Do Indians at a Texas football game count as real Americans?
Texas Republican Bo French made this question a matter of political debate earlier this month when he criticized a large contingent of Indian students at the UT-Ohio State game. French and his supporters contended that these Indians were not true Americans. His critics insisted that that’s a racist thing to say and argued these students represented the wonders of assimilation.
The Washington Post editorial board fell in love with the brown student section:
Where French sees a “problem,” we see an American success story. The scene that angered him neatly illustrates the power of the melting pot and the immigrant desire to embrace traditional American customs and culture. The students pictured are probably second- or third-generation Americans, taking part in a quintessential American pastime.
National Review’s editorial board claimed the photo that upset French “bears every possible visible sign of assimilation.”
College football is one of the most uniquely American of institutions and is unknown in India. Indian Americans are participating fully in U.S. life, generally know English, and have high intermarriage rates. Unless the test of assimilation is being white, they’re doing it.
A Daily Wire op-ed written by an Indian reiterated this sentiment and added that the truly alien element were those Americans upset at the Indians in burnt orange “Today’s far-right nativists claim to defend American identity, but they’re importing the European blood-and-soil politics that America has rejected,” Anang Mtital wrote.
Much of the Online Right will reject these statements as pure cuckoldery. But they do reflect the views of the American mainstream, and are worth taking seriously simply for that reason. Debates over American identity and assimilation have to account for what the people actually think, not just how we wish them to think. Mittal is wrong to believe Americans never held to an ascriptive identity, but there is a point that the majority no longer holds to this today. Most Americans would see those Indian college football fans as assimilated. Those who disagree would count as Dissenting Americans rather than as members of the Silent Majority.
This of course doesn’t mean the New Right’s political project is hopeless, nor that Americans will forever uphold a thin standard for assimilation. There’s nothing wrong with being a Dissenting American considering the current state of our country. But the majority is largely fine with it, and that has to be accounted for when trying to make change in the realm of real-world politics.
Our standards for who can and can’t be an American have changed over time. At the Founding, as our first naturalization act clearly stated, only free white persons of good character could be full members of the body politic. Socially, it was expected that true Americans would not only be white, but also Protestant and northern European. Strict immigration laws were passed in the 1920s largely to keep out southern and eastern Europeans. Many powerful politicians would proudly proclaim America a white and/or Anglo-Saxon country.
But all that changed after World War II. Civil rights legislation and liberalization of immigration laws helped cement Americanism as an inclusive, colorblind identity. The vast majority of Americans have been content with it up until woke challenged it over the last decade. Civic nationalism proved so popular that the historic American people didn’t even bother seeing themselves as anything but plain Americans. In the past, they would’ve identified as Anglo-Saxons. But few have positively claimed such an identity over the last 80 years. Many forgot that they were even Anglos and started identifying with whatever was their most recent immigrant stock.
The idea that anyone can be an American is a popular notion. Normies love hearing stories of exotic foreigners turning into NFL-loving, cowboy hat-wearing Americans. In their view, whiteness is no longer synonymous with Americanness. Many leftists and many foreigners still think the two are entwined, but the average normie would vigorously disagree.
The old standards of assimilation are gone. As polling and social mores attest, there are now five basic traits most Americans think you should have to count as an American.
They are:
Be a citizen
Speak English
Abide by the values spelled out in the Constitution (this one is obviously subject to individual interpretation on proper abidance)
Participate in the market economy
Follow American sports
That’s basically it. By those standards, the Indian football fans would count as Americans.
Bo French and his defenders would obviously disagree. They want a stricter standard for Americanism, but what that might be is not exactly clear.
The most honest argument, as National Review pointed out, was to make it about race. Some went that far, but most French defenders knew that would violate the strong taboo against racialism. So they doubled-down on claiming the students were unassimilated foreigners when the evidence suggested otherwise.
While the criticism of the Indian students was very popular on X, I doubt it connected with most normies. There is growing consternation in Texas to the sudden deluge of Indians in suburbs across the state, but it’s still not enough for them to embrace explicit racialism. Some normies would find it strange that so many Indians were at the game, yet the majority aren’t that upset by it. They would be more outraged about being called racists than seeing Indians at a college football game.
Mainstream immigration criticism tries to avoid overt appeals to race realism to allay normie concerns. Critics need to point out how migrants bring crime, live off welfare, don’t bother learning English, steal jobs, become terrorists, or even eat beloved pets to provide normies concrete reasons to oppose immigration besides racial considerations.
This becomes difficult with Indians, a group with low crime rates, high English proficiency, tremendous wealth, and little predisposition to become jihadis. H1b visa holders do take American jobs, but, as I’ve argued previously, this doesn’t seem to connect as much with voters as warning about how illegals are taking blue collar jobs. Indian criticism always veers into racialism, which limits its political utility. Politicians aren’t going to turn into Jared Taylor on the campaign trail.
One of the New Right’s primary projects is to fashion a thicker American identity that will also be politically appealing. The old civic nationalism is deemed insufficient to advance immigration restriction and combat wokeness. Hence, we get Heritage Americanism, a term heavily thrown around in the French-Indian War. The term attempts to reverse engineer an identity for the historic American people. As previously mentioned, these people usually don’t have an identity beyond being an American and, as polling shows, only a small minority connect Americanness to ethnicity or race. Heritage American aims to offer an ethno-cultural identity to these people. Like Indian criticism, it’s popular online but it doesn’t seem to have made the leap to the real world. The vast majority of “Heritage Americans” don’t see themselves as such and still subscribe to a civic nationalist understanding of American identity.
The closest real-world equivalent to Heritage American would be “white.” But the very reason we have this term is because whites reel from overt white identitarianism. Enter Heritage American, which gives its users a more socially acceptable term than white. The problem is that no one uses that phrase outside the internet. But it at least doesn’t make people immediately tense up like “white” does.
The self-proclaimed Heritage Americans stand athwart the mainstream, tweeting at them to embrace their identity. But the average American, so far, is content with the identity they already have. Obviously, that’s an issue for the Right. Rather than inculcating a thicker identity among the general population, the Heritage American posting further reinforces the outsider mindset among the Right. They become what I call Dissenting Americans. Much of the New Right strongly disagrees with the majority’s opinions on race, religion, democracy, and what America should be like. There’s a good reason why normie is a slur within these circles.
There’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with the majority. Most of those reading this would count as Dissenting Americans, as would your humble writer. But it’s necessary to adjust our outlook in light of being a minority. The Silent Majority is no more. You have a rather bluepilled majority that doesn’t see the world the way we do. They can be persuaded to support a number of good policies, such as immigration restriction and banning affirmative action. One should just never mistake the normies as being more based than they actually are. Trying to force feed red pills to voters can prove unwise, as Bo French may learn in November.
The project to create a thicker American identity isn’t hopeless. But it’s something that will have to happen organically. We won’t post our way into one.
Order Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.
I’m not reading this but great title