Bias, Indian Style

Years ago, a Chinese-American friend mentioned that an African family had moved into our New Jersey neighborhood. “There go our property values,” he concluded. Hardly original thinking, but at the time I was amused at how quickly a recent immigrant was ready to pick and choose which Americans should be permitted to live next door to him.

I was reminded of this exchange last week, when my outraged dad sent me the latest anti-Obama email that had landed in his inbox. The arguments are invariably weak and inaccurate: the latest insisted (incorrectly) that Senator Obama’s first job was as a "civil rights activist," dismissing it as hardly "a productive job." Others seek to “expose” the senator’s Kenyan and Muslim heritage, usually by attaching pictures of his paternal relatives without comment. And to a particular audience, the images of dark-skinned men and women in native garb certainly speak for themselves.

But it’s not this clunky racism that troubles me. It’s that these emails are being circulated by fellow Indian-Americans. Why would these Indians choose to distribute (and thus implicitly endorse) xenophobic sentiments which could easily be turned against them? Don’t they realize that to many Americans, names like “Amol” or “Rahul” sound just as alien as “Osama”? That Governor Bobby Jindal’s relatives back in Punjab look just as foreign as Senator Obama’s Luo brethren? Perhaps they need to be reminded that if it wasn't for the "civil rights activists," we'd still be drinking from separate water fountains and attending separate-but-equal schools. Make no mistake which would be assigned to us.

After eight years of ineptitude and arrogance from a man who knew little about the world and lacked the curiosity to learn about it, President Bush’s successor will assume office with America’s global relationships and image in tatters. If elected, Obama’s childhood in Indonesia will help him put a human face to people that American foreign policy too often treats as “collateral damage.” To most politicians, “liberty” and “freedom” are just words in a teleprompter, but Obama’s extended stays in Kenya would’ve ingrained their value through exposure to a society that lacks both. Consider how much harder it would be for cave-dwelling fanatics to cast America as Satan if it chooses a man from African and Muslim stock as its leader. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to try a new kind of leader, especially after a President—the son of an ambassador, CIA director, Vice President and President— who only visited four countries before his inauguration. I’d been to four countries by the time I was four, and my dad didn’t even have access to Air Force One.

Rather than take issue with Obama on substance, these Indians are unintentionally revealing their own closely-held biases. “We might be a minority, but we’re better than those other minorities,” they say to themselves. In doing so, they turn their back on the inclusive ethos that welcomed them to America and enabled them to so quickly achieve success in a foreign country. I’d suggest that we avoid judging our neighbors by the color of their skin, and instead by the content of their character—lest others begin to do the same to us.