|
|
|
| My Own Private India - Do you find it insulting?
|
rohank
6/30/2010
|
I just came across this article, My Own Private India. Do you find it offensive? Insulting?
Here are few lines from the article.
.....I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didnt want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai?
I called James W. Hughes, policy-school dean at Rutgers University, who explained that Lyndon Johnsons 1965 immigration law raised immigration caps for non-European countries. LBJ apparently had some weird relationship with Asians in which he liked both inviting them over and going over to Asia to kill them.
After the law passed, when I was a kid, a few engineers and doctors from Gujarat moved to Edison because of its proximity to AT&T, good schools and reasonably priced, if slightly deteriorating, post–WW II housing. For a while, we assumed all Indians were geniuses. Then, in the 1980s, the doctors and engineers brought over their merchant cousins, and we were no longer so sure about the genius thing. In the 1990s, the not-as-brilliant merchants brought their even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor.
Eventually, there were enough Indians in Edison to change the culture. At which point my townsfolk started calling the new Edisonians "dot heads." One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense street yelling for its residents to "go home to India." In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if "dot heads" was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.
Post Your Response
Add To Favorite
|
| Responses
|
Post Your Response
|
rohank
7/7/2010
|
I am surprized that no one found this offensive and/or responded to this. However, Time did apologize for this, here is the response
TIME responds:
We sincerely regret that any of our readers were upset by Joel Stein’s recent humor column “My Own Private India.” It was in no way intended to cause offense.
Joel Stein responds:
I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I was trying to explain how, as someone who believes that immigration has enriched American life and my hometown in particular, I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it. If we could understand that reaction, we’d be better equipped to debate people on the other side of the immigration issue.
|
| View Other Discussions |
Disclaimer: All the discussions are posted by individual members of SeattleIndian.com and SeattleIndian is not responsible for the validity of the content. Please use this information at your own discretion. If you have any questions please email us at support@seattleindian.com
|
|
