This is white cultural imperialism, full stop. Right or left, I don't care where it comes from - I know it when I smell it.
Here is Kamala Harris, an Indian-Black American, pushing “Latinx”:
https://mobile.twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1290733001320...
There’s a deep synergy here that exploits the fact that most Americans have limited insight into what minorities think, but generally want to be supportive. White progressives can amplify their apparent mandate by selectively platforming progressive minorities to speak on behalf of those groups. Those progressive minorities, meanwhile, can wield the outsize influence of progressive whites over the media and institutions against other members of their own group.
That’s how “Latinx” happens. Progressive Latinos by themselves have no power to influence what the general public calls Latinos. But if they get Elizabeth Warren to say it, they can turn it from a “progressive Latino” issue into a “Latino” issue and lots of well meaning people will go along to be supportive of Latinos.
Kamala Harris is a great example. She was polling in the single digits among Black people (https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/04/kamala-harris-black...). And I’ll tell you that most desis are closer to Tulsi Gabbard than Harris. Including the Russia stuff—given India’s long-standing affinity with Russia. She’s not Vice President because she’s the one people in those groups would pick. She’s Vice President because of all the white Act Blue donors I know who are thrilled to have a Black-Indian Vice President who just happens to think the way they do.
No surprise there: Modi is a conservative populist who could make Trump blush, and is very popular (and polarizing) in India. I’m not sure how the translates to Indian Americans, Indian politics isn’t very portable.
But at least with respect to pre-Fox News Gabbard, the areas where she departed from white progressives were recognizably desi to me. You don’t celebrate your abortion or make your sexuality part of your identity in Indian American communities. Likewise, there tends to be a strong impulse towards realism in foreign policy that accepts brutal dictators like Assad as necessary in some cases to avoid a breakdown in order. and there is a strong Russian affinity, since India was aligned with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Meanwhile, Harris quite closely tracked white progressive orthodoxy.
I'm not sure I see the problem here? If there is a problem isn't it because minority groups that support regressive politics (say like the 'log cabin Republicans') don't get promoted by their fellow regressives as much? Shouldn't Republicans be amplifying the voice of African-American homophobes, and Gay racists more so that everyone can see that not all minorities are progressive and some want to work together to hold back minority groups they aren't part of?
Progressives promote minorities with progressive opinions and pass those progressive opinions off as representative of those minority groups. White progressives self-consciously wear that label; non-white progressives invoke their ethnic identity without the progressive qualifier.
Progressives in media, academia, and politics often use their institutional power to manipulate the public narrative surrounding minorities. As my dad once lamented, "CNN made Ilhan Omar into the face of American Muslims."
> you don't like that because you're a minority with non-progressive views and feel underrepresented?
I personally don't like it because I have fairly typical views for my minority group and I don't like being misrepresented. I'd like a more honest public discourse that acknowledges something like "brown people love Obamacare, but really don't want their young kids learning about sex."
More importantly, it disenfranchises the very minorities these progressives purport to speak for.
It enables white progressives to hijack the political power of minorities within the broader center and center left (Democrats and Democrat leaners). For a spell in 2020, progressives turned "Defund the Police" into the "Black" position on policing, and weaponized claims of "racism" against anyone who opposed violent protests and riots. They got the Op-Ed guy at the New York Times fired for publishing a piece by Tom Cotton about putting a stop to the riots. Lots of well-meaning white people care what Black people think about policing, and they are terrified of being called racist, so they put up BLM signs on their lawns and reposted quotes like "riots are the voice of the unheard."
Of course Black people didn't want to Defund the Police, and they don't like riots. When Larry Hogan sent in the Maryland National Guard to put a stop to the Freddie Gray riots, his approval rating in majority-Black Baltimore soared over 70%: https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/bal-maryland-gov-larry.... Luckily this ended with respect to this specific issue because people like Eric Adams were in a position to call out the white progressives: https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-adams-defund-the-police... ("NYC mayoral candidate Eric Adams says 'young white affluent people' lead the 'defund the police' movement").
This happens on issue after issue: progressives claim the moral high ground by purporting to speak on behalf of minorities while advancing policies those minorities actually oppose. For example, you see all these moves toward race-conscious hiring driven by progressives on behalf of Black and Hispanic people. But most Black and Hispanic people oppose such policies: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/9/18538216/diversity-workplace-pe....
In some cases, this interferes with the ability of minority groups to advocate for their own personal safety. During the increase in crimes against Asian Americans in NYC and SF, CNN was full of Asian activists and academics who stressed the importance of non-white solidarity and not letting the violence derail efforts at criminal justice reform. The Asian American activists platformed by progressives care primarily about maintaining solidarity with other progressive groups, not about the unique interests of Asian Americans: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r.
But Asian American communities face fundamentally different trade-offs with respect to over-policing versus under-policing compared to other minorities. A white American is three times more likely to be shot by a cop as an Asian American. Asian American voters thus strongly supported Andrew Yang in NYC, and large numbers defected for Curtis Sliwa in the general election. Manipulation by white progressives impaired the ability for Asian Americans to advocate for their own interests.
Fundamentally, white progressives who participate in ethnic identity politics have a conflict of interest. They have tremendous incentives to use their larger numbers and institutional power to advance their own interests, not those of minority groups: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/ ("White elites —who play an outsized role in defining racism in academia, the media, and the broader culture — instead seem to define ‘racism’ in ways that are congenial to their own preferences and priorities.").
> so that everyone can see that not all minorities are progressive
Most minorities aren't progressives. Progressives are whiter on average than the population as a whole, and about as white as traditional conservatives: https://hiddentribes.us/profiles (80% white for progressives, 70% white for traditional conservatives). If you disaggregate say Asian Americans into finer groups than just "Democrat" and "Republican," you'd see that most are moderates, the next biggest chunk are moderate conservatives, and progressives make up a relatively small fraction.
The ones that are progressive (mostly Latinos) are much more likely to be Bernie-style economic progressives than to embrace the intersectional progressivism of Elizabeth Warren. In the 2020 Democratic Primary, Bernie won Latinos in California with 45%. Warren placed fourth with just 7%, lower than Mike Bloomberg. Among Black voters in Virginia, Biden won 63%, and Warren again placed fourth behind Mike Bloomberg, with just 7%.
In fact, Warren was actually never a viable candidate in a Democratic Party that relies on southwestern Latino and southern Black voters to win elections: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/elizabeth-warren-boo... (" In February 2020, New York Times reporter Astead Herndon detailed how Warren’s success with Black and Latino political activists had yielded barely any support among actual Black and Latino voters."). But we were subjected to months of white progressives in media treating her like a frontrunner because they thought that the ethnic minority activists she had on stage with her represented real support from ethnic minorities.
> and some want to work together to hold back minority groups they aren't part of?
Minorities have their own ideas of what policies are good for them, and for the most part they're different from what progressives believe. They should be able to advocate for those interests without white progressives using their institutional power and donor dollars to drown out their voices on issues that concern them.
Well you have to appeal to your audience. If you speak as a Bangladeshi how much would the average American member of the audience understand? If the Bangladeshi take is similar to the average Indian take I'm used to, rising crime rates would probably be explained by something like "all these people are corrupt. That's what Indians do instead of doing it the right way they just try to find a shortcut and take from others. Badmaasha do this and ruin the country".
Of course they don't mean that literally the whole country is corrupt and all Indians are awful, but people not from there wouldn't understand that it's an exaggeration. They just don't have the cultural context to understand how to interpret that. The American way of communicating is not so on the nose, in fact it minimizes negatives and tries to avoid generalizing at all. So again, i don't think they would understand it would just sounds vaguely racist to the average American. So I'm not sure what Bangladeshi view you're talking about is but context really matters.
And most of the desis I know support Harris over Gabard. Surprise surprise-- you cannot easily generalize the views of large groups, especially based on anecdotal evidence. Being Desi has little to do with it.
That's why I don't like the whole business of identity politics. It creates this situation where the minorities you see on TV speaking for minority groups are the ones who are saying the things white people want to hear.
> And most of the desis I know support Harris over Gabard.
I'm not talking about overall support, but instead the particular attacks white Democrats aimed at Gabbard in the 2020 primary (pre-Fox News appearances). It was over things where Gabbard was taking a position that was different from white Democrats, but typical of desis.
I think it’s fair to say that Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi Democrats are typically more socially conservative than white Democrats. Likewise, Indians and Bangladeshis often have an affinity for Russia arising from those countries' alignment with the Soviet Union. E.g.: https://www.telegraphindia.com/culture/books/bengalis-and-th....
I found it weird for white people to be talking so much about south asian identity on one hand, while attacking a south Asian woman in a nasty way for having opinions that a lot of south Asian women have.
It doesn't flow anywhere except to other college educated professionals. These people attempt to tell rural, or the working-class, or immigrants what to say and how to behave, who then turn around and do something else like elect Trump.
In fact, the whole body of thought governing them reminds me too much of the Latin Church. I have no words to express how I detest the kind of thinking behind them.
The digital and public life is so important for many people today that, if you eliminate them there, it's like killing a good chunk of their lives.
These people wage crusades against individual reputations and public/digital lives. Just because they think differently.
So not like killing at all. It is, however, a bit like building an orthodoxy. Which the group formerly in position to build orthodoxy is surprised to learn is an uncomfortable process.
You have to observe that deadly violence was normalized in the past.
It was even entertainment in Rome. Hence, the Colloseum.
Externally, it's evolved, but internally the ideolog is quite similar.
Some of the similarities are:
- divides men and women
- interferes and intends to control families
- demonizes people that are useful to society and accumulate wealth
See, you’re digging your own semantic hole with all this political correctness.