Racist Catch-22

 In the face of a rising tide of anti–South Asian hatred on the American right, a number of commentators have pointed out the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" quality to xenophobic racism. 

On the one hand, after all, the right accuses immigrants and racial out-groups of refusing to "assimilate," of living in Balkanized impoverished enclaves, of causing urban blight and bringing into the country various disruptive anti-social behaviors. 

"You talk too loud, / cuss too loud, / look too black, / don't get anywhere, / and sometimes it seems / you don't even care," as one of the speakers says in Langston Hughes's dialogue, "High to Low." 

Some of our right-wing politicians and pundits are not shy about expressing this side of the racist coin. 

As Tucker Carlson put it, in notorious remarks in 2018: pro-immigration liberals want the United States to "admit the world's poor [...] even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier[.]"

It seems quaint now to reflect how much controversy Carlson's comments caused eight years ago. 

After all, our current vice president, J.D. Vance, said virtually the same thing at his party's unusual midterm convention earlier this month, and many major new outlets barely even noticed it. 

"We were tired of being called racists for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier," Vance reportedly told the audience.  

Okay, so that's one long-standing racist charge against immigrants and out-groups: namely, that they are "dirty, smelly, and untrustworthy," as a character puts it in Monty Python's sketch "Prejudice." 

But suppose an immigrant takes the approach of assimilating? Suppose they take the approach of "High" in Langston Hughes's dialogue, that is to say? 

Suppose they actually achieve great success in America? Suppose they, if anything, over-achieve in order to prove their contribution to the country and their right to be here? 

Then, of course, they are attacked for that in turn. 

Viz. the recent incident in which a right-wing weirdo in Texas posted an image on social media of a group of South Asian students celebrating the victory of the home team at the University of Texas. 

Instead of being accused of not assimilating, these students were attacked for assimilating too well—and therefore of "replacing" white students who might have otherwise gone to the same school. 

These were of course tropes of German antisemitism too, at the time of the Nazis. Some Jews were attacked as dirty and unassimilable refuse from the slums of Eastern Europe. Yet, still others were accused of trying to blend in and "pass."

Indeed, as often as economically disempowered out-groups are attacked by racists, minority groups that are perceived as "economically privileged" or successful but "politically powerless," as Ernest Gellner has pointed out, are often even more in peril. 

In other words, you can't win. At least not with racists. 

The only solution I can think of is to "deny" to these racist ideologies, and to the people who preach them, "any condonation, tolerance, or boon of intercourse," to quote Hugh MacDiarmid, and to "subject them in all connections to endless boycott." 

The problem is that the people who hold these xenophobic views—or, at least, who find it expedient for purposes of power and demagogy to express them—increasingly run our society. 

That UT-Austin football game post that everyone is talking about was quite horrid—but it was, after all, posted by no one more important than a GOP candidate for the position of state railroad commissioner. 

Far more disturbing is a second incident that the New York Times describes in the same article:

Earlier this month, the official channels of our federal Department of Homeland Security apparently "posted an image [...]of a 'Transformers' character facing off with a Sikh man, along with the words: 'America for Americans. Get off our roads. You don’t know how to drive Mr. Singh.'"

Jesus. 

Insane racism of this sort does not just end in memes. It has real-life consequences. As the Times article points out, a few days after the "Mr. Singh" post went up, a Sikh truck driver was stabbed 17 times on the side of a Wyoming highway.

The victim miraculously survived. From his hospital bed, he posed a question to the Times journalist that the whole world needs to hear: "What is being built up in people’s hearts, that they would want to do something so terrible to another human being?"

We like to believe as Americans that we inhabit a tolerant and pluralistic society. The Trump administration does not speak for us, we say. At least not for all of us. 

But there is an ugly current of xenophobia that we cannot deny in our nation's past and present. 

Thinking of this innocent man —stabbed 17 times just for being who he is and practicing his religion—I could only think of Edgar Lee Masters's haunting poem about xenophobic hate crimes, "Yee Bow," from the Spoon River Anthology: 

They got me into the Sunday-school

In Spoon River

And tried to get me to drop Confucius for Jesus.

I could have been no worse off

If I had tried to get them to drop Jesus for Confucius.

For, without any warning, as if it were a prank,

And sneaking up behind me, Harry Wiley,

The minister's son, caved my ribs into my lungs,

With a blow of his fist.

Now I shall never sleep with my ancestors in Pekin,

And no children shall worship at my grave.