I write this after I have sent my mail-in ballot through the post, and with twenty-three more days to election day, November 3, I see how limited and bad the choices are not just for Indian Americans or Hindu Americans but for all Americans. As the cliché goes, we are caught between a rock and a hard place or forced to choose between joining the devil or jump into the deep sea. With hucksters, shills, and true believers on both sides hectoring, lecturing, shaming, pleading, demanding our time,  money and vote with promises of keeping America great, making America great, building something better – slogans tested and marketed by well-paid K Street snake-oil marketers and PR agents – we are at our wits’ end, except of course for the true believers who swear by their “old man”. 

Social media platforms are flooded with messages from friends and family members who want you to pay attention to the latest Trumpian blunder or descriptions of the dangers facing the country and your community if Biden were to get elected. There is triumphalism from the Biden camp, and there are doomsday predictions from the increasingly antsy and amateurish Trump camp. There is wild rhetoric, and unimaginably spurious claims and assertions, based on nothing more than “anecdotal evidence” of one. 

Trump diagnosed as having been affected by the coronavirus, his short stay at the Walter Reed hospital, his foolish ride around the hospital’s neighborhood to assure his supporters camped outside that he is not dead, and his quick rush back to the White House to stop tongues wagging that he is seriously sick, all caught on camera, and endlessly dissected, debated, discussed on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and The New York Times have turned Americans into addicts, zombies, and crazed partisans deeply distressed about their country and wondering how long they can claim that theirs is the “greatest nation in the world”. White supremacists and militia members seek to kidnap the Michigan governor, and attach razor blades to the Vote Trump yard signs illegally posted in places where they are forbidden, and “progressive” athletes foolishly advocate the closing of prisons and the disbanding of police forces. 

Grandstanding and gamesmanship are the only two political gambits, and each side is playing those to the hilt. The Devil take the hindmost.  

Add to the political mix the issue of race, racial inequality, and police and community violence, and what we are witnessing are macabre dances, choreographed and enacted over the past six months, and a sudden surge of African American spokespersons, experts, and analysts appearing on TV and writing op-eds – as if to make up for decades of myopic whiteness deluge. Alas, what we hear from these African Americans is the same set of complaints, the same blinkered responses to issues of inequality, and the same attempts to shut out alternative voices. So, a Shelby Steele or a Thomas Sowell is rarely seen or heard, and thus options for rethinking and recalibrating society’s responses to problems of race, color, and inequality are either ignored or demonized. 

Twenty-two years ago, Michael Sandel, wrote in his book, “Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy,” that despite all of American successes, wealth and power, and progress on women’s and minority issues American politics was “…rife with discontent”. He observed that Americans were frustrated with government, and that there was a kind of societal unraveling and that people feared that they were “…losing control of the forces that govern our lives, and that the moral fabric of community—from neighborhood to nation….” Sandel blamed both Republicans and Democrats of not being able to “… inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that self-government requires”. Over the past two decades, this discontent has grown exponentially with political partisanship so acute that many Republicans and Democrats have stopped talking to each other and consider each other not as political rivals as much as irreconcilable enemies. 

Regarding race and racism, and how to analyze the problem and find solutions, Shelby Steele has been one of the very few Black “conservatives” who has written cogently and consistently on the matter. In a fine summary of Shelby Steele’s life and social philosophy, Samuel Kronen writes, “In the late ’60s, Steele went on to work in a slew of poverty programs as a part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The chaos he witnessed firsthand awakened his skepticism about the degree to which liberal policies could correct historical injustices”. Similar to what we see in India in terms of caste-based reservations and guarantees in public employment, the US too has Affirmative Action programs that have made only minor dents in the lives of the majority of African Americans. Kronen summarizes Steele’s observation about oppressed people and freedom: “Once a group of formerly oppressed people finally win concessions from the larger society, it can be experienced as a shock, trauma, or shame that throws its members back on their own inadequacies. The energies spent in pursuit of freedom are useless once it is obtained. There arises instead a powerful impulse to use identity as a means to power. If a newly liberated group convinces itself that it is still oppressed, the demands of freedom can be evaded with a clear conscience.” 

So, what does he offer in turn, which has been either brushed under the carpet or angrily denounced? How can African Americans overcome past injustice and grow in strength and confidence? Kronen paraphrases Steele: “… the greatest barrier to black advancement is the deficiency in human capital that emerged from past racism—the cultural and economic underdevelopment left over from 400 years of oppression”. He says that the “focus on white racism and black victimology” does not allow for any discussion about the underlying issues – and that the way out of this predicament and this unhealthy codependence is “individual and collective responsibility”. Racism is not the issue, he argues.

Kamala Harris claims to be Black but fails to articulate a thoughtful response to the allegations about “systemic racism” and offer a practical way out. Indian Americans who have joined in the Black Lives Matter campaign loudly assailing “systemic racism” in the country, yet demand that there be more relaxed rules to allow for immigrants, legal and illegal, to come to the country. The talk is all about rights and about entitlements, and little if nothing about duties and responsibilities. I even get reminders from progressives in India to watch Hasan Minaj talk about colorism in India! I have taught intercultural communication and interracial communication for thirty years, but I am reminded that I still have to learn a lot from the likes of Hasan Minaj, who, if I believe I am right, has married a woman who has lighter skin than his but who will grandstand about Indian “obsession” with “fair and light”. By Indian, here, he means Hindu, and not Christian, Muslim, Sikh, or any other “minority”.

Another challenge to diverse democracies is the matter of immigration and immigrants. The US is labeled a nation of immigrants, and there have been many debates about America as a “melting pot” and whether it should be a “melting pot” or a “salad bowl,” and whether immigrants should assimilate, must assimilate, should retain their culture, their language, and what that means. A lot of the assimilation debates circle around English language speaking abilities, the American work ethic, individual responsibility, political participation, and allegiance to the flag and nation. In an insightful essay, “Do we really want immigrants to assimilate?” Peter Skerry notes that assimilation and conflict go hand-in-hand, and that “because the accepted explanation for any negative response to immigrants is ‘racism,’ many reasonable and fair-minded individuals who might otherwise be tempted to disagree with immigration enthusiasts have been scared away from the topic. On the other hand, because racialization posits a community of interest between black Americans and immigrants who are ‘people of color,’ obvious competition and conflict between black Americans and immigrants (especially the sizable Hispanic population) have been downplayed, ignored, or simply denied”.

Twenty years later, nothing has changed. So, we have the strange combination of Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley (called the squad) claiming to be women of color and joining together to fight racism and offering solutions for the country’s problems. They are called “liberal” without querying what values they uphold and who they represent, and what kinds of compromises they can make and will make when they have to deal with “intra-color” conflict and competition. Joining hands with the “squad” are our own Pramila Jayapal, Kamala Harris, Ro Khanna and an army of Obama-era, Washington DC based political activists and players claiming to be “people of color” and labeling themselves “progressive” even as they distance themselves from Hindu American voters and their truly liberal values. In a peculiar, selfish, very predictable manner these folks will push for more Syrian immigration or more Mexican immigration or statehood for Palestine, and H1-B visas, and Silicon Valley hiring of Blacks as if these measures, in combination, would lead to a “color blind” America. 

 

Identity politics has made the American electorate more divided and brought together strange bedfellows whose quest for power masks their inherent and fundamental differences and conflicts. Whether democracies preserve diversity or create diversity has been very well presented by Jyotirmaya Tripathy and Sudarsan Padmanabhan, who argue that “in democratic polities, disparate cultural practices are often converted into identity categories, with disturbing implications for national identity, constitutionalism, political governance and citizenship”. Alas, in the era of Trump, especially, where politics and public discourse are bounded and marked by identity and personality clashes rather than undergirded and framed by policy matters or political principles, the American voter is deeply divided and the electorate very queasy at the outcome, whoever wins, or worse yet, if there is a delay in declaring the results. Compounding all this is the pandemic, for which we better find an antidote soon lest the greatest nation in the world becomes a fumbling, second rate, barely governable state.  

Ramesh Rao is a professor of communication studies at Columbus State University, Georgia, USA. He is the co-author of “Intercultural Communication: The Indian Context” and the author of a handful of books on Indian politics and society. He is editor of IndiaFacts, a portal that publishes commentaries and analyses of Hinduphobia in the media and academia.

Tags :

• US Elections65

• Share on Social Media

• Follow us on Social Media