Is Everyone Racist Against Indians?

A Public Spat Reveals an Unspoken Consensus

Dhalsim’s Stage from Street Fighter II

The world’s most populous nation, India, and its peoples have been a central subject of discussion in recent weeks. I don’t care to generalize about them (as if such a thing is even possible when speaking about a nation of more than four-hundred languages and over a billion people). There’s plenty of people on this site doing pro-bono race science if that’s the sort of thing that draws your interest. Read/block them at your own discretion. To me, the interesting thing about this particular discursive flashpoint is how it reveals a bipartisan consensus. That is to say; even in our hyperpolarized political environment, it seems broadly acceptable to hold a degree of outright disdain for the entire South Asian Indosphere demographic, to the point that it becomes basically indistinguishable from racism as we understand it.

The as-of-now dormant online fracas between the tech right¹ and the populist right² appears set to conclude like a bad UFC undercard fight. After weeks of threats and self-promotional cyberbullying followed by fifteen minutes of feints and dry-humping, everyone smiles, hugs for the cameras, and returns to their corner arms raised, confident that they did enough to “win.” Nothing is resolved. Everyone just moves onto the next thing.

Much like a bad UFC undercard fight, the demands of the content economy may mean we see another edition of this particular conflict in the near future. Everyone³ seemed to have a good time on the first go-round so why not greenlight a sequel? Certainly it’s a multifaceted enough issue to support an extended universe. We could double back for a deeper-dive on nerd/jock resentment dynamics. A few more redpilled moms could file customer service complaints about their big special college educated STEM boys not getting tech jobs. Hell, we could just kick the tires, light the fires, and have a good laugh as billionaires rage at the demiurge living in their smartphones. This is the discourse we voted for. May as well have a few laughs. Besides, it’s not like the pressure point, the dreaded H-1B visa, is going away. Neither are the people who will apply for such visas, bright, motivated young people from places like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and of course, India.

Amidst the sound and fury I found a particular pocket of silence rather notable. The various outlets of the liberal media who’ve made their bones on a full-throated embrace of modern identity politics have been suspiciously silent on the whole thing. There isn’t a thinkpiece of note being passed around (at least not that I’ve seen). No narrative praising the rich cultural tapestry of the H-1B visa tech workers and their vital role in shaping the fabric of modern American life. There are, of course, good reasons why this may not be the case. Writing takes time. Perhaps The Atlantic or Salon has something in the incubator. Maybe they’re just content to let the scrap play out and leave the refutations and analyses for later. There is of course the possibility that this is a symptom of American liberalism’s broader holding pattern after a disastrous election cycle. One imagines editorial debates. Maybe wokeness really is going out of fashion. They don’t want everyone to stop screaming at Elon and Vivek Ramaswamy and start screaming at them instead.

The cynic in me sees another possibility. Maybe they’re just fine with it. They’re fine with the opposition infighting. Napoleon teaches us that one should never interrupt their enemy while they’re making a mistake. All the online abuse, the resentment, labeling people as invaders, stealing white collar jobs as peoples of Central and South America have long been accused of stealing blue-collar jobs, surely that’ll drive a generation of young Indian Americans into the arms of the Democratic party for future elections. But no, drill down another layer. Maybe they’re just fine with it. They’re fine with tech workers getting squeezed by foreign talent. Fuck em, right? Those fratboys all voted for Trump when it mattered. They’re fine with South Asian communities taking that heat, that resentment, that anger. They’re a minority of a minority and a decent chunk of them got in their feelings about Palestine and either stayed home or voted Green Party (the nerve!) and so the Reddit Categorical Imperative of “fuck around and find out,” the governing principle which reigns over all modern liberal thought, could be invoked. All of a sudden we’re not talking about dangerous rhetoric, are we? We’re just guffawing at Elon getting ratioed. Will we still be laughing when some guy with /pol/ brain shoots up a server farm or a Hindu temple? I doubt it. But who knows, maybe one of the victims will have a funny name. We’ll be able to pass around those old Nick Mullen bits again.

Again, I get that this is mind-blowingly cynical but I just feel it in the culture, in the air. I feel it more strongly in the sort of cosmopolitan liberal circles that are meant to have purged themselves of racism as a condition of entry into their social class. This isn’t to say that they’re the “real” racists. All your racism is equally valid to me, I don’t discriminate against forms of discrimination. They’re also not “more” racist than their opponents on the right. That’s not really relevant to what we’re talking about here. The difference isn’t in the degree of disdain for a given demographic, it’s in the way disapproval of a given demographic is expressed.

There Have Always Been “Those People”

Throughout the history of human societies, discrimination along ethnic lines has taken many forms but has been a pretty omnipresent err- presence in general terms. This does not make it right, naturally⁴. There’s extensive scholarship on this subject from authors far more qualified than I. But you get it, right? Whether it’s actual government policy that’s setting the rules of engagement or more organic social mores springing from ethnic frictions, there have almost without exception always been certain groups condemned to the status of societal whipping boy. The art of a time reflects the culture of that time and so we can see “acceptable” racism preserved in amber with relative ease. Whether it’s the Jim Crow-era prose of a Faulkner or Mark Twain or noted non-Asians Mickey Rooney and Shirley MacClaine squinting their way through roles as east Asian characters in feature films, we can find an example of every demographic under the sun being stereotyped, infantilized, or otherwise deprived of agency for the entertainment and reassurance of the in-group.

In retrospect these portrayals are usually regarded as offensive. Usually for good reason. For all the modern screeching about wokeness and the counter-preening of the creative classes, I’m pretty happy I don’t need to see Austin Powers: Goldmember level bits about Asian people in modern movies and TV⁵.

However, in examining and condemning the prejudices of the past, we ought to consider that we’re not immune to those same prejudices. Nothing about human history would make me particularly optimistic that these ugly tendencies can be bred out of us. The grudges simply migrate elsewhere. The stereotypes receive firmware updates and fresh coats of paint. To wit; the repressed, effete, vaguely autistic guy in sitcoms used to be a nebbish Jew or a bespectacled east Asian mixing his R’s and L’s. Now he’s often south Asian. He’s got such a funny accent! He lives in fear of disappointing his overbearing parents! The gang better get out of this week’s jam or else he’ll be back in Tamil Nadu, driving a cab for his Uncle Rakesh!

His influence…

I’m sorry, but this did eventually have to be about Apu From Simpsons and That One Guy From Big Bang Theory⁶. I didn’t want to take it here but there’s no way around it that I can figure so I got it out of the way early. I apologize for it. We’ve been panhandling at this intersection of media studies and identity politics for a decade now and it’s hard to argue we’re better off in any way. I just needed to get this into the public record, lest someone clog up my comments with it, acting like they’re oh-so-very observant. “Hey have you considered how media portrayals of-” yes. I have. Of course I have. Why else would I write this?

“I Know It Smell Crazy In There” and Its Consequences

If we have discussed the character of “the Indian” in the popular consciousness, it would be wise to discuss the perception of the nation itself. The bare statistics paint the picture of an emergent world power. The seventh largest nation on Earth, as well as its most populous. A top five or top three gross domestic product depending on how you measure it. Nuclear armed. Internationally competitive in their national sport of choice. More or less culturally independent, with an internationally recognized film industry. Doesn’t sound too bad.

But this is not the common perception. Often India is a punchline. A land of call center scammers, sexually desperate social media commenters, filthy street food stalls, outsourced IT departments, emaciated orphans, decaying infrastructure, generational poverty, pollution, corruption, misogyny, and sectarian violence. It’s the land where they had to run public service announcements to ask people not to defecate in public. Where heat waves bring four-figure yearly death tolls. The bane of travel vloggers the world over. A place where a politician was hospitalized after drinking river water to demonstrate it wasn’t as polluted as people were claiming. It smells. It’s dirty. It’s the nation of funny accents and unpronounceable names. Tacky, chintzy consumer goods and entertainment products. A gorgeous natural biosphere with careless stewards. Overlong films that feel the need to be all genres at once for reasons incomprehensible to western viewers.

It is then, a country a set of problems familiar to any student of economics, history, sociology, or anthropology. Civilization has existed in some form or another on the Indian subcontinent for as long as we have records of human civilization existing anywhere. Yet it's only been a “country” in the modern parlance since the late 1940s. Much like its eastern neighbor, China, its millennia of history has been a story of premodern people navigating harsh climates and natural disasters, regional kingdoms, warlords and tribes, brief apogees of unity and power, followed by colonial humiliation. Now India and the peoples of its cultural sphere of influence are growing more prominent on the world stage and, more importantly, gaining far more internet access. Our online spaces are not immune to mass migration or the friction that results from cultural confusion.

It’s difficult, I suppose, to isolate any one trait of “the Indian online” which seems to spark such a visceral reaction. Bluntness, over-familiarity, weird racism. You can find many examples of these and other cringe-inducing behaviors. But none of that is unique. My sense of it is that much of it comes back to pride. Pride in one’s nation, people, culture. Pride which clashes with the west’s perception of their mother country. But that’s nothing new, especially for post-colonial states. Brazilians seem to have a great deal of national pride, as do Nigerians. Hell, Americans are often characterized by an obnoxious pride in our nation. But I suppose there’s only a few paltry hundred million of us. It’s a numbers game. That’s what it all comes back to at the end of the day. The forces of bigotry never run out of uses for “the horde,” which, after all, is just a less-polite way to refer to “those people.”

How Liberals Get Racist

The right will tell you to your face that they don’t like “those people.” Don’t like their music, the smell of their food, their God, their supposedly-subversive ideology. When a card-carrying Liberal gets racist it’s never framed as being about race. It’s not in the blood, it can’t be, that would be so regressive and silly. It’s framed as an issue of the cultural superstructure which formed them. A liberal is sure to give you extensive preamble before getting racist. They’ll cite neighbors of the demographic in question with whom they maintain harmonious non-relationships. Celebrities of the demographic in question whose work they enjoy. They’ll tell you how they’re not all like this… but.

Then they drop it on you. It’ll go something like this.

“They do good work and all, like we’re happy to have them on the team but it really does get exhausting sometimes, I mean, they really lack social skills. I honestly don’t know what they do outside of the office. Ohmigod did I tell you one of the guys on my team is getting an arranged marriage? In current year? I feel soooo bad for those women like honestly could you imagine? It’s such a chauvinist culture, over there.”

This is the contradiction at the heart of modern identity politics. Diverse cultures need to be celebrated, as they all contribute to our global society, but those individual component cultures often have values, social mores, or other inflexible principles which contradict the values of cosmopolitan society. These components of the global society are regressive and should be critiqued and condemned, but you can’t condemn the people who hold these regressive beliefs, at least not to their face. Better to do it in an academic journal, a NYT op-ed, a Reddit long post, or a Twitter thread.

The resulting tenor of discourse is often deeply paternalistic and condescending. It’s soft colonialism, denying agency and adult comprehension of complicated social questions to nations of millions of people. The Right speaks of scorned races as malicious. This is their plan. They’re doing this on purpose. It’s a conspiracy. The Liberal “Left” speaks of races they disdain as infantilized. They don’t know better. They’re victims in all of this. You can’t blame the victim, after all. It’s not their fault that their culture doesn’t know better. Plus, of course, their culture is beautiful and valuable. Diversity is our strength, after all, and imagine how much stronger we’ll be once these diverse cultures become, little by little, like us. Once they get with the program.

It’s not necessarily equivalence, but when a group is subject to this sort of broad, casual disdain, the sentiment is often the same. It’s just a difference in expression.

The Ballad of Gunga Justin

Justin Trudeau, plus some other people.

The friction over skilled migration from South Asia is not some theoretical online issue, and the negative reactions of ostensibly liberal people are not theoretical either. Consider, if you will, that fantasyland of common-sense progressive governance (if you’re an American); Canada. It’s hard to ignore how much consternation there seems to be, especially in Canadian online spaces, over mass immigration from the Indian Subcontinent. You have the right-wing variety of anti-immigrant rhetoric. “The Punjabis are pooping on the beaches” is the Anglo-Anzac-Canadian cousin to “the Hatians are eating the dogs and cats.” But you get it from ostensible liberals as well, liberals of that characteristically Canadian extraction that take immense pride in defining themselves in opposition to whatever America is at that particular moment. They’re not racist of course. They don’t hate these people. But they’re overstaying their visas! They’re not following the rules! They’re buying Tim Horton’s franchises and only hiring their countrymen! It’s the nepotism, it's the corruption, it’s the culture.

The end of Justin Trudeau’s tenure as Canadian Prime Minister⁷ will be subject to analysis and interpretation by serious academics and armchair political wonks alike. A nine-year run as a head of state doesn’t end for any one reason. But it’s hard, in the moment, to not see the perceived mishandling of Canada’s immigration policies as the straw that broke the camel’s back. This is before we even get into the controversy of a Sikh political activist apparently whacked on orders from the Indian government. Feel like we let that one pass rather unacknowledged. I know there’s a lot going on but that was a pretty comprehensively batshit situation.

We’re Bringing The Disease of the Arab Mind Back, Folks, and It’s Going to Be Greater Than Ever

One wonders how similar situations will develop and/or decay in the rest of the liberal, democratic world. Seems to me that the UK has been attempting to elect a government which will load all the “foreigners” onto a barge of some sort and then set the barge on fire for about a decade now. America’s new-old government is espousing more anti-immigrant rhetoric than ever, even while its most prominent figures signal support for the dreaded H-1B visa. That’s the real rub. Donald Trump probably meets most definitions of “racist”⁸. But he’s not a racist in the way his most-racist supporters would prefer. He’s not a true believer in whiteness or Christendom or whatever. He’s not a true believer in anything. He’s a sales guy. Sales guys don’t have principles. They disrupt closing the deal, making the sale. They disrupt winning.

The repetition of that gerund; “winning,” by Elon, by Vivek, by Trump himself, is very telling. Because it’s not really articulated what exactly any of us receive for our victories to come. Opting for cheap foreign labor compelled to work and work and work by their visa status instead of domestic talent with more leverage makes obvious sense for large corporations. But that doesn’t help the domestic STEM degree holder who finds themself undercut and out-competed. They can either sit and stew, hoping a worsening job market will eventually allow them to work in their field for the pay they feel they deserve, or they can accept worse pay, a more onerous schedule, and a sunsetting of the tech-aristocrat future they were sold. The same sentiments which drove resentment against prior generations of immigrants recur again and again. The in-group feels disenfranchised and resents it. It’s not hard to see how that resentment can lead to targeted, purposeful violence.

In ruminating on this phenomenon in advance of the essay, I’m reminded of another time when a bipartisan consensus of fear, loathing, and discrimination gripped the western world. In my youth I recall the hate and resentment towards Muslims of all extractions. The dust kicked up by the falling of the twin towers sent an epidemic of the mind and spirit airborne. Fear and paranoia towards brown faces, bushy beards, Arabic prayers, head-coverings, and so on was not just acceptable; it was patriotic. It was not just the id of a scared, traumatized country that didn’t know shit from Shinola about the Islamic World beyond Saddam Hussein and Disney’s Aladdin. It was academic, it was trendy. Books were published and op-eds were penned which built profitable careers, bought houses, put kids through college. Pop-demagoguery like “the clash of civilizations” and “the disease of the Arab mind” entered the lexicon overnight. It was perfect justification for people who’d just got done “solving” racism in the 1990s to explain and credentialize their sudden swerve back towards it. We bought merchandise and laughed at Jeff Dunham bits. Manic PTA moms fed ham sandwiches to their son’s new pal Mo. Pro-wrestling promotions hired swarthy Sicilian guys to wear keffiyehs and denounce racism in a villainous manner. It was an ugly, bloody time.

We may be entering another ugly, bloody time.

This is, according to social issues think piece best practices, where I am meant to append some little homily about the long arc of the universe bending towards justice and how we all do the work of building a kinder world. I refuse. I’m sick of it. I can’t scold or chide you out of your prejudices. You know where you stand on this. I asked in the title. Is everyone racist against Indians? You’re part of everyone. Decide for yourself.

1. Here defined as: the guys who bought the US government in November.

2. Here defined as: the guys and girls who voted to finalize the sale.

3. Except Elon, lmao.

4. Klaus Zynski, certified non-racist from now until eternity, don’t yell at me.

5. Remember when Will Ferrell did brownface in those movies?

6. Looked it up, the character is named Raj, because of course he is.

7. See you, space cowboy.

8. Real brave, clear-eyed, trailblazing commentary in current year, I know.