of course, he is Indian-American. It was only a matter of time
\nbefore race came into the picture. Christopher Orr of The New Republic
\ntheorized that Americans can accept a nerdy black man, but not a nerdy
\nIndian because Indians were never cool anyway. Ann Althouse of the
\nUniversity of Wisconsin Law School suggested yesterday that the
\nreaction to Jindal and his speech might be racist: “If there’s someone
\nof a different race, and you just have this gut feeling that
\nsomething’s not quite right, why are you so confident that it’s not
\ncoming from racism?”<\/p>\n
But if we are uneasy with Bobby Jindal, it is not because we’re a
\nnation of racists, it’s because we are observing a man who seems to be
\nuneasy with his own race.<\/p>\n
While it hasn’t stopped him from taking campaign money from South
\nAsians–I attended an Indian-sponsored fundraiser in Los Angeles some
\nyears ago when he was running for governor for the first time–Jindal
\nhas downplayed his ethnic background throughout his political life. He
\nchanged his Indian name during childhood and, against his father’s
\nwishes, he converted from Hinduism to Christianity. When the
\nTimes-Picayune tried to go to India to cover his Punjabi roots, his
\nfamily did not cooperate. And on Sunday night, when Morley Safer asked
\nJindal if he experienced racial tension growing up in Baton Rouge, the
\ngovernor responded, “Not at all. You know, this has been a great place
\nto grow up. The great thing about the people of Louisiana is that they
\naccept you based on who you are.” Safer pointed out this was hard to
\nbelieve in a state where 40% of the population voted for Ku Klux Klan
\nleader David Duke not so long ago. “We were raised as Americans. We
\nwere raised as Louisianans,” said Jindal’s wife, Supriya when Safer
\nasked them both if they maintained Indian traditions in their home.
\n“Not too many,” they both agreed.<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“By changing his name from Piyush to Bobby and by converting from
\nHinduism to Christianity, Jindal has repeatedly distanced himself from
\nhis Indian ethnicity and his family’s Hindu faith,” says Varun Soni,
\nDean of Religious Life at University of Southern California, and the
\nfirst Hindu dean of a major American University. “But now that Jindal
\nis being touted as the ‘Republican Obama,’ his identity as an
\nIndian-American may suddenly be politically advantageous.” Maybe this
\nis why Jindal awkwardly wedged in the canned comment about his family
\n“from a distant land,” and at least part of the reason he’s become the
\ngolden boy in a party of white Christian men.<\/p>\n
So now the GOP wants to update his image, and, by association, their
\nown. With President Obama peppering race issues with elegant
\nintrospection, Jindal suddenly has to answer questions about something
\nhe has long glossed over. Perhaps this is the disconnect–the
\nweirdness–that people are sensing. There may be valid reasons why
\nJindal has changed himself from Piyush into Bobby, but people can sense
\nthe ambivalence, and that ambivalence was on full display last week in
\nhis speech. In the Obama age, a brown man who cannot or will not
\narticulate his relationship to his heritage (aside from vague
\nplatitudes about the American dream) makes Americans uneasy. Today,
\ntransparency is touted as a virtue. But Bobby Jindal creates confusion
\nin the minds of Americans who watch him: they sense self-deception.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Now, I just lauded the fact that the muslim American community is among the most assimilated of religious groups<\/a>. However that assimilation was not at the expense of religious or ethnic identity. It seems that Jindal has not just assimilated but has rejected his old ethnic identity outright. There isn’t anything wrong with this, though the sudden GOP embrace of his ethnicity reeks of tokenism. However, in comparison to Obama, the contrast is clear as day – for Obama, race and ethnicity are issues to be acknowledged and embraced, whereas for Jindal they are things to be denied. People noticed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A post-racial politics means being able to talk about race rather than ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist. The clearest indicator of a (non-white) politician’s approach to racial issues is their name. Consider that Barack Hussein Obama once went by the name “Barry” in his identity-confused youth, but took the oath of office as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":165,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[233,26,126],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-identify-yourself","tag-bobby-jindal","tag-politics","tag-racism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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City of Brass is his weblog, which was founded in 2002 under the name UNMEDIA. He is a co-founder of the annual Brass Crescent Awards. The name City of Brass refers to the Story of the City of Brass in the Thousand and One Nights, and the poem by Rudyard Kipling of the same name: Here was a people whom, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion; And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust. -- Thousand and One Nights, Story of the City of Brass IN A land that the sand overlays, the ways to her gates are untrod, A multitude ended their days whose fates were made splendid by God, Till they grew drunk and were smitten with madness and went to their fall, And of these is a story written: but Allah Alone knoweth all! -- Rudyard Kipling, The City of Brass (1909)"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}