A few University of Texas at Austin students of South Asian descent cheered their football team’s dramatic comeback win against top-ranked Ohio State, and found themselves in the foreground of a picture worth a thousand tweets. Bo French, the Republican nominee for railroad commissioner (a more important position than its name might suggest, having jurisdiction over energy policy), did not like what he saw. “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” he posted on X.
While other Texas Republicans criticized French — some vigorously, some tepidly — a retinue of online defenders ventured creative interpretations of what the problem was. The university catered too much to foreigners. Never mind that the picture did not disclose the citizenship or nationality of its subjects, and the law mandates that 90 percent of students be Texans. Its admissions standards are unfair to white Texans. French himself retreated to this position, but the university has no preferential standards for Indian Americans. In fact, French in the past joined the near-uniform chorus of Texas Republicans in supporting the university’s admissions system, which was designed to eliminate consideration of race and was defended for years by foes of racial preferences.
So the rationalizers had to go farther afield. Too many Indian Americans are Hindu: another trait not discoverable from the photo, and also one that appears to pose no practical difficulties for America’s republican institutions. They’re not assimilating. But the photo 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.
To be more charitable to the photo bombers than they deserve, some of these attempted justifications raise issues that, outside this ridiculous context, are legitimate and even important. The H-1B program through which many Indians came here is too often exploitative and needs reform. Too much immigration — even when the immigrants themselves are law-abiding and economically successful — can be disruptive to communities and nations, threatening their sense of shared belonging, creating tensions or at least frictions. In the case of Indian Americans, however, the difficulties have been thankfully minimal; and in any case, needed reforms are no reason or excuse for belittling or demonizing the immigrants in question or their families.
The picture gave some viewers a misleading impression of how many dark-skinned people were in the Texas crowd; X.com, for its part, creates a misleading impression of how many Americans have an aesthetic objection to the presence of such people. Barring what seems an unlikely mass conversion to their cause, the objectors will just have to get over it. Most Americans, of all races, find their repulsion itself repulsive. And white Americans, by and large, have too much sense to believe that greater racial consciousness is the answer to any problems they have.
The commenters who object to the picture are wrong about many things, but they are right to feel that their side is losing. Those harmlessly happy young people have found their perfect counterpoint in the toxically miserable.