Tag: Diaspora
Corrections and qualifications to commenters
One of the problems with Twitter, and the internet, in general, is the decreasing level of the discussion. Some of this is simply due to greater popularity of the platforms, and so less stringent selection for intelligence. And, some of it is
AI, STEM and moral philosophers
Sometimes we don’t need to talk about it
In millennial media there is the “We Need to Talk About” genre of “think-piece.” Quite often it’s navel-gazing
On the hyphenated American…
First things first, my mother was shot during the Bangladesh Liberation War. Though, as upper-middle-class Muslims who tended toward being in technical professions (medicine, engineering, etc.) honestly I don’t think we bore the brunt of the violence (I qualify technical, because an uncle-in-law who comes from an artistic family had several relatives shot by the Pakistani army due to their possible propaganda creating skills).
I was born in Bangladesh. That being said, my parents spent more time as Pakistani citizens than Bangladeshi citizens. And they’ve spent the most time as American citizens. I grew up nearly my whole life in the United States of America.
When I was a kid people would often assume I was Arab, Iranian, or, most often, Indian. Sometimes I would correct them, and explain my family was from Bangladesh..but then I would have to explain what and where Bangladesh was. So often I would just let it stand, as “Indian” is good enough for government work.
That being said, some people have objected to my relaxed attitude on this. Mostly, these are Indians and Bangladeshis. People born and raised in India and Bangladesh. Though a few people I know from Nepal or Pakistan or Sri Lanka also are perplexed at my relaxed attitude toward national identity. I think the major issue is that as an American, there is clearly brown provenance to my origins, but the crystallizing national identities in the subcontinent are detached from my own family’s historical experience, which hasn’t experienced much of the last 40 years.
Of course religion and such matters. People of Muslim origin from the subcontinent who are irreligious are very different in their attitude toward being brown from people who are religious, and these are very different in their attitude toward those who are very very religious (in some ways, the irreligious and the very very religious are more similar than to the group in the middle).
Two leaders of Western European countries of Indian background?
Browncast: Dr Woodson
Another Browncast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!
You can also support the podcast as a patron. The primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone else. This website isn’t about shaking the cup, but I have noticed that the number of patrons plateaued a long time ago.
Woodson Shownotes:
In this episode, Razib and Mukunda speak to Robert Woodson, the founder and President of the Woodson Center along with one of the leading members of the 1776 Project. We discuss the current social and racial dialogue in the United States, the problems with the mainstream understanding of racial history and relations in the US, the great strides made during the Civil Rights, the difference between the Civil Rights movement and current movements specifically Black Lives Matter and possible solutions.
The Woodson Center focuses its energies and efforts on addressing the economic and social needs and concerns of low-income African American communities using entrepreneurship and community empowerment strategies and initiatives. The 1776 project is a “is an assembly of Scholars, Educators, and Activists who uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values, challenging those who assert that America is forever defined by its past failures—namely, slavery. It challenges the prevailing narrative that promotes class warfare and racial division with the constant message that all problems of low-income neighborhoods are rooted in systemic racism, which determines and limits the prospects of the poor.” Mr. Woodson is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and sits on the Board of the Rhodes Scholarship.
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“1776” is an assembly of independent voices who uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values and challenge those who assert America is forever defined by its past failures, such as slavery.
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Recently, Woodson Center launched an innovative new project, a Campaign “1776” which is an assembly of independent voices who uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values and challenge those who assert America is forever defined by its past failures, such as slavery.
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Unheard objections
Lots of response to my piece, How Brahmins lead the fight against white privilege. I’m trying to do less Twitter and more blogging, so here I go with some responses to reactions
Q: “Why are you picking on Brahmins?”
A: The only groups white people know about in regards to caste are Brahmins and Dalits. So Brahmins went in the title. That being said, 25% of Indian Americans are Brahmin. The highest proportion Brahmins are in and around UP (in the hills as well), but very few immigrants to the USA came from this region (proportionately). So Brahmins seem about 10x overrepresented.
Q: “Why are you mentioning caste, no one cares about in the USA….”
A: Totally correct in my opinion that caste is not an issue. But Indian Americans are very unrepresentative. In a private survey of 2,000 Indian Americans, 400 stated they were Brahmin. How many stated they were Scheduled Caste or Dalit? 5. This is an underestimate because some people won’t admit it, and some parents may not have told their children. But ~15% of Indians are Scheduled Caste. 0.25% of Indian Americans. This seems notable. I could have used a different term obviously, and if the audience was India I would have. But I wanted to get across to the Western audience that Indian Americans are not your typical Indian.
Q: “Why does this matter?”
A: I used Saira Rao as an example, but she’s an extreme caricature of a type. For several years people I know in academia and media have been privately complaining me (that’s what I’m here for!) about “social justice posturing” of Indian Americans. Particular, to be frank, young Indian American women. These are often very self-righteous, very vocal, and, very privileged. I haven’t done a survey, but most of these individuals aren’t the children of cabbies, but hail from well-heeled suburbs. There is no shame necessarily in being a Leftist from a prosperous background, but what people tell me (and I have seen on Twitter), is that many of these individuals co-opt narratives of colonialist and racist oppression. Of course, being a brown American most of them have experienced racism, but obviously the history of the United States before World War II is not their family’s history, and being more privileged than typical, American Desis, on the whole, are not crushed of the earth.
But due to the ignorance of Americans of many aspects of international culture, everything and everyone gets bracketed into a “postcolonial narrative.”
Of Indian Americans and American Indians
Of all ethnic groups in the United States, second generation Indian Americans are the only ones who experience a decline in income relative to the first generation. The art and media produced by Indian Americans tends to angsty, brooding and dispiriting.
Talking points re: caste
The “caste in America” issue just isn’t going away, and I keep having to resurface on social media. This post will be placeholder until I can set aside time to publish something more thorough and polished (between my startup and substack I can’t spare the marginal cycles on a piece about caste).
First, why do I care about caste? Though I have an intellectual interest in the topic, mostly it’s just that I get asked about it, a lot. Mostly this is driven by Indian American journalists writing about the pervasiveness of caste in tech, which I think is pretty much manufactured mostly out of a few incidents. If you are a subcontinental-looking person in the US in professional class situations you will be asked. This is why I have started to refer to myself as a Dalit online. Why not? Who is going to know? Some online Indian Leftists do accuse me of being an “upper caste Muslim,” but despite my origin from eastern Bengal’s rural landholder class my “lived experience” is that of a brown American.
Second,