Maybe it's some sort of confirmation bias, but it seems like there's a lot of prominent right wing people of Indian ancestry (Vivek Ramaswamy, Dinesh D'Souza, Nikki Haley). Is it confirmation bias or is this a real thing? If the latter, what is driving it other than US immigration policies excluding leftists?

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[–] southasiansecularist@hexbear.net 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

In addition to what others have said, it's also the model minority thing. There's a good portion about this in a book called "We Too Sing America" by Deepa Ayer. She described a "racial bribe" phenomenon (sorry long quotes coming through, I've bolded important parts):

At times, non-Black communities of color have colluded, consciously and unwittingly, to maintain White supremacy and its racial hierarchy in place. Our positions on the racial ladder in America dictate the opportunities, privileges, and entitlements that are available to us. Blacks are at the bottom, while Whites maintain the top position. Latinos, Arabs, and Asians fall in middle positions. The racial ladder preserves White privilege while propagating anti-Black racism. Racial groups in the middle maintain and reinforce this structure, sometimes with their consent. For example, immigrants of various racial backgrounds internalize racist attitudes toward Black Americans in the process of becoming “Americanized.” In her 1993 essay “On the Backs of Blacks,” author Toni Morrison explains that “the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American.”

South Asians, Arabs, and other Asians have historically been tempted to take this racial bribe in order to advance to higher positions on the racial hierarchy. We must firmly decline this invitation. When we do so, we can begin to dismantle the racial ladder altogether.

In their book The Miner’s Canary, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres explain that the racial bribe has four goals: “(1) to defuse the previously marginalized group’s oppositional agenda, (2) to offer incentives that discourage the group from affiliating with black people, (3) to secure high status for individual group members within existing hierarchies, and (4) to make the social position of ‘Whiteness’ appear more racially or ethnically diverse.” That is, non-Black communities of color are often invited to take the racial bribe in order to make the status of Whiteness more appealing and to signal Whites’ openness to diversity.

Why are South Asians especially vulnerable to the racial bribe? The myth of cultural exceptionalism is partly to blame. It promotes the idea that South Asians possess innate cultural characteristics that propel them to succeed and thrive more than other minority groups. This narrative is tied closely to the model minority concept that purports similar views of the intellectual superiority of Asian Americans. The nuanced difference between these two narratives is that cultural exceptionalism is less focused on explicit racial comparisons to other groups, while the model minority narrative explicitly creates a wedge between Asian American and Black communities. Policy makers often exploit the model minority narrative to deny access to benefits to people of color as a whole by claiming that Asian Americans do not need them.

If you wanna read more about it, just look up "We Too Sing America" by Deepa Ayer. Here are some links from Anna's Archive:

https://annas-archive.org/md5/9b7552f3607e8244dd8abe93d3ea2a50 (epub)

https://annas-archive.org/md5/cf043ff43fcc1b4e14db31fa0ece2b9c (pdf)