What About Bobby

Bobby Jindal’s speech Tuesday attracted a lot of ridicule and ire, in no place/space more than Facebook (most hilariously from the groups Bobby Jindal is Kenneth the Page and Volcanoes for Bobby Jindal). I want to concentrate here on the ire of one particular population: South Asians. For a while, dating back to Jindal’s Congressional stint, there have been groups with titles like South Asians Against Bobby Jindal, Bobby Jindal Doesn’t Represent Indians, etc, and since the speech, their numbers (both membership and number of groups) have grown, and more so than groups of Indians for Jindal. Do I join? I’m not sure. Keep in mind I’m constantly worried whether I’m Indian enough.

Near as I can tell, these groups’ objections to Jindal fall into one of three categories: superficial/fun stuff, identity-based, and position-based.

Superficial stuff includes things like the exorcism thing making the rounds (don’t wish to link), or little “gotcha” tidbits like “Jindal went to Disneyworld the day after making fun of Disneyland!” Now, I’m not ramping up into some giant objection to the inclusion of this kind of stuff – it’s par for the course for most any political group’s page, and why should South Asian discourse be held to a higher standard?

Things get a little meatier when you consider some of the identity-based objections. There is a widely held perception that, because of his changed name (Piyush to Bobby, though not legally) and religion (Hinduism to Catholicism), Jindal is at least a “coconut” and at worst a poser. The charge leaves me cold, because it basically begs my question, and also because it’s a kind of second-guessing that strikes me as super emotional. I can see how it might seem like a repudiation of Indian-ness/Hindu-ness, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who joined those groups out of anger/suspicion about that, but there are also plenty of people on the groups’ message boards repudiating this charge as a proper objection.

Also under the identity rubric, however, is concern over whether and how Jindal “represents” South Asians. Even this strikes me as a sort of strange thing to worry about, because that concern typically revolves around a negative or overly reductive stereotype, that everyone will think “we” are “like that.” But that’s not what’s going on here – to paraphrase Pickle Reader AS, his whole gestalt Tuesday was bizarre, and even the most committed racist would find it a stretch to suddenly extrapolate that all South Asians are stilted and twangy. Ok, I just wanted to make that joke, but I do think – perhaps naively– that very few people are going to look at that speech and thinks he speaks for South Asians.

This post is approaching Bollywood length, so I’ll make it a two-parter. After intermission, policy-based objections, the audience of these groups, and the final answer as to whether I’m joining!