What About Bobby, Episode 2

PREVIOUSLY, ON BOBBY JINDAL:
Luvh felt unmoved by "superficial fun stuff" as well as by identity-based objections (that Jindal is a "coconut," and also that he's a misleading representative of the South Asian community).

My objections are policy-based, but those are also probably the most well-voiced objections on your basic "South Asians Against Bobby Jindal" page. So the question is, why couch your policy objection in your ethnicity or his?

My primary policy objection is that Jindal is a quite stereotypical "shrink the government/privatize everything" guy. But that issue doesn't seem to have much resonance with South Asian-ness, from either side of the debate.

This is not true of two other areas of policy objections. One is immigration. Jindal votes for things like fences and diverting military forces to border protection, and he is rated 100% by U.S. Border Control. To be sure, South Asian-ness is front and center for this one, but in a peculiar way. At first glance, it seems awfully Clarence Thomasy for a first generation American to want to pull up the ladder behind him, so to speak, but that analogy, though seductive, doesn't exactly apply; it's more like he's pulling up a different ladder than the one he climbed.

As can be gleaned from the Rakhe family dinner table, immigration policy is a thorny area for South Asian Americans. It's hugely difficult for South Asians to immigrate. Visas are tightly capped, and the only way to do it illegally is to overstay a visitor visa, but the Man is onto that. Consequently, my family, like many other South Asian American families, has lots of relatives in the motherland who wanted to come here but couldn't. Naturally, this is a recipe for resentment and vehemently held anti-illegal immigration positions.

But I, and plenty of South Asian Americans, don't feel this way. I see the vehement anti-immigration position as a striking failure of imagination and empathy, especially when Jindal sponsors bills to have government services offered in English only. Yes, it just so happens that almost 100% of South Asian immigrants to the United States speaks English, but is it that hard to think of how difficult things would be if you can't? You're South Asian!

I think it comes down to a dispute over assimilation and breaking out of quasi-tribal thinking. And for that reason, when the audience of the Facebook group is actually fellow South Asian Americans, I do think it's appropriate and important to couch my objections to Jindal in terms of our shared ethnicity.

The second policy area is centered around Jindal's extreme religiosity, but I think in this case objections are best left UNcouched in ethnicity, or rather, in this case, once-shared religion. In fact, pairing an objection to, as an example, Jindal's curiously strong anti-choice position with a dismissive "no faith like the converted" sentiment, or worse, an embittered "why are you so Christian?" sentiment robs the objection of a lot of substance, and in fact might make it boil down to the charge that Jindal is a race-traitor or an infidel, which is not where I want to be.

That being said, I think I'll join the group and just be vigilant about rock throwing.