Uncle Swami by Vijay Prashad

Author:Vijay Prashad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

Compulsions of Ethnicity

Sonal Shah, India Abroad Person of the Year, 2003.

Bobby Jindal, India Abroad Person of the Year, 2005.

Indra Noori, India Abroad Person of the Year, 2006.

Nikki Haley, India Abroad Person of the Year, 2010.

You know you’ve assimilated when one of your own is charged with white-collar crime. The trial of Galleon’s CEO Raj Rajaratnam was the final straw. The home base of South Asian America is now secure: we too can be crooks. Rajaratnam was charged with insider trading, the classic crime of post-1981 America. One of his accomplices is Rajat Gupta, one of the great gurus at McKinsey and then on the board of Goldman Sachs, who is worth millions of dollars. In the stratosphere of finance capital, $1 million is not enough. All the pinstripes want to add another zero to their portfolios. Greed is as important as dignity.

An even clearer sign of our political arrival is when a politician who shares ancestry with an immigrant community runs for and wins office without any fealty to or even obligation to that community. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is the classic case, but so too is South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and, in a different way, White House insider Sonal Shah. These are politicians who are not accountable to their community but nonetheless often stand in for it. And because they stand in for it, there is a sentiment among many of us that despite their views, they must be defended. Those are the compulsions of ethnicity.

By the compulsions of ethnicity, the community has to be supportive of the politician or the crook (in some cases the same person). Their standing reflects on the community even as they have no organic link to it.

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