By the way, I had lunch today with a friend who is a life-long Democrat and who wants to vote for Nikki Haley. Reason: because she’s not old. Nikki Haley, I mean. The friend is in her seventies.
That would be the absolute first for this highly politicized person to vote for a Republican. She’s even willing to disregard Haley’s anti-abortion stand.
I’m telling you, people, normies are different.
It will sting, though. The first female president who is also “a woman of color.” That’s a big boo-boo.
I mean, Haley is white but for the “one drop rule” Dems, she’ll count.
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Is she white? Her parents are both from India. She’s certainly paler than some people of such origin, but she’s most definitely of Punjabi descent, not European. If you want to say that people like her are about as “of color” as people from Iran, Central Asia, etc., well, fair enough. Our racial classifications are all arbitrary, real people span a spectrum of appearances, and all ethnic/racial groups have much more mixed origins than any “I’m pure-blooded such-and-such!” boasters claim.
Still, at the end of the day, her ancestry is not from the places normally associated with “white” in our racial bean-counting, her ethnic kindred mostly look “non-white” (though of course every group has a range of appearances), and her full name and Sikh religious upbringing surely did mark her as Different to the other kids around her growing up. She has lived as a non-white person in America…and is nonetheless conservative. That’s something that will drive Dems nuts, and probably motivate them to try to find the technicality to say she’s NOT REALLY A PERSON OF COLOR.
We’ll probably get to hear some liberals explain that people from northern India share common ancestry with Europeans (true) and have been called “Aryan” at times (sure), so she’s really white supremacist, or something. They try to deny all the other conservative people of color Real Person of Color(TM) status, so they’ll do it to her too, if she’s the nominee.
But the GOP is idiotically wedded to Trump.
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Oh, I keep assuming she’s Greek!
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Everywhere in the world, white refers to how you look. It has nothing to do with origin or descent. This idea that Meghan Markle, for example, is black because her mother is black is very bizarre to non-US people.
I have Hispanic students who ask me, “Professor, in my country I’m white but in America I’m told that I’m not.” Then I start explaining about the one-drop rule, and it’s all very embarrassing.
Of course, every culture has its own way of doing things but the American understanding of race has already resulted in lots of weird stuff. Maybe it’s time to rethink it.
That’s fair. But, looking at her, I would still say that if she were standing next to a typical Anglo-Saxon (still America’s dominant cultural strain) she would be regarded as dark. Toss in her full name and Sikh upbringing and I guarantee the other kids in South Carolina regarded her as Different. (I spent a year of my childhood in South Carolina and just being Catholic marked me as Not A Real Christian to certain kids.)
She’s grown up in a different category in our society. That is what matters. And yet she STILL turned out conservative. The fact that she could grow up in some sense marginalized and yet not be a lefty marks her as a traitor. Liberals would NEVER celebrate her as a Woman of Color. They would instead insist on her whiteness even more adamantly than you do.
Hell, there are people who insist that she’s in denial about racism because she says her family made an unforced choice to use her middle name Nikki. (Which apparently means “Little One” in Punjabi. Gee, I have no idea why a family would refer to a little girl that way. Gotta be to avoid racism. Gotta be.)
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A relevant Soviet joke.
Cold War. Americans deploy a spy into the USSR. He spent years in training, learned the language, the culture, the customs. A typical Soviet wardrobe, everything.
So finally he crosses the border somewhere in Western Ukraine. He’s walking through a tiny village, prepared to make contact with a local. An ancient grandma is walking towards him.
“Good morning!” says the spy in a perfect, unaccented Ukrainian.
“Good morning, American spy,” calmly says the grandma.
“How? How could you possibly know?!?” asks the befuddled spy.
“‘Cause you’re black, son,” she says.
Whatever the other merits of Nikki Haley, I’m not particularly interested in “owning” the libs by playing the lib game of identity politics and I’m surprised you find it appealing in this instance when you’re usually even less interested in this stuff than me. If people want to argue for her on the basis of electability, policy, etc., I’ll listen. But I don’t care one way or the other about electing the first woman of color president or the first transgender senator or whatever else.
Obviously, this identity game does nothing for me personally but I really wouldn’t mind bringing up “the first woman president” at a faculty meeting and just seeing them squirm.
I know I should be above this pettiness but I’m not a big enough person.
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I don’t like the identity game, but I dislike a lot of things that can still have some value in the right dose. I do think firsts matter, in that they prove that we can get beyond them mattering.
The first woman president won’t necessarily be any better or worse than her male predecessors, but she will demonstrate that the public is ready and willing to do something that was once unthinkable but really ought to be unremarkable. Women can lead. Or fail. They can make good decisions and bad ones. They should be considered like anyone else. Their sex shouldn’t matter, but the only way to prove it doesn’t matter is to see one of them win eventually, which means it will matter that it happens.
But once it happens we will then have to let it stop mattering. We will have to judge her performance as we would judge anyone else’s. And since judging presidents is so subjective, we will disagree on her performance, but we should disagree for normal reasons. We should disagree because we make different assumptions about the long-term consequences (beyond her 4-8 year term) that will play out for her decisions on the global stage, or because we have different policy preferences in domestic affairs or different values or whatever. Same as we disagree over male presidents. Not because she has two X chromosomes and we either celebrate that fact or are fed up with celebrating it.
In other words, we should be glad that a woman won, but disagree on normal grounds over whether that particular woman should have won.
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So did I mention that some of my family in the UK crossed the floor to vote with Oswald Mosley?
[watches the identitarians hate on me even more for being “fascist-adjacent”]
🙂
Go on, the hate gives me power, it means I have to do fewer rounds on the rat wheel for exercise.
So hate me for voting for Donaldus Trump Imperator Rex, not because I believe in “our democracy” but instead because I believe I like to watch these people squirm. :-)
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OT: immigrants whose heads are stuck in another country and how to prevent that
Aww. I like his mom. She seems great.
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It’s great for him but I don’t feel that way at all. I’m an immigrant, and I’ll always be an immigrant. I stick out as a sore thumb everywhere except on campus. All of my friends here are immigrants. Fifteen years in the same town, and I literally made zero local friends. The last time I had a non-immigrant friend was in grad school.
Everybody is very sweet. But it never goes beyond superficial pleasantries. Around locals, absolutely anything I say has an impact of a bomb going off. People just stare. And I tried. God knows I did. At this point, I’ve mostly stopped because I don’t see the point anymore.
The friend I talked to yesterday is an immigrant from Canada. She says that only now, in retirement, at the age of 75, she made local friends. I’m friends with her but not with her daughter who’s my age, lives locally and has kids Klara’s age. We’ve both tried for years but it’s just so uncomfortable. She says something, I react, and once again, it’s obvious I said the wrong thing.
It’s not anybody’s fault. It’s simply what it means to be an immigrant. Other immigrants tell me, “I don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t have this problem.” And then I ask, “When was the last time a non-immigrant invited you over to their house? Or out for lunch? Or coffee? Anything?” There’s always a silence after that.
OK, rant over. It’s a bit of a sore point.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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