Courtesy of Subodh Chandra
As everyone by now knows, at a campaign event in rural Virginia two weeks ago, Sen. George Allen singled out for the crowd’s attention a second-generation Indian American, S.R. Sidarth, who is a videographer for Allen’s Democratic opponent, James Webb. Allen addressed Sidarth as “Macaca, or whatever his name is.” The senator went on to “welcome” Sidarth—a student at the University of Virginia and a native Virginian—to America and the “real world of Virginia.” (Sidarth captured the incident on video.) It brought back memories.
My senior year in high school growing up in Oklahoma (where I was born), I entered a competition to be selected for the U.S. Senate Youth Program, a weeklong, all-expenses-paid trip to Washington to meet policymakers and learn about the government. There were only two delegates from each state. In Round 1, I scored well enough on a statewide civics exam to advance to Round 2. In Round 2, I wrote a patriotic essay apparently good enough to advance me to Round 3. In that final round, a panel of political muckety-mucks interviewed me, and I sensed that I had charmed them with precocious profundities leavened with politically evenhanded witticisms. I was feeling pretty good about my chances.
Soon thereafter, I was paged over the intercom to the counselor’s office. As I walked in the door, the counselor sat me down and whispered, “Subodh, are you a U.S. citizen?” The answer was yes, but visions of summary deportation to lands I had never known flashed through my head. “Where is my U.S. passport? Where is my birth certificate?” I wondered.
It turned out that someone at the Senate Youth Program had just decided at the last minute to verify my eligibility for the award they were about to give me. While on the surface this might seem understandable, it apparently never occurred to them to ask a similar question of my co-recipient with the Anglo name. It never occurred to them that the name “Subodh” is becoming as American a name as the “Felix” in “George Felix Allen.”
CUT TO 21 YEARS LATER. After undergraduate and law degrees from high-falutin’ institutions, a career as a litigator, federal prosecutor, city attorney, and top prosecutor for a major American city, I was running for the Democratic nomination for Ohio attorney general. Ohioans all over the state embraced my candidacy. (Though not quite enough—I lost the Democratic primary.) They would chuckle as I led them in an interactive name pronunciation exercise: “Subodh, rhymes with ‘abode.’ Chandra, rhymes with ‘tundra.’” Now, Subodh, in Sanskrit, an ancient language like Latin or Gaelic, means “good knowledge.” I would ask, in reference to Ohio’s current political scandals, “Isn’t it time we had an attorney general whose very name means ‘good knowledge’ rather than one who’s always claiming he had no knowledge?” Folks would applaud and cheer.
Yet, with weeks left before the primary, a popular radio talk show host cut me down to size on his show, demanding to know, “Were you even born in this country?” When I said yes, he demanded to know, “Did you go to school here?”
“Where else would I go?” I asked.
Macaca is both a genus of monkey and a common European slur used against dark-skinned people of North Africa. Most media reported various contradictory explanations by Allen and his staff claiming the term was connected to Sidarth’s haircut. They reported Allen’s assertion that he made up the term, and his denial that he knew what it meant. Some media outlets reminded everyone of Allen’s Confederacy fetish and dubious history on race relations. Few in the media, however, reported that Allen’s mother was a French colonial immigrant from Tunisia, that Allen himself speaks French fluently, and that the term “macaca” would have been common among French Tunisians.
Blogs like Sepia Mutiny were brimming over with hundreds of comments as South Asian Americans, Republican and Democrat alike, decried Allen’s comments. T-shirts were printed (see my sons sporting some above). The macaca fracas compelled many (including myself) to advocate donating to Webb’s campaign, and various Indian American political fundraisers have pledged their support. Sanjay Puri, executive director of the premier Indian American lobbying organization USINPAC, and other Indian American leaders in Virginia met with Allen. Allen said he was sorry “if” Sidarth was offended, and has failed to apologize directly to him.
WITH HIS WORDS, the senator reminded many second-generation Indian Americans of all the times that we’ve been told we “talk good English,” even by people who have not been speaking it as long as we have.
And Allen’s comments—and the way his audience laughed as Allen singled out Sidarth—reminded us that who our leaders are matters. Leaders who instill us with a sense of higher common purpose, rather than exploiting the human tendency to think in simplistic us-vs.-them terms, make our country stronger for it.
And Allen’s assumption that he had any standing at all to welcome the Virginia-born Sidarth to America only illustrated the degree to which the generals have not caught up with the reality on the ground. Some 41 years after U.S. immigration law changed to beckon and embrace educated immigrants from Asia, and with their American-born children now well settled into their careers, people like Allen seem unwilling to accept that the caricatured land for which he is inexplicably nostalgic (and that as a native Californian, he never experienced) no longer exists. If it ever did.
Welcome to America, Sen. Allen.
