Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me this morning made reference to a recent foot-in-mouth remark by White House Spokesman Tony Snow (who used to be at NPR):
“One of the problems with NPR is that there is so much political correctness that if you’ve got a name that looks like it was made up by Rudyard Kipling , you’ve got a better chance of getting hired. I’m a white guy named Tony Snow for heaven’s sake. That’s as white as it goes.” [Link]
This remark got very little coverage by either mainstream or blog media and took some digging to find. It seems to have slipped by most people’s radar screens.
I’m aghast at the very casualness of the race baiting involved in that sentence. Oh yes, those brown people with the funny names, the ones who are taking over NPR by virtue of their skin color, not their talent (How many desis are at NPR anyway?). At the same time, I recognize that it is clearly less of a deal than Joe Biden’s recent remarks, which to me were just a minor kerfuffle I recognize that this is a minor rather than major political sin.
Still, Snow’s remarks are eminently cringeworthy and the sort of thing that brown people should both remember and remind him about, just so that he learns the utter gaucheness of what he said.
“Mr. Snow, this is Somini Sengupta from the Times … one of those reporters with a “Kipling Name” … I’d like to ask you about the President’s policy on …”
how did that one slip by the intrepid mr. goyal?
Snow worked for NPR?! I agree about the political correctness at NPR though. But it’s vile of Snow to use the Kipling example to drive home the point as if the few brown folk who do work for NPR aren’t simply the best people around for the job. He couldn’t have chosen a worse example and I hope he comes to grief for saying such a thing.
But guys, isn’t Snow just simply more entertaining to watch as White House Press Secretary when he’s giving those conferences? My friends think I’m weird when I tell them that I actually turn on C-span to watch these things, but this dude is seriously funny!
Snow’s idiocy aside, how is NPR too politically correct?
Here’s something on that…Link
I don’t think it’s a less of a deal at all. Biden’s remarks were naive and annoying, but they were made in a spirit of wide-eyed amazement at the changes in his region–not anger/resentment/blame, which is what Snow’s comment seems to be in.
I generally find NPR’s approach to fairness very mechanized. This is probably a logical consequence of their concern for sentiments but often ends up distorting representation. By contrast the Wall Street Journal, to take an equally prestigious example, comes across as a lot bolder since theyÂ’re more concerned with material consequences and not sentimental ones. In this sense the right beats the left at their own game in a variety of ways – theyÂ’ll hire anyone whoÂ’s good and donÂ’t allow themselves to be easily muzzled. But for all their talk of free speech and equal opportunity, the politically correct types often end up working against their own principles. I have long ceased to find NPR, PBS, and NYT to be stimulating. Just because they’re the best we have doesn’t make them worthy of respect.
I have found that most people that cry about organizations being too politically correct are really crying about them being just plain correct.
OOOOOhhhhhhh!!
Talk about putting one’s ffot in one’s mouth..
How insecure can folks get….?
Okay, I’m a loyal reader of this blog, and I applaud those who take the time to keep us informed on all things South Asian. I’m also one who is against lame stereotyping and ignorance, but I have to join AK here and point out that the blog, and its readers have spent a lot of energy and time dissecting the fact that people in public positions sometimes say stupid things that reveal their ignorance, and maybe even a little latent racism. Point made and taken. Let’s move on. There are a lot of really big things happening in the world as we speak. Tony Snow’s comment is not one of them.
Move on. SM is getting to be more and more of a circle-jerk about mildly offensive happenings thrown into sharp relief, overwrought and desperate references to everything even slightly ‘brown’ that manage to make even those indian pulp-fiction covers look bad, and the blogger’s personal irrelevantly crammed into the intro of every post about anything.
It’s why I moved on to 3QD.
*mundane happenings/details of the bloggers’ personal lives
No. Point not made. Point not taken. Not yet time to fucking move nowhere.
Good for you. Parting is such sweet sorrow.
It’s a blog in which the writers give their personal perspective/experience on things. That’s the whole point. If you don’t like it don’t read it, move on yourself, and don’t bother posting your own personal circle jerk results in response.
This is what I said:
How are we in disagreement? I pointed out that Snow’s remarks demonstrated very poor judgement on his part but that I did not think they constituted a capital offense. And there was nary a personal aside here, although most of our readers enjoy it when we do make personal interjections.
Protesting a bit much, are we?
Saheli, ITA. I think Biden’s words lack the obvious bitterness and not-so-latent-negativity of Snow’s spew and ultimately, I think the Senator from the first state isn’t a racist foe of our community. Snow, however, sounds like an ass and what’s sad is that he has such a visible role, such an amplified voice.
Sriram, I’ve had the opportunity to meet both AK and you IRL; I’ve had fun with and respect you both, immensely. I agree that this is not as big a deal as other things, but the very fact that these posts do get attention via comments or links proves that there are others who are interested in such coverage.
SM will never expose every injustice b/c we are neither constrained by the expectations which are placed on MSM nor endowed with their time and resources. We each write about what interests us and for the most part, the imperfect system works, because our readership is as dynamic and different as our voices.
If someone doesn’t like this post, I hope they scroll on; I, however, will look forward to and if it happens will definitely blog about Somini Sengupta or some other brown reporter calling out the White House Spokesman on his douchebaggery.
We never said we were either qualified or attempting to speak FOR our community; we just want to speak TO them.
I am just as quick to take offense as the next guy, but that white guy’s bellyaching about his dull white name when the exotic names are getting the hired struck me as quite funny – in an SM sort of way.
It’s worse than hypocritical to simultaneously advocate for affirmative action, while considering it racist to bring up the fact that such programs exist. Now whether you cannot go into an NPR office unless you have a slight Indian accent, I havenÂ’t the slightest, but itÂ’s certainly within the realm of possibility that an (in)famously left-leaning, government subsidized institution like NPR may practice this form of racial discrimination. And Snow is within his rights to bring it up, especially since he is a member of the most colorblind administration in US history.
Divya is correct to worry that Browns working for NPR may be stigmatized as affirmative action cases as opposed to “simply the best people around for the job” like Rice or Powell. But the way to ensure this is for the US supreme court to finally strike down such programs as a violation of the ’68 civil rights act or the 14th amendment.
Manju,
Since when did leftists and the PC crowd start to get worried about hypocrisy? You do make me smile 🙂 Logical consistency regarding issues has hardly been their forte.
You give too much credence to people who not only correlate but also find uni-directional causality of “Mumbai Bomb Blasts” after reading an article from ToI and projecting their preconceived ideas about Gujarat and its people on the current incident.
My advice: just chill and watch the fun.
Regards, Aninda
Anindo/a,
Start a blog. If even two people read it or give a damn what you have to say about any issue then I think you will be qualified to give Manju or anyone else advice.
Also do a search on Google News and you will see that MANY of the papers are now looking into the Gujarat connection.
If you have an axe to grind then please don’t do it on Ennis’ thread.
Thanks.
How did you know that I do not have a blog? As usual, jumping the gun! No, I do not have any axe to grind. I do not want to hijack this thread also. I was passing a comment as an observer and just cautioned Manju!
Regards,
Ah – I see, Tony Snow isn’t racist, he’s correct. Riiiiiiight.
Now if Snow wasn’t a hypocrite, he’d actually be all for affirmative action. After all, the President didn’t get into boarding school, Yale and Harvard business school based on his grades (he had a C average in college!). He got in because of affirmative action for white people – legacies! He never would have made it this far in a truly blind system. Having been admitted, his connections have served him well for the rest of his life – things like Skull & Bones. So clearly, if affirmative action for white people can take a dummy like that and give him the social connections he needs to become President, then it must work!
Manju, as usual I find myself having to deconstruct some of your comments :):
Yes, NPR is government subsidized. 2% of its funding in fact. The rest is from private donors and listeners like me who believe in contributing to a superior news source out of our own pockets.
I doubt anybody believes that NPR’s reporters are there because of affirmative action. Not only is their reporting far superior to almost every other outlet, but even Karl Rove himself has said that he is a fan. Also in a survey by the University of Maryland a few years back, NPR listeners were the most likely to know that there were no WMD ever found in Iraq (which many people still don’t know).
I won’t even offer a rebutal. I will just giggle like a school girl at that one.
Didn’t mean to be too offensive in my previous comment. There are two things that I can’t sit idly by and watch be insulted if I have anything to say about it. The first is The Bill of Rights and the second one is NPR (also is someone talks smack about the space program 🙂
Ahhh, an Aggie. Now I understand everything. You can come to our SM Houston meet-up in February and tell me all about uni-directional causality.
Abhi,
Thanks for inviting me to the meet-up. I will keep that in mind. Yeah, I am an Aggie and I do bleed maroon 🙂
Regards,
3QD rocks!
Yes, I’m a regular reader of 3QD too. I can’t see that there is any competition between us though – we do very different things.
What the deuce is 3QD?
Thank you ANNA, the feeling is mutual.
Fair enough.
I guess my real beef is that a)we are talking about a Press Sec. who works for Dubya’s administration, who was a newscaster on FOX. Should this really be a surprise to anyone? Why spend the energy on pointing out the “douchebaggery” when it’s to be expected?
I totally understand. But, I think the bloggers at SM need to appreciate that, like it or not, they have a fairly broad readership at this point and exercise a certain amount of influence/persuasive power in the South Asian community. How much influence? I’m not in a position to say. But, I do feel that you all have the ability to moderate debate across a fairly broad spectrum of people, and you could focus the debate on more pressing matters.
That said, I’d like to reiterate that I have a tremendous amount of respect for what you are doing, but this is just one point upon which I felt the need to voice some disagreement.
I totally understand. But, I think the bloggers at SM need to appreciate that, like it or not, they have a fairly broad readership at this point and exercise a certain amount of influence/persuasive power in the South Asian community. How much influence? I’m not in a position to say. But, I do feel that you all have the ability to moderate debate across a fairly broad spectrum of people, and you could focus the debate on more pressing matters.
I think if the SM bloggers were to adopt the ‘pressing matter’ standard, there would almost be no posts under their ‘Humor’ category.
Are our expectations so low that we shouldn’t even note such behavior when it occurs? I expect more professional behavior from people whose salaries I pay with my taxes. Furthermore, while this sort of behavior doesn’t surprise you, there is a sizable contingent of desi republicans … some of whom read SM … who might be surprised.
More importantly, Sriram, it’s not like these stories are crowding out the types of stories that you care about. We’ve always covered a wide range of topics – big news, little news, culture, arts, science, etc. We’re eclectic and have always been – it’s one of the things that draws readers to the site. But, it’s not like we’re covering Snow and ignoring some major policy debate.
So honestly, I don’t see what your beef is.
Furthermore, while this sort of behavior doesn’t surprise you, there is a sizable contingent of desi republicans … some of whom read SM … who might be surprised.
The Desi republican ragheads are too busy camouflaging their head gear so as not to get outed while they attend the Conservative Action Political Conference to listen to their political gods.
Meanwhile, back in India, kids grow up reading Kipling and Churchill (usually in high school). Both those worthies had nothing but contempt for browns.
Uh-oh. Abhi, I definitely hope this meetup is in the Fall!
Manju, you make a point about NPR’s excessive political correctness when discussing opinions and suchlike (and that cult link is beyond hillarious), but the manner in which you express your opinion is much more acceptable (and academic even) when compared to Snow’s statement. Further, there is nothing wrong with the news (opinion-free information of the world) that NPR broadcasts.
For all NPR’s (supposed or real) political correctness, they are much more palatable than the fair and balanced version on Fox News. NYT, however, is an entirely different proposition, IMO. They leave no stone unturned to appear politically correct. Their positions on the nuclear deal with India, for example (admittedly, I have a bias there), are ridiculous. NPT itself is a big joke, for that matter, but that’s a whole different issue.
Do you get paid by someone, Manju?
He’s not just “bringing it up”; he’s complaining about it in a fairly tawdry way and attempting to discredit NPR in the process (Kipling is the one who wrote “White man’s burden”), which is a bit “eh” for someone who’s the press secretary for the White House. I assume you’re smart enough to understand the distinction, which makes me even more annoyed at the fact that you willfully choose not to.
Again, I assume you’re smart enough to understand that stocking your cabinet with center-right to extreme right conservatives of various races doesn’t mean that you’re “colorblind.” It more likely means, in light of other evidence like the 2000 Republican Convention, that they seek to appoint people of different races to appeal to certain voting segments (e.g. Latinos; centrist White people who are turned off by overt bigotry; etc.). So why pretend otherwise?
Do you actually know any desi people who work at NPR? I know two. I don’t know what they think about their work environment, but I certainly won’t put feelings in their minds. As opposed to you.
I think there are very legitimate issues to raise about affirmative action and many other things related to this issue; but you have to do it in a fair way. For example, I’m more concerned with whether people who are actually victims of social disempowerment are actually benefiting from these programs or whether people like wealthy college educated South Asians and or conservative gay White men are displacing others who have actually experienced social disempowerment in more profound ways in their lives and would do more to address it (e.g. Black people, people who grew up poor, non-English speakers, non elite-education grads or people who didn’t graduate from college at all, etc.) I’m also more concerned with American-centeredness of these programs; as if someone who grows up in a village in Nigeria isn’t at least as disadvantaged.
But of course these whole discussions seems impossible to have with you because you would skew your argument as above in order to make it impossible to conduct an honest conversation. Which is really a shame.
Saurav:
Armstong Williams has been slipping me a few bucks.
Ah, but this is the brilliant Mr. Tony Snow White’s cryptic point. Affirmative Action is the new White Man’s Burden.
I’m not that smart. I honestly beleive the Rice/Powell appointments were colorblind, and are therefore a momentous milestone in America’s battle w/ her original sin. But it’s also proven to be a great missed opportunity, as our educational and civil rights establishment, for political reasons, are not using them to show our black youths that reaching the top in America is w/i their grasp. By all accounts, Rice is extremely close to bush (she even accidentally called him “my husband” at a georgetown dinner to the shock of the other guests–google it i’m serious) and Powell had stature unmatched by anyone at the time of his nomination. Clarence Thomas, b/c he clearly was not the best for the job, fits your description. He was a token and a political stunt, despite the fact that he’s proven (in retrospect) to be a great justice.
Interesting use of the word conservative. Presumably, it be OK if Liberal gay white men benefitted from Affirmative Action. Is this the real agenda?
Tell me how you really feel.
3QD = http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/
http://www.movietalkies.com/movies/index.asp?MovieId=11059
I know this is not the appropriate thread, but did not know where else to ask. The above link proves that Dharamndra made a sequel to Sholay with Rajendra Kumar, called Do Sholay. Does anyone have any image of the film, scenes etc? I just find it hard to believe?
Thanks, Masale.Wallah. I must agree with Ennis, it is very different from SM. Upon reflection, the uncouth criticism lobbed by “Seriously” is seriously flawed. What on earth does he/she/it expect from a blog with such a specific focus? Of course it refers to everything even slightly brown.
Sriram, I think that perhaps you might have misunderstood what my point was in that discussion — though I’m sure I contributed to that by being a touch too flippant and unclear in the first place. My point was never that we should ignore these kinds of comments or excuse them. In fact, I actually think that if anything we need more dissection — that is, more dissection and articulation of what exactly is the problem with these statements or any statements that people might make before we move on. In the Biden discussion, my concern was that we were just assuming and asserting the comment was “offensive,” but without explaining and articulating more — in a contextualized way — about why that may be so. In other words, without enough dissection. I think that more dissection is what will help us educate folks, evaluate how much these statements should matter (and why), and — as Siddhartha noted — understand what the underlying bigger issues actually might be here.
So I guess I agree w/Kobayashi that “moving on” would be a mistake — but if we linger, perhaps we should really linger a bit more. That actually might help us put things in perspective.
Thanks ANNA. I’ve HFWAR you immensely as well.
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blockquote>Presumably, it be OK if Liberal gay white men benefitted from Affirmative Action. Is this the real agenda?
Liberal is not the opposite of conservative. But anyway, for me, yeah, it’s part of it. Should it be part of the criteria for affirmative action? Probably not. But i suppose it’s arguable–the U.S. government did a hell of a job of using immigration policy, periodic witch hunts, and other tools to expel leftists, so while liberals might not qualify, perhaps political dissidents and noncomformists of various stripes (like socialists from the developing world) ought to be particularly focused on 😉
In any case, thank you for catching that–I was trying to depict a social category, not a political one and misused the word conservative there. I still hold to the original point though.
You already did it for me: “I’m not that smart. I honestly beleive the Rice/Powell appointments were colorblind, and are therefore a momentous milestone in America’s battle w/ her original sin.”
Have fun with the Old Testament ethics 😉
Fair enough.
Erm… Tony Snow’s despicable faux pas aside, isn’t Kipling’s “Gunga Din” a poem which portrays the Indian waterbearer of the title as courageous and highly heroic person who saves many lives, and indeed, as the poem suggests, more of a man than the British soldier? Gunga Din is also the hero of the Hollywood movie of the same name.
Gunga Din is more of a servile dog than a hero.
Then we wopped ‘im ’cause ‘e couldn’t serve us all… … I’ll marrow you this minute… … our good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din… An’ a bullet come an’ drilled the beggar clean. ‘E put me safe inside, An’ just before ‘e died, “I ‘ope you liked your drink”, sez Gunga Din… … I’ve belted you and flayed you… [Link]
The movie’s supposedly worse.
The movie’s supposedly worse
It indeed is. I saw the movie. The natives are portrayed as cowardly, deceitful and cruel.
Not to threadjack, but in response to the above two comments, compare the “Thuggee cult” scene in Gunga Din to the “cult” scene in Temple of Doom. You’ll see it’s almost the same. In its own Orientalist way, the Kipling poem actually paid homage to the Indian servant who gave his life to save his British master. However, in Temple of Doom, and more so in Gunga Din, the “good native subject” is happily servile and gets no recognition whatsoever.