Whites and The Ethnic Venom Question
Don't expect that White Americans will behave like third world tribal people.
Scott Greer (who publishes the excellent Highly Respected, a newsletter and podcast) has a short article out titled ‘Indians and the Assimilation Question’.
The piece articulates what I think are reasonable fears and genuine insecurities (this is not coded way of haughtily flexing or trying to put anyone in their place for having them, it’s just a description of reality): namely, that Indian immigrants while superficially assimilating in ways not quite matched by other foreign origin peoples, present a unique danger by only surface-level accommodation.
The general argument goes that Indians, as Anglophone immigrants, are much more able to resemble Americans—and let’s cut to the chase, both Scott and I mean White Americans—and thus ‘operate among them’ than are any other foreign origin persons who for some few generations at least or perhaps forever, will likely retain a distinct accent, or less of a facility with words, or a level of remove from American (White) culture, including contemporary popular media.
But, this is only ever superficial and deep down, the Indian is much more like the subject of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Stranger”:
(excerpted)
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.
The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control—
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood. Scott primarily highlights caste as an example of this intense, and ongoing foreignness (the term the Portuguese gave to the native social arrangements they encountered in India, with relatively strong analogues):
The caste mindset influences how they approach Americans. Anyone who has interacted with Indians notices that they will either talk down or suck up to you. There is no in-between. If you’re a server, prepare to be treated like a shudra. If you have money, prepare to be treated like royalty. Americans really don’t like that attitude. There’s an informal equality in the way we speak with one another. It’s bad manners to talk down to someone, especially a waitress. It’s embarrassing to be overtly obsequious to the rich and powerful. But Indians don’t follow these standards.
I know Scott in real life, and I think he’s a great fellow - you should subscribe to his podcast if you haven’t. But I don’t recall ever speaking down to him or sucking up to him. I’m not shy about telling him when he’s misapprehended something (we go back and forth on X about this).
Perhaps—he could contend— that’s because I see him as a fellow Brahmin!
This would be, if not accurate, at least highly amusing and endearing.
No, my respect for Scott, as is indeed my respect for anyone serving me food at a restaurant or co-investing with me on a deal whose cap table I would never see if not for their check size, comes from my dusky Hindoo parents raising me well.
And none of this is to say Scott shouldn’t notice, or Americans shouldn’t notice, examples of Indians in America behaving atrociously. Here’s one (of many):
What I don’t think is true though, is that Indians are all like this, or that there is a unique co-ethnic tribalistic mechanism at play to mean that sometimes, Indians in politics are big libtards. What I think is happening instead is that Indian immigrants—of a very different character and selection method pre- and post- 1990 and H-1B legislation—are market dominant minorities:
Ultimately, market dominant minorities (almost by definition arrivistes) are strivers. They seek increased status as much as they seek wealth, because they are new. Why? Because along with the economic security of running a 7/11 or becoming a vascular surgeon, there's the question of social security, conferred by conformation to the group.
This pattern plays out among all primates, and humans are no exception.
In the United States, perhaps up until the “vibe shift” of the last 10 months, for a long time there has nothing more guaranteed to be a marker or manifestation of low social and economic status than being "right wing" or “conservative” particularly the constellation of beliefs, dress, and attitudes found here, at the Louisiana Mudfest:
Now, I think that event is somewhere between "fucking awesome" and "spectacular", and that section of America is trampled on enough I won't even criticize the obvious promiscuity and drug abuse–certainly not as a sneering Brahmin myself!
But do watch the video. Skip around in it. Then try to imagine how not just middle class, but truly, "upper middle class" White Americans feel about it. Imagine people who own two cars that were purchased in the last five years, wear Patagonia and Warby Parker and have serious professional employment, and who are surrounded by similar people in very cozy zipcodes, where college is the norm and divorce is rare. Even better, try to imagine how they feel about it if, say, their professional colleague who is Indian is watching it alongside them.
It’s not pretty, is it?
Hold that emotion in your heart, and now think about the immigrant–Jewish, Polish, Irish (Irish excited about affording "lace curtain" decor, even) or even, indeed, Hindu who is unestablished, and lives among and deals with the Upper Middle Class WASPS or now just Whites all the time, from college towns to downtown city law offices to engineering campuses to operating rooms.
What immigrants correctly ascertain is that America’s erstwhile ‘WASP elites’, and the broader White Upper Middle Class generally, in HOAs and private schools and the like, absolutely loathe the White in the Louisiana Mudfest.
They feel polluted by being around them, they sneer at their problems. Pure bile.
Strident White Nationalist racialists like genteel Jared Taylor say about as much.
For immigrants, past and present, from some of the very pale ones who look very similar to American Whites, with names like Epstein or Goldman, or McKinnon and Palladino, to more recent ones with names like Ramaswamy or Patel this caste division among the natives White Americans is unmistakably powerful in determining social entrée. It’s very obvious who is “in” and who is “out”.
But it’s not just that. Immigrants also get many servings of the Hollywood media canards about White Christian America being deeply hostile, racist, unfriendly, and mean. Since the so-called “Rural Purge” of 1970s network television, there has been effectively zero positive depiction of White America in the wrong zipcodes, and everything from mean-spirited comedy about how dumb they all are to ghastly horror films portraying them as violent inbred monsters.
So there's a now a large class of people who often navigate to the top of economic hierarchies, but feel socially insecure (they're much more visible minorities) an have been told there is one group marked out for hatred (White Christian Middle America) which also hates them. It proceeds as you’d expect.
Why does it matter to notice this?
It’s easy to make the case that liberal Congressman Suhas Subramanyam is acting in his co-ethnic’s interests by pushing for more immigration. And Scott is right to notice genuine ethnic hatred from Manisha Sinha in her new book.
But Kash Patel to Saurabh Sharma to Usha Vance, there are a lot of Indians who were born in America (descending from pre-1990s Immigration Act/pre-H-1B immigrant cohorts) that really aren’t hostile to White America, and White Americans grew up with, work with, and sometimes even marry them.
They aren’t, in fact, sneering at or sucking up to Scott Greer (or anyone else). Caste, for various reasons (chiefly among them, that there’s been nothing like affirmative action caste-reservations or even that many Indians) has simply not been a feature of life for them or their parents while they were growing up here.
They are variously Hindu, Christian, or the funny kind of Secular But Respectful Of Religious People but They Aren’t Themselves type now so common in America. But they’re not really the ethnic-activist type which Scott magnifies. They largely just fit in—and White Americans sense this and respond in kind.
It’s largely this, and not some kind of innate drive to duplicity with a layer of superficial assimilation, that means they ‘gain incredible amounts of political and economic power’. That is, it’s actually just totally credible amounts.
I do think there must be a reckoning about how many Indians feel entitled to immigrate to America (or on an H-1B, work here, cf. Atal) and how many post-1990 have no regard, even contempt for the America to which they would immigrate. But White Americans themselves are split immigration. They don’t, still, for instance, think of darker Italians are filthy greasy Dagos a lá Senator Geary’s assessment of the Corleones in the Godfather (both were criminal, and fictional characters, but gesturing towards a real period of American integration).
Quite often, advocacy for American national interests—which I think are good and necessary, including maintenance of Heritage American majority status and opportunity by limits on immigration—assumes White Americans are interested in living out something resembling Pan-Arabism. But White Americans don’t want to live like or behave like Arab nationalists. They want to be like White Americans.
So while they won't and shouldn't entertain demographic replacement or hierarchy displacement, they also tend to sharply turn their noses up at totalizing ethnic venom, at the kind of hysteria from some whites (often, by the way, working class ones with some amount of tenuous entrée themselves into the professional class) who feel reasonable fears and genuine insecurities—but ones that are perhaps expressed a little clumsily. Here is how it plays out:
Josiah Lippincott is very worried about H-1B Indians (he claims they are, at a civilizational level, purely inferior thinkers to Europeans) displacing him as a White American from a high-paying tech job. Travis Whitaker is a White American with a high-paying tech job who offers him a way to get one if he’ll prove just how smart he is. Josiah deflects. This is an unfortunate exchange.
What I think is not-so-great about this is that reasonable and understandable arguments against economic and national displacement by cheaper laborers (and the H-1B visa is more or less designed to do that, even though incredible people like Elon Musk and Aravind Srinivas relied on it themselves) become contingent on a assumption of airs of superiority—one that is a bit lacking.
In combination with the prior incorrect argument, White Americans with a vastly greater purchase on policy—at the ballot box, employed in culture-determinant professions and institutions, and even in government—look on and see (mostly unfairly, IMHO) resentful losers. They don’t see people they identify with, but instead they see people who are incapable or who simply don’t “get it.”
That is to say, they see people of a lower class (or caste) being total Peckerwoods.
It’s not a good look, and I think causes harms to the good case for restrictionism.