode today) -- that we may not ever know for sure either way whether Adnan did it, but that there's certainly enough reasonable doubt now that he should not have been convicted in the first place.

* * *

Above I said that I consider "Serial" to be a new addition to the canon of Asian-American storytelling. Let me unpack that a little. We've had a number of great works dealing with generational gaps and questions about assimilation (my parents don't understand me... but am I Asian enough?). We've had stories dealing with interracial and intercultural relationships and families (I really want to marry my non-Asian girlfriend, but my family wouldn't understand...). From Gene Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, we've seen the struggles of middle class Asian Americans to sort out their identity and find a place for themselves in the middle of American life. On screen, we have the eminently likeable and untroubling figures of people like John Cho and Kal Penn to make us laugh (mostly; I guess #Selfie was kind of a dud after all).

What we've had less of is the idea of Asian Americans in a complex multicultural setting, where people of several different ethnic groups are all close friends and dating across racial and ethnic lines: whites, blacks, East Asians and South Asians. We've not seen so much the kinds of things that can happen when Korean girls -- with parents who speak little English -- date Pakistani boys who lead prayers at the local mosque. And we've definitely not seen writers like Lahiri deal with what happens to immigrant communities when one of their members gets accused of murdering an ex-girlfriend. So the world and the experiences depicted in "Serial" are new -- and valuable -- additions to the kinds of stories we have seen Asian American writers producing. It so happens that in this instance our guide into that world of Asian American voices happens to be a white woman named Sarah Koenig. For me at least, that isn't a problem. 

Follow-Up: "Brown" and "White"

The responses to my post on Nikki Haley a couple of days ago have been interesting The pushback makes me want to clarify some of my arguments a bit more, though I don't have any aspirations of actually "winning" the debate; in any case my own views on South Asians and the peculiar American concept of race are very much in flux these days, and I am still thinking it through.

There are two salient themes that seem to come up in the discussion that perhaps could be underlined:

1) The real long-term goal is to undermine "whiteness" as a kind of racial default or endpoint for both immigrant communities in American society and for the established racial minority (i.e., blacks or African Americans). In response to one of the comments on my original post, I suggested that perhaps where we are headed eventually, at least in the urban parts of the U.S. is towards a kind of post-"white" society, where the barriers will be much more class-based than racial, especially for people from immigrant backgrounds who don't have the familial experience of slavery and segregation in their past. The configuration of race has changed several times in American history (see books like "How the Irish Became White" and so on), and it can and will change again.

2) If we can't displace whiteness as a default, perhaps we can redefine it. For at least the past 50 years or so, being understood as "white" in the U.S. meant that you were of European origins (earlier it would have meant more strictly northern and western European origins). I think it may be the case that with the rise of someone like Haley, who is perceived by many South Carolinians as white despite her South Asian immigrant origins (which are widely known), that this kind of subversion may already have happened.

Below I'm just going to paste snippets and comments I've seen by others on the web that address these two ideas, with my own brief responses.

* *

On Facebook, a friend posted a comment that I thought summed up where I've been on this issue myself for the most part:

I want to believe that one can claim whiteness if one wants. Depending on who's doing the claiming, it could be the ultimate act of subversion against the hegemon, self-loathing assimilation, or somewhere in between. And if any group could get away with it, Indians are the ones with the privilege. After all, Bhagat Singh Thind attempted to gain citizenship by arguing that Indians are Caucasian - even though he lost his case. But looking at Republican Indians in politics, namely Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley, it's hard for me to think they are up to anything other than an attempt to ingratiate themselves to the Republican establishment and their constituents. I say all of this as someone who was only dimly aware of being Indian until I went to college and UPenn's South Asian Student Association tried (unsuccessfully) to co-opt me. Yet, I've never once considered putting anything other than "Asian" in the race box (except for declining to answer when possible or writing in "human" on my census form).

I want to underline my friend's point about privilege. Many Indian Americans especially come from privileged backgrounds economically, and I think people who claim a "People of Color" solidarity amongst East and South Asians, Latinos, and blacks have to recognize this point. I may at times feel a "person of color" solidarity with poor blacks in America, but the solidarity is not shared: to them I inevitably sound a lot more like a white liberal when it comes to social and economic issues, even if I don't look like one.

That said, I don't dispute that Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley had to work hard to "Americanize" (one could also say deracinate) themselves in order to succeed in politics. On Sepia Mutiny over the years we had many (too many) discussions about whether Bobby Jindal would have had a prayer (loaded term!) of a chance in Louisiana if he had either run as "Piyush" rather than Bobby, or hadn't been a Catholic convert. (The answer is clearly "no, he would not have had a chance") The same probably holds for Haley if she were to have run as "Randhawa," or with a turbaned Sikh husband rather than her actual husband, Michael Haley.

* *

At the Volokh Conspiracy there have been a pair of posts on this subject, and many interesting comments (these predate my own post). One salient comment by a commenter ran as follows:

[A]llow a white Southerner to point out something about casual use of the word “white”: sometimes it just means “not black”. Meaning, believe it or not, that in common usage, a school (or gathering, or club, or church, or whatever) in the South that includes no black people is “all-white”. This is true even when there are, for instance, people of Korean or Indian ancestry in said group. Whether this is anthropologically correct, or PC, or even nice is beside the point. It’s just one of the common, casual usages. (link)

I have seen this in other cases, and not just in the South. I even have to admit that I've done something like this myself on occasion. For example, at one point I was teaching a class on a topic in postcolonial literature, with something like 12 white students, two (East) Asian American students, and one African American student. To a colleague I remember noting, "with the exception of **** [the African American student], all the students in my poco class this spring are white!" Somehow in the course of that conversation I unconsciously turned the two Asian American women in that class, with Christian first names, into white students.

If you read the many comments on that post at Volokh, you'll see that many other people also seem to unconsciously do this at times, even though they might later note the seeming "mistake." The question I want people who have disagreed with my previous post to address is: what might it tell us about the definition of "race" in American society that so many people are doing this?

To my eye, it suggests that second/third generation Asian Americans in particular are losing their "otherness" in certain contexts and social milieux. When it comes to college affirmative action policies, Asians have long since not counted as "minorities," and the spaces where that is true will only continue to expand.

(Also see this post from Volokh in 2008: "How the Asians became White." There the focus is on a study of doctors in California; Asians and whites are counted on one side, while blacks and Latinos are counted on the other.)

* *
Samhita at Feministing wrote quite an extensive post on this issue, responding to me and taking up some points made by Taz at Sepia Mutiny. Here is one of Samita's key points:

But, at the end of the day, it is not about what we say we are–race is a structural experience, as much as it is an interpersonal one, if not more so. Having access to white culture and more money doesn’t make you white, as many sociologists have found. Haley can self-identify as white, but she has had the lived experience of a person who is not white and as a result, will never be recognized as white or have access to “whiteness,” in the political sense of the word, even if some people once in a while mistake her for white on the street.

But I actually do think Haley has had the experience of being effectively "white," in part because of the peculiar racial configuration that holds sway in the American south (see the comment from Volokh I posted above), but also increasingly in other parts of the U.S. And I mean that she has been recognized as such by the dominant/white mainstream, not simply that she decided to call herself white on a lark, despite what everyone else around her thinks.

The fact that this is so is not necessarily a cause to celebrate; if anything, the comment I quoted above from Volokh suggests that while the definition of "white" may be broadening, it is still based on an opposition to (and sometimes exclusion of) "black." And that is real problem we have to address, one way or the other.

Nikki Haley, Race, and the U.S. Census

This is the kind of post I once would have written on Sepia Mutiny, with the full knowledge that it would have produced a firestorm of controversy. One of my former colleagues over there did cover the story, but as you can see the reaction is pretty much predictable: let's just call her an Uncle Tom because she's pretending to be white (to be fair, the comments do challenge the premise of the post in some interesting ways).

Here I wanted to push past the basic framework that people have for thinking about this issue and suggest that 1) Census and drivers' license racial categories help provoke this problem, since "East Indian" or "South Asian" is not a widely recognized racial category, leaving many people confused; and 2) it would not in any case necessarily be a "racial" sell-out for Haley to identify as white given her economic background, acculturation and appearance. She may just be recording what many other people are already thinking.

* * *

1. Generalized confusion over racial and ethnic categories

As many readers will have seen, it recently came out that Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina had her race listed as "white" on her 2000 voter registration card. The most detailed version of the story I've seen is from USA Today, which reveals that in large part this story has been generated by the Democratic party of South Carolina to try and embarrass the Governor:

South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian said the 2001 document the party unearthed shows the 39-year-old Haley plays on her race for political convenience.
"She can't even tell the truth about her racial heritage," Harpootlian said.

Haley spokesman Trey Walker said the governor's office did not plan to respond to the Democrats. State Republican Party Executive Director Matt Moore called Harpootlian's criticism "just more theatrics and that's all there is to it."

Haley's 2001 voter registration application was derived from information already on her driver's license.

It was not clear when that information may have been provided, or what options were even available on the form for racial identifiers when it was given.

South Carolina's current driver's license application asks people to identify their race as white, black, Hispanic, Asian or Indian, according to instructions for the form. It doesn't specify whether the description "Indian" refers to someone who is American Indian or of Asian Indian heritage, but it traditionally refers to Native American on government forms. (link)

Of course, "Indian" in South Carolina means Native American, so the only option for Haley other than White or Black is Asian. I myself would put down "Asian" in Haley's shoes, but I think that Indian Americans could be forgiven for not feeling comfortable with that category, since many people continue to understand "Asian" to refer only to East and Southeast Asians.

I posted earlier on the ongoing and broad-ranging confusion in the way government agencies classify different communities by race and ethnicity. The U.S. census racial categories have long been a source of confusion for many immigrant groups in particular. While the approach to race and ethnicity involving Hispanic/Latino people is now impressively nuanced and complex, the approach to immigrants from other parts of the world remains confusing and haphazard. "Asian Indian" is now a category you can check, but the "Other Asian" category seems to invite Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans to check that box despite the obvious connections between the different nations of the Indian subcontinent.

The question of course is what the U.S. government plans to do with "racial" information other than simply record it (as I understand it in countries like France the government does not keep official tallies of its racial and ethnic minorities for fear of encouraging discrimination). While there is an affirmative action argument -- it's important to know whether all members of society are getting proportionate access to government services -- it's not clear to me that Indians and Pakistanis would want or expect to be treated differently by a government agency based on their ethnic/racial background. I maintain that it would be far more sensible to have a broader category called "South Asian" that would include everyone deriving from the Indian subcontinent; other sensible categories would be "East Asian" and "Southeast Asian."

A second issue pertains more specifically to Sikhs and the "Sikh American" community. Many Sikhs I know in the U.S. do not identify strongly as "Indian American." Some who dis-identify as Indian come from families with strong separatist bents, going back to the "Khalistani" days of the 1980s. Others may have more muted ideological investments (i.e., they do not actively support the creation of a separate Sikh state of "Khalistan"), but still may have been raised in environments where Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims did not mingle much (this diasporic separatism is itself a legacy of the tensions in India from the 1980s). I do not know much about the Randhawa family in South Carolina, but certainly many of the Sikh families I knew when I lived in North Carolina seemed to fit this bill quite well; they had little connection to Punjabi Hindus and virtually no social connection to non-Punjabi speaking Indians. These are Sikhs that identify more strongly as "Sikh American" than as "Indian American"; I doubt that this applies to Haley herself because she has converted to Christianity, but it could, for some Sikhs, potentially add to the confusion at least regarding whether to check the box for "Indian" or "Asian Indian." Indian is a nationality; "South Asian" may be defined as a "race," depending on how we define race. In any case, "South Asian" was not one of the choices available to Governor Haley.

Given all this confusion, I think it may be wise not to jump to conclusions regarding the racial identification on Nikki Haley's voter registration card.

(I should also point out that Nikki Haley is far from the only one to have this confusion. Amongst second generation South Asian Americans, a full 25% of them checked "white" on the 1990 census, while 5% checked "black".)

2. Identifying as "White"

When Italians, Greeks, and Eastern European Jews started immigrating to the U.S. en masse in the early 20th century, they were not seen by other Americans originating from Northern and Western European countries as "white," at least not white in the same way they saw themselves as white. The "ethnic difference" of these immigrants was visible and it presented a clear social barrier.

Over time, of course, those groups were assimilated, and today Italian Americans, Irish Americans, and Ashkenazi Jews who have a strong sense of identification with their families' countries of origin are seen as "white ethnics." Ethnicity is now seen as a barrier that can be easily crossed and lose its significance over time, while "race" is reserved to describe visibly different minority groups.

The question I often have for South Asian Americans, especially those who come from affluent backgrounds and whose acculturation is largely to Euro-American ("white") norms, is whether they really think they are so going to be very different from white ethnic communities down the road.

Isn't it fair that some South Asian Americans with little connection to South Asian culture or language would see themselves (and be seen as) "white" by others in their communities? Isn't it possible to be of South Asian origin and "white" at the same time?

To be clear, I myself don't describe myself as white. I just don't see why other South Asians shouldn't be allowed to do so if they have a strong identification with Euro-American cultural norms and others in the community accept it. To make this identification doesn't even require that you ignore or hide your family background; but it seems inevitable that for a significant number of South Asian Americans going forward their ethnic identity will play for them rather the same role it does for Italian Americans -- it's in your name, and maybe visible in your complexion (though with the growth of intermarriage this too may fade), but it doesn't necessarily pose any kind of other meaningful social barrier.

I understand that in the African American community this kind of thinking is deeply frowned upon, since it has a history going back to the Jim Crow era -- the old legacy of "passing" to avoid racial discrimination, which in many cases prevented true solidarity from taking hold. Even identifying as "multiracial" as Tiger Woods did many years ago is controversial along those lines: you are either with us in struggle ("black" as a term suggesting a racial identity that is always political), or you are not.

But in fact South Asian American immigrants do not share that history; many of us have never experienced that kind of discrimination, and it's unclear to me what political or ideological power comes with identifying as "Asian," as Nikki Haley presumably should have done to avoid the censure of the Democratic party in her home state.

I personally do feel a sense of political solidarity with other "brown" and "Desi" people owing to who I am and my personal cultural values and orientation. But I also know plenty of South Asian Americans for whom this is not really the case, and I'm not at all invested in policing whether they or their children see themselves as ethnically "white" or "South Asian," since it seems that anyway most people are not clear what these categories really mean.

UPDATE:

See this interesting discussion at Brownpundits.

Vinay Lal, "The Other Indians"

We finally have a pedagogically useful introductory book on the history of the South Asian American community, Vinay Lal’s The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America (see an earlier post on Vinay Lal by Abhi here). Lal’s book covers some of the same topics as Prashad's The Karma of Brown Folk but is much more heavily factual and closely researched -– it’s a work of history rather than a political polemic –- and it’s rich with useful and well-sourced statistics. If I were to ask students to read something about the history of South Asians in the U.S., say, in conjunction with a segment of a course relating to Indian immigrant fiction, I would probably assign this book.

In lieu of a comprehensive review, below are a few highlights and interesting tidbits from The Other Indians that I picked up on: Elihu Yale, early Immigration/Legal issues, Religion, and the old terminology question.

Elihu Yale

Lal's chapter on the early American relationship with India was interesting to me, specifically the account of Elihu Yale (i.e., the Yale who gave Yale University its name):

Well before Indians first began to arrive in some numbers in the United States a little before 1900, trade had brough the products of ‘East India’ –tea, spices, silk, muslin, opium—to New England homes. Salem owed its greatness to the commerce with the East . . . It is the ‘magnificent Oriental plunder’ accumulated by Elihu Yale in India, who served as a lowly clerk in the East India Company’s offices before he rose to assume charge of the Madras Presidency, that lifted a New England college founded in 1676 from the doldrums and prompted its founders to rename the college in honor of the wealthy donor. As a young boy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, later to be known as the ‘Sage of Concord’ and the leader of a group of writers and thinkers who would be characterized as the ‘Transcendentalists,’ often visited Boston’s ‘India Wharf’ which had by his time becomethe leading center of trade with China and India. Emerson confided to his journal in 1836 that everything in ‘this era’ had been made ‘subservient’ to ‘Trade,’ and ‘On us the most picturesque contrasts are crowded. We have the beautiful costume of the Hindoo and the Turk in our streets.’ (Lal, 8)


I have sometimes wondered whether folks at Yale today ever stop to think about the colonial legacy of Elihu Yale. (Is there anyone reading this who went to Yale, who's looked into it?)

The Dark Years: Bhagat Singh Thind, 1920-1940

I also found Lal’s account of the legal history of Indian-American citizens following the Asian Exclusion Act informative. After allowing a first wave of immigrants from India around the turn of the century, U.S. immigration authorities started to tighten restrictions on Indian immigrants by 1910, rejecting more and more applicants, in part because of fears about the Ghadr movement, and in part because of rising general xenophobia about immigrants from Asia. Still, prior to 1923, many Indians could get around racial restrictions by claiming to be ’Caucasian.’ In 1923, this was reversed, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Bhagat Singh Thind needed to be ‘de-naturalized’:

In early 1923, the Supreme Court heard on appeal from the Immigration Bureau the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, whose application for naturalization had been granted in the face of the Bureau’s opposition. Thind, a Caucasian of ‘high-caste Hindu’ stock ‘of full Indian blood,’ enterd the U.S. through Seattle in 1912, enrolled as a student at Berkeley in 1913, and was one of a handful of Indians who fought in World War I under the U.S. army. . . . Thind’s lawyers rested their case on the two-fold argument that, on the anthropological evidence, north Indians were Aryans and thus Caucasians, and, secondly, by judicial precedent Caucasians were to be construed as whites. Justice Sutherland took the contrary view: in the ‘understanding of the common man,’ . . . ‘white’ clearly denoted a person of European origins. ‘It may be true,’ wrote Sutherland, ‘that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable profound differences between them today.’ The ‘Aryan theory’ had been ‘rejected by most, if not all, modern writers on the subject of ethnology,’ and the word ‘Caucasian,’ Sutherland argued, ‘is in scarcely better repute.’ (Lal, 37-38)


Funny that Judge Sutherland, in 1923, was casting doubt on the Aryan invasion theory even then. (Isn’t it strange that some people still want to believe it’s true, even today?)

Another surprise in Lal’s account is of the years subsequent to the Thind case: despite the fact that the U.S. had decided it could de-naturalize Indian immigrants who had achieved citizenship, in practice, it happened to very few people. A lawyer named Sakharam Ganesh Pandit, who was a naturalized U.S. citizen, successfully went to the Supreme Court in 1927, to defend his naturalization as valid, and after that de-naturalization was quite rare. The real impact of the Asian Exclusion Act and the Thind case was that Indians no longer immigrated to the U.S., and many who had already settled here decided to leave. According to the U.S. census, there were 8000 Indians in California in 1917, but only 1,476 by 1940 (Lal, 40). Throughout the entire country, there were only 2,045 self-identified Indians present in the U.S. in 1940. (Just forty years later, in 1980, the Census recorded 387,223 Indians in the U.S., and that number has of course jumped again in both 1990 and 2000.)

Religion: Hindu Temple Architecture

I also learned from Lal’s treatment of religion as it is practiced by Indian Americans. He does not ignore some of the radical religious groups, like the VHP-A. But he doesn’t obsess over them either, and he makes space for a detailed account of the complexities of Hinduism as it is actually practiced in the U.S. by ordinary people. He has, for instance, interesting details on houses of worship, referring to some of the new temples that have been built with strict adherence to architecture stipulated the Shilpa Sastras, as well as the more syncretic temples that are structured very differently than they would be in India. I thought the following was interesting, along these lines:

A large metropolitan center such as Los Angeles is home to a Murugan temple, at least two Radha Krishna temples, a Kali Mandir, a Devi Mandir, a Sanatan Dharma Mandir, a Lakshmi Narayan Mandir, a Sri Venkateswara temple, and close to a dozen other temples. The nondescript Valley Hindu Temple of Northridge, where a sizable Indian community has developed over the last two decades, is representative of the other, nonsectarian tradition of Hindu temples in the United States, insofar as the temple houses a diverse array of deities—Shiva, Ram, Krishna, Durga, Lakshmi, to name a few—and welcomes Hindus in the diaspora of all persuasions. It has sometimes been suggested that Hindus in the diaspora may be less attentive to distinctions which hold sway in India, such as those between north and south, Vaishnavites and Saivites, and so on. Whether this is partly on account of their own minority status in the U.S. is an interesting and yet unresolved question. Whether this phenomenon is as distinct as is sometimes argued is also questionable. While images of both Vishnu and Shiva are not usually housed under one roof in Hindu temples in India, and the mythological works known as the Puranas—where the history, genealogy, and worship of these gods is articulated—are exceedingly sectarian, the Puranas are less exclusive than is commonly argued. Thus, a Vaishnava Purana usually elevates Vishnu as the supreme God but still has ample room for Shiva; a Saivite Purana inverses the order. A Devi Purana, dedicated to the Goddess, will similarly render secondary the male Gods. (Lal, 73-74)


I wonder if any readers who have been to different temples around the U.S. (and perhaps also in India) might have any comments on temple construction in the U.S. vs. India. (It might seem like an obscure topic, but actually I think architecture of houses of worship says a lot about the way people practice their faiths.)

The Old Terminology Problem: Desi, South Asian, etc.

Though I think very highly of Lal’s book, his discussion of terminology did raise some questions for me at certain points. Lal eschews the word “desi,” and settles on “Indian-American,” and explains carefully why he’s doing so. I can’t reproduce all of Lal’s arguments along these lines, but the following paragraph stood out to me as an interesting (though not necessarily compelling) critique of “desi”:

Though there is no gainsaying the fact that many proponents of the term ‘desi’ similarly seek to invoke its widest and most pluralistic meanings, calling forth the shared lives of many South Asians, the term operates on many different and disjunctive registers. As I have often been reminded by an old friend from Jaisalmer, in Western Rajasthan, words such as ‘country’ mean quite different things to people from metropolitan centers and those who earn their livelihoods in India’s tens of thousands of villages and smaller towns. When my friend chances to remark ‘Hamare desh me aisa hota hai’ (‘This is how it happens in our country’), by desh he clearly means his part of the country. The observation invokes not so much the nation in the abstract, much less Bharat, but rather a frame of mind and a set of habits. The word ‘desi’ also calls to mind home-grown products: thus, for example, no that liberalization has opened the Indian market to a whole array of foreign goods, including Western/hybrid varieties of fruits and vegetables, one hears often of the contrast between foreign vegetables and those branded ‘desi’—the latter being small and (in common belief) much more palatable to the taste than foreign varieties. There is, it appears to me, something unsettling and certainly odd about the fact that the most enthusiastic proponents of the word ‘desi’ are precisely those diasporic Indians who, in many ways, have least claim to the word and its multiple inheritances, considering their location in metropolitan centers of thought and their immense distance from local and vernacular knowledge systems. For these reasons among many, I have, except in a few particular instances, eschewed the word ‘desi’ when speaking of Indian Americans. (Lal, xi)


I understand Lal’s reasoning, though I don’t think it’s necessarily always a mark against "desi" that many people who use the term are diasporic, and perhaps less connected to South Asian culture. I don't think the variations in the way "desi" (and videsi and pardesi) is used within northern India necessarily make the diasporic deployment of it less true within its context. Language can change.

Later, Lal also addresses the term "South Asian American," and introduces some concerns about it that will be familiar to readers of the endless debates over terminology that have taken place on Sepia Mutiny over the years (to wit: the problem of tokenizing or ignoring ‘smaller’ countries in South Asia; the fact that few people outside of secular/progressive communities would actually identify themselves primarily as “South Asian”; the confusion of South Asia with Southeast Asia; the difficulties of limiting South Asia geographically, with Afghanistan on the west and Burma on the east, etc.).

[Incidentally, I also address the terminology question in this published essay.]

Again, while the problems with the term "South Asian" (or "South Asian American") are real, they are not insurmountable, and Lal’s reasons for electing not to use the term were not entirely convincing to me. In the end, he seems to settle on "Indian American" because, "it appears to me to best do justice to those people who are the subject of this book." In effect, it seems to me that Lal may have decided for practical reasons to focus primarily on immigrants from India in particular as the subject of his book, and some of his arguments about the problems with the term “South Asian” (or “South Asian American”) might be beside the point.

That said, The Other Indians is a great read and a very helpful book overall.

Review: Nikita Lalwani, "Gifted"

The debut novel by Nikita Lalwani, Gifted , makes for quite enjoyable reading. It's about an Indian girl's coming of age in Cardiff, Wales, as a math prodigy pushed and prodded by an overly controlling father.

The father's obsession with having his daughter achieve a very rigid kind of academic greatness should ring a bell with second gen/ABD readers, especially given the apparent desi fascination with things like Spelling Bees and World Records. For most middle class desi kids growing up in the west, childhood is often (whether you like it or not) all about "studies" -- and Lalwani's book shows a case of that parental obsession taken to an extreme.

That said, Lalwani's Rumi (short for Rumika) is in fact genuinely interested in math and numbers from an early age, and Lalwani does a good job of taking us into her head without drowning the reader in math problems. Though I'm not particularly mathematically inclined myself, I do remember there being a certain luminosity to math problems as a child/teenager -- something beautiful in algebraic abstractions, or the spiraling concept of infinity in calculus. (Unfortunately for me, I tended to be more enthusiastic about the aesthetics of the math than in actually solving the problems at hand...)

Here's a short passage from early on in Gifted, where Rumi (age 8 at the time) is chatting with her relations while on a trip to India. They are discussing real-life math prodigy, Shakuntala Devi, who was able to multiply two thirteen digit numbers in her head:

Rumi and Jaggi Bhaiya talk about world records, in particular about Shakuntala Devi, the maths genius who multiplied tow thirteen digit numbers in twenty-eight seconds the year before. Rumi has seen Shakuntala Devi on TV, her kindly smile gracing the airwaves like the most favorite auntie you can imagine, big red bindi shining out from the center of her forehead with the super-force of blood. Rumi has a funny feeling when she sees Shakuntala Devi on the screen. It is as though she is related to her. Or something. Even her mum and dad are charged and excited when they see her on the box, thrilled by the contradictions of cotton sari, center parting, blond hair-sprayed host and acrobatic maths.

'But why did they treat her like that? In itself, it is proof of the superiority complex that the West has over us,' Jaggi Bhaiya is saying.

'What is superiority complex?' Rumi asks.

'When a culture thinks they are better than us, that we are dirty, cheating scoundrels. That is why they insulted Shakuntala Devi in this way. You cannot deny it!'

He is referring to the text added next to the entry in The Guinness Book of Records. Rumi knows the words, having Jaggi recite them and having read them in her own edition: 'Some experts on calculating prodigies refuse to give credence to the above--largely on the grounds that it is so vastly superior to the calculating feats of any other invigilated prodigy.'


Gifted is somewhat different from other Brit-Asian fiction by writers like Hanif Kureishi, in that the social context isn't especially politicized. In Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia and My Beautiful Landerette, the central subject is the tension about race and identity -- with the rise of the National Front on the one hand, and the emergence of the racially self-conscious British Black Arts Movement and the Southall Black Sisters on the other.

Though Gifted is also set in the 1980s, politics and race isn't really an issue. Lalwani's characters are in a more isolated, "mainstream" context, and the story is really about the internal dynamics of a single, deeply dysfunctional nuclear family. If anything politics enters in obliquely in passages like the one above, where the question is really whether and how respect is given by the world to "gifted" Indians. Like Jaggi Bhaiya, Rumi's father smolders with a simultaneous pride and insecurity about his image as a middle-class Indian in British society, and his neuroses are partly what drive him to treat his daughter as he does.

I tend to suspect that this book will be slightly more popular with women than with men, though it is (thankfully) a far cry from those deeply irritating Chitra Divakaruni type books, where the goal is for the desi woman to "find herself," usually after extricating herself from a bad marriage with a bad desi man. Dating and boys do play a role in Gifted, but again, the story is really about Rumi's fraught relationship with her father and mother, and all those familiar clichés of 1st/2nd gen Indian fiction (i.e., involving arranged marriage) are fortunately absent.

Nikita Lalwani's Gifted is available at Amazon.com.

Torn About Bobby Jindal

I should start by saying this: I know, if I lived in Louisiana, that I wouldn't vote for Bobby Jindal. I just disagree with him too strongly on the social issues -- intelligent design and abortion rights, for starters -- to let my sense of ethnic loyalty get the better of me.

But I can't help but be somewhat torn when I see photos like this:

bobby-jindal-shaking-hands.jpg



The rest of the very interesting New York Times profile explains what this represents: Jindal is slowly winning over the rural white voters in northern Louisiana, staunch Republicans (can anyone say David Duke?) who couldn't bring themselves to vote for him when he ran for governor four years ago. He's also learning how to avoid giving the impression that he is an overachieving policy wonk (which he undoubtedly is), so as to better connect with ordinary Louisianans.

For me, Jindal's growing success at this (again, encapsulated in the photo above) taps into an anxiety I myself have had as a child of immigrants -- who became the first (and only) person in my extended family to earn a Ph.D. Even if your tastes and cultural values are profoundly "Americanized," as mine are, there remains a sense that you don't quite "fit," which tends to be exacerbated (for me, especially) every time some a-hole on South Street (in Philly) mutters something about "there goes Bin Laden" when I walk down the street. Part of the anxiety comes from the ignorance and xenophobia of some Americans, but a good part of it comes from myself, an internalized sense of remaining not-quite-pukka despite everything.

If Jindal wins, his victory will suggest to me he's somehow overcome both sides of the immigrant's anxiety syndrome: the part that comes from others' mistrust, and also the part that comes from himself -- his own sense of being something different, something other than a "normal" American, or in this case, a representative Louisianan. If he wins, I won't cheer, but I will, I expect, quietly feel a certain sense of pride at his accomplishment despite my strong disagreement with his kind of politics. Not just because he's a fellow desi -- it's actually more complex than that. Rather, the pride will be because he's a fellow desi who's evidently achieved, after a struggle, something I've long aspired to do: shake that dude's hand.

New vs. Old U.S. Citizenship Tests

It's fair to say that we ought to be able to pass the tests we ask other people to take. The U.S. citizenship test has traditionally had enough oddball questions in its question pool that I suspect many citizens wouldn't actually pass. Now it's been revised, and the Times surveys a range of ideological responses to the changes -- some immigrants groups are outraged, etc. However, if you look at the actual exams (the new exam question pool is here; a comparison of the new and old exams is here), it seems clear that the new exam is a huge improvement from the point of view of mechanics: the clarity and phrasing of the questions is now much, much better.

For example, one old question was "Where does freedom of speech come from?" What is that asking, exactly? Another bad one: "Why are there 100 senators in the U.S. Senate?" It's obvious what is meant (50 states X 2 senators per state), but the phrasing is bad. It's now so much why as how you get 100 senators.

Another poorly phrased question from the old exam is "What are some of the basic beliefs of the Declaration of Independence?" Again, it's a bit strange to refer to the "beliefs" of a written document. Better phrasing might be, "What are some of the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence?"

Among the new questions, there are very few that have these kinds of problems. Admittedly, some of them are a bit more difficult from a straight historical perspective ("What territory did the United States purchase from France in 1803?"), but it's not hard to go learn (and yes, memorize) the answers.

Does Diversity Cause Us To Mistrust One Another?

Via Ruchira Paul and 3QD, an article in the Boston Globe about the work of Robert Putnam, a Harvard University political scientist. The Globe summarizes the gist of the article as follows:

It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

"The extent of the effect is shocking," says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation's social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam's research predicts. (link)


What makes this all more interesting is the fact that Robert Putnam is not himself a conservative, but a progressive-minded scholar who supports diversity. He didn't expect these findings when he started this project, and has worked hard to make sure they are understood correctly -- though anti-immigrant conservatives have definitely been eating this up.

I want to speculate a little on how South Asian immigrants might fit into the 'diversity problem' Putnam's study raises, but before that it seems important to get into a little more detail about just what Putnam is saying. Please forgive the long quote:

The results of his new study come from a survey Putnam directed among residents in 41 US communities, including Boston. Residents were sorted into the four principal categories used by the US Census: black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. They were asked how much they trusted their neighbors and those of each racial category, and questioned about a long list of civic attitudes and practices, including their views on local government, their involvement in community projects, and their friendships. What emerged in more diverse communities was a bleak picture of civic desolation, affecting everything from political engagement to the state of social ties.

Putnam knew he had provocative findings on his hands. He worried about coming under some of the same liberal attacks that greeted Daniel Patrick Moynihan's landmark 1965 report on the social costs associated with the breakdown of the black family. There is always the risk of being pilloried as the bearer of "an inconvenient truth," says Putnam.

After releasing the initial results in 2001, Putnam says he spent time "kicking the tires really hard" to be sure the study had it right. Putnam realized, for instance, that more diverse communities tended to be larger, have greater income ranges, higher crime rates, and more mobility among their residents -- all factors that could depress social capital independent of any impact ethnic diversity might have.

"People would say, 'I bet you forgot about X,'" Putnam says of the string of suggestions from colleagues. "There were 20 or 30 X's."

But even after statistically taking them all into account, the connection remained strong: Higher diversity meant lower social capital. In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to "distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television." (link)


Wow -- that's a long list of problems associated with living in diverse communities! Personally, I've never felt the difference Putnam's study finds, but for the most part I've mainly lived in relatively diverse places. I've lived in glum diverse places (Malden, MA; Bethlehem, PA) -- where no one would give me the time of day or even stop and say 'hi' -- and somewhat happier diverse places (Potomac, MD; Parsippany, NJ; New Haven, CT; Durham, NC; and my current town of Conshohocken, PA). Most places I've lived, though, I've felt that most people do "hunker down" and spend their evenings in front of the TV. I've never lived in the vibrant downtown of a big city (sigh), nor have I ever lived in a place that was really ethnically homogeneous -- so perhaps I've only seen one side of this.

People interested in seeing more detail -- and hearing it directly from Putnam, might want to check out the article in question here. For the most part it should be readable for non-academics (it helps if you know what he means by "social capital"), though Putnam does get into some statistical analysis that goes over my head.

The other big questions are 1) why could this be happening, 2) what can be done about it, and 3) is it a permanent problem, or merely a temporary phenomenon associated with recent immigration, which will dissipate over time?

One can easily speculate that the answer to (1) has to do with the natural mistrust produced when people have different ethnic and racial backgrounds, different cultural values, speak different languages, and so on. The answers to (2) and (3) are harder.

Again, thinking speculatively here, I'm not sure that anything can be actively done about (2), but I do feel quite confident on (3) that the mistrust and the lower "social capital" Putnam sees in more diverse communities is likely to dissipate over time -- as immigrants acculturate and/or assimilate. Here, one's experience as a second-gen desi comes into play. And the high levels of interracial dating and marrying out of one's ethnic group seen among second and third generation Asian immigrants suggests that blending is already well under way.

Putnam himself agrees with that prognosis, and in his article, quotes Barack Obama to that effect. Obama has called for:

. . . an America where race is understood in the same way that the ethnic diversity of the white population is understood. People take pride in being Irish-American and Italian-American. They have a particular culture that infuses the (whole) culture and makes it richer and more interesting. But it's not something that determines people's life chances and there is no sense of superiority or inferiority. . . . [I]f we can expand that attitude to embrace African-Americans and Latino-Americans and Asian-Americans, then . . . all our kids can feel comfortable with the worlds they are coming out of, knowing they are part of something larger. (link)


Obama is in effect calling for "race" to start acting more like immigrant "ethnicity" -- for it to be malleable, and open to the possibility of its own diminishing value as an element of division. Are South Asians a "race" or an "ethnicity"? Though I'm proud of my Indian heritage and proud of being both an Indian American and a practicing Sikh, I tend to agree with Obama on the value of thinking of oneself as part of "something larger," and of not allowing one's ethnic background to determine one's "life chances."

Maltreated H-1B Workers Begin to Find a Voice

There was a thought-provoking article in the SF Chronicle Sunday on the current quandaries faced by high-skilled foreign workers on H-1B Visas in the U.S. A very large proportion of these are Indian (49%), and in high-tech and computer fields (45%).

Currently, the system has problems on every side: first, representatives of software companies (chief among them Microsoft's Bill Gates) have loudly asserted that they need for the number of available H-1B visas to be increased, as there are currently significant numbers of unfilled positions in many computer related fields (and this is even despite the explosion of outsourcing in the past five years). Secondly, there is confusion about whether H-1B should be understood as a temporary visa, or the first stage on the path to a green card; most Indians I know presume it's the latter, while the government still seems to think it's the former. And finally, the system clearly hasn't been working very well for the immigrants themselves: it currently takes between 6 and 12 years for an Indian on an H-1B to be given a green card, even with employers willing to sponsor them. Confusingly, it takes much less time for H-1B workers from other national backgrounds to be given a green card once they find sponsorship.

One of the surprises to me in the SF Chronicle article is the fact that the USCIS doesn't even really know how many H-1B workers with Green Card sponsors there are:

Stuck in the middle is a federal government that has problems tracking the visas. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that oversees this guest-worker program, can't answer basic questions including:



-- How many foreign-born professionals are working in the United States on H-1B visas now?



-- What percentage of H-1B visa holders seek green cards instead of returning home?



-- How many H-1B visa holders and family members are awaiting green cards?



"The cumulative numbers you are looking for simply aren't available," said Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Chris Bentley. "These are not issues we track."


This admission of ignorance is really depressing: it suggests how low on the government's priority list the H1-B workers really are. "It's not something we track" is a way of saying, "no one really seems to care about this."

Fortunately, a new organization has cropped up to advocate for H-1B workers: Immigration Voice. They've hired a PR firm to help them make their case in public, and they're trying to influence the push to reform the H-1B system that is currently starting to work its way through Congress.

On a personal note, I should say that my wife started working in the U.S. (in the Bay Area) on an H-1B visa, and I've seen the ins and outs of this deeply flawed system at work. I feel strongly that the H1-B system is essential to the U.S. economy, and that H-1B workers, who come to the U.S. with advanced university degrees and unique skills, ought to be fast-tracked to permanent resident (Green Card) status. As it is, 1.1 million people (according to Immigration Voice's number) are currently waiting in limbo, unsure whether to plan on staying in the U.S. permanently -- and everything that might come with that -- or whether they should continue to presume they'll be heading back to the countries they started from.

Finally, I also think second-gen desis in the U.S. -- particularly all the desi lawyers out there -- ought to be advocating for better treatment for the Indians who are here on H-1B visas. As of now I haven't seen much of this.