Category Archives: Politics

What do Hindu Americans think?

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In the comments on this weblog there are lots of debates about what person of religion X thinks. This has particularly been vexing to me when someone asserts “Christians believe Y,” based on interactions with a particular type of Christian. Though CUNY”s American Religious Identification Survey and the General Social Survey are excellent resources, probably the best clearing house on American religious data is Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey. Unfortunately Pew’s specific data is hard to link to, so I’ve had to repeat the same information over and over and given instructions on how to find the specific data through a series of clicks.

To get around this I decided to replicate some of the data points of possible interest to readers of this weblog. I extracted Hindus, Buddhists, Evangelical Protestants, Mainline Protestants, and Roman Catholics. The majority of South Asian Americans are of Hindu background, and even more of Indian Americans. Buddhists are diverse, but since they are of the same broad religious family (Dharmic) as Hindus I thought they’d be a good check. The Evangelical Protestants here are traditional white denominations, not the historically Black Protestant denominations. Mainline Protestants refers to the major establishment Protestant denominations, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans (note that a minority of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans, are evangelical, but the majority are not. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is not evangelical, but the Presbyterian Church in America is). Do remember that Hindus in particular are still predominantly an immigrant community in the United States (this makes sense of their peculiar age distribution). Continue reading →

We are Khan (?)

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evil.jpgEvil needs a face. In the 1980s that face was Ruhollah Khomeini. In the 1990s it was Sadam Hussein. In the 2000s it was Osama bin Laden. Setting aside whether these individuals were in fact evil, the reality is that for the American people they were the face of evil. They were personifications of a complex bundle of geopolitical concerns which came to the fore for a given span of time. Like it or not this was relevant to American brown folk. Apparently Sanjay Kumar, a Sri Lankan American who was later became the C.E.O. of Computer Associates, had to wear an “I am not Iranian” t-shirt in high school around 1980 during the hostage crisis. During the first Gulf War I encountered a weird comment that I looked like Saddam Hussein from an idiot in one of my classes (my own reaction was “what kind of crack are you smoking?!?!”, and my friends pretty quickly started mocking the kid who had thought to get one in at my expense). More recently in the 2000s the issue of “false positives” has been widely covered on this weblog, not without controversy. Continue reading →

Tiger Moms raising Paper Tigers?

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This is going to be the most talked about article since Amy Chua’s. Every South Asian American man visiting this site should read the whole thing. Here are just some of the attention grabbing sections from Wesley Yang’s piece in New York Magazine, broken out for our readers (and these excerpts are from just the first half of the 11 page article). First, what a school with admissions based purely on test scores looks like:

Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: The top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-asides for the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage “diversity” or any nebulous concept of “well-­roundedness” or “character.” Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian-­Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school.

This year, 569 Asian-Americans scored high enough to earn a slot at Stuyvesant, along with 179 whites, 13 Hispanics, and 12 blacks. Such dramatic overrepresentation, and what it may be read to imply about the intelligence of different groups of New Yorkers, has a way of making people uneasy. But intrinsic intelligence, of course, is precisely what Asians don’t believe in. They believe–and have ­proved–that the constant practice of test-taking will improve the scores of whoever commits to it. All throughout Flushing, as well as in Bayside, one can find “cram schools,” or storefront academies, that drill students in test preparation after school, on weekends, and during summer break. “Learning math is not about learning math,” an instructor at one called Ivy Prep was quoted in the New York Times as saying. “It’s about weightlifting. You are pumping the iron of math.” Mao puts it more specifically: “You learn quite simply to nail any standardized test you take.”

But it won’t last into college:

Colleges have a way of correcting for this imbalance: The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade has calculated that an Asian applicant must, in practice, score 140 points higher on the SAT than a comparable white applicant to have the same chance of admission. This is obviously unfair to the many qualified Asian individuals who are punished for the success of others with similar faces. Upper-middle-class white kids, after all, have their own elite private schools, and their own private tutors, far more expensive than the cram schools, to help them game the education system…

And it isn’t like the movies anymore:

“The general gist of most high-school movies is that the pretty cheerleader gets with the big dumb jock, and the nerd is left to bide his time in loneliness. But at some point in the future,” he says, “the nerd is going to rule the world, and the dumb jock is going to work in a carwash.

“At Stuy, it’s completely different: If you looked at the pinnacle, the girls and the guys are not only good-looking and socially affable, they also get the best grades and star in the school plays and win election to student government. It all converges at the top. It’s like training for high society. It was jarring for us Chinese kids. You got the sense that you had to study hard, but it wasn’t enough.”

Continue reading →

Get Drugged By Lazarus

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I don’t know if you realize this, but there’s a lot of bad music out there, particularly bad music by Desi artists. I’ve been pretty consistent with these Music Monday posts at Sepia Mutiny for the past six months, and the only requirement I have is that the musician or song that I profile has the be something that I myself would download on to my iTunes and embarrassingly blast loudly in my car. That being said, I have to dig through a lot of ear bleeding songs to get to one that really moves me. But I get so excited when I find something that I want to share.

lazarus.jpg

Today’s #MusicMonday comes through an interview I found at Brown Girl Magazine of the doctor-hyphen-rapper out of Detroit, Lazarus. A Pakistani-American artist, his lyrics are conscious and gritty, and his beats are Detroit ferocious.

With over a million views on the above video, I clearly have learned about Lazarus after all the other kids have. I kind of love how he is unapologetic about pursuing his medical degree and a rap career at the same time, as can be heard in his song “Living the Dream.” Ain’t no shame in improving yourself. Lazarus dropped a mixtape called Lazarus Story this past September, which can be downloaded for FREE online through this link right here. Continue reading →

Me too, me too. Jindal releases birth certificate

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I have an idea. Let’s have national birth certificate coming out parties. Groups of people can get together with each other in homes or bars and reveal their certificates together and then ponder them while occasionally challenging their authenticity. Don’t like my idea? Why? You have something to hide?

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who was born in Baton Rouge to immigrant parents from India, has released his birth certificate.

Jindal is being considered by some observers as a potential candidate in the 2012 presidential race.

His office says they released the document to quell any speculation that his eligibility to run for office would be affected by a “birthright citizenship” bill introduced by fellow Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana. It would limit automatic U.S. citizenship to children whose parents were legal residents. [link]

Correction, Jindal is no longer even an afterthought in the 2012 race. Thus, this publicity stunt. Here is the backstory on Jindal’s birth:

As he wrote last year in his book, “Leadership and Crisis,” his mother had been offered a scholarship in 1970 to complete a graduate degree in nuclear physics at LSU.

When she informed the university that she couldn’t accept the scholarship because she was pregnant, “LSU wrote back and promised her a month off for childbirth if she changed her mind. LSU was so accommodating, and the opportunity to come to America so thrilling, that my parents accepted. [link]

Now, if I was a certain type of conservative I could argue that Jindal is kind of an “Anchor Baby.” He best not step in to Arizona:

Buoyed by recent public opinion polls suggesting they’re on the right track with illegal immigration, Arizona Republicans will likely introduce legislation this fall that would deny birth certificates to children born in Arizona — and thus American citizens according to the U.S. Constitution — to parents who are not legal U.S. citizens. The law largely is the brainchild of state senator Russell Pearce, a Republican whose suburban district, Mesa, is considered the conservative bastion of the Phoenix political scene. [link]

Continue reading →

Not So Special

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HomelandSecurity.jpgI wasn’t always a an activist in the South Asian community. I got my grounding in environmental organizing and it took the events around September 11th, 2001 to really catapult me into trying to figure out how to create that political voice for this community. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, since the capture/death of Osama Bin Laden on Sunday night.

One of the first, if not the first, forms of advocacy I partook in for the South Asian community was around “Special Registration” otherwise known as National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS). I was living Washington D.C. at the time, and we would go around to Pakistani and Indian restaurants and grocery stores and drop off 3-fold flyers at the front counter informing the community of the new and xenophobic law. It wasn’t much, but at the time it was so important that we let the South Asian community know what their changed rights were in light of the then newly created Department of Homeland Security.

Special Registration required boys and men, ages 16 to 45 from a list of 25 countries with large Muslim populations to register at immigration offices or ports of entry. As a result, 84,000 males were fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned in long interviews based on their countries of origin, more than 13,000 were put into deportation proceedings, and 2,800 were detained. [san]

There were so many stories I heard of where South Asian boys and men in the community had to flee and some scary stories where people simply disappeared. Only later were they found to have been detained.

The impact was felt especially by working-class South Asian, Arab, Sikh and Muslim communities in New York City; the economic impact of losing fathers, sons, and husbands meant that many families suddenly faced homelessness. The Muslim community in Coney Island is said to have lost a full third of its population almost overnight. In its later phases, NSEERS focused on U.S. ports of entry, with the same haphazard scrutiny and interrogations. [illume]

On April 28th 2011, after nine years of “Special Registration”, the government has quietly suspended the law. Continue reading →

Osama & me & we

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Osama_bin_Laden_portrait.jpgI began blogging because of Osama Bin Laden. This was not a necessary condition, but it was a sufficient one. I make that qualification because there are various aspects of my personality which indicate to me that I’d have started blogging when blogging became popular, no matter the details of the world around us. And, I suspect that blogging would have taken off, 9/11 or no 9/11. But in our world the path dependency played out so that political blogging and 9/11 have a strong relationship, with the latter leading to an explosion of the former.

And so I began my online adventure in April of 2002 in the wake of the rise of the “warblog.” My main interests were the War on Terror, web application programming (JSP/Servlets especially), and genetic engineering (in favor!). 9/11 had perturbed me from my default milquetoast libertarian isolationism, though I will admit that my initial starting position probably helped me be only mildly pro-war at the peak of the fever in March of 2003 (I recall throwing out 60 out of 100 in terms of how “warm” I was to the idea of invading Iraq, with 50 being neutral). As the years have passed I’ve rapidly retreated from the position of what I like to think of as my “neocon years.” One gauge of this may be that I used to check out Libertarian Samizdata every day in 2003, but drop in once a year to see if it’s still around now. Continue reading →

This is 2012 in America (almost)

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Ambassador_Jon_Huntsman.jpgI was just poking around for information on the potential Republican field in 2012 this morning, and I stumbled onto an interesting image of one of the candidates, Jon Huntsman, Jr.. In case you don’t know, Huntsman is the scion of a mega-rich Mormon political family, and viewed as a moderate Republican (though this is mostly because these terms are graded on a curve today, and I say this as a registered Republican). He was appointed by Barack H. Obama to be ambassador to China, but he resigned that position. The supposition is that he might be mulling a presidential run. I am of the set who believes that this is some bizarre joke or tactical feint, as a moderate Mormon has pretty much zero chance in the Republican primaries.

But why the post? First, check out this photo of Huntsman (alternate link if pop-up doesn’t work) with two of his daughters and his wife. How does it make you feel? Here’s an article about Huntsman’s religious pluralism: Continue reading →

>1 Billion People…

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… are hungry. So notes a widely cited piece by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo in Foreign Policy.

But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India.

Despite rising incomes & cheaper than ever food, for some reason, too many poor folk are simply choosing NOT to expend their $$ on nutrition –

Despite the country’s rapid economic growth, per capita calorie consumption in India has declined; moreover, the consumption of all other nutrients except fat also appears to have gone down among all groups, even the poorest. …at all levels of income, the share of the budget devoted to food has declined and people consume fewer calories.

[Indians] and their children are certainly not well nourished by any objective standard. Anemia is rampant; body-mass indices are some of the lowest in the world; almost half of children under 5 are much too short for their age, and one-fifth are so skinny that they are considered to be “wasted.”

So what’s going on? And what should “we” do about it?

Continue reading →