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Love it or leave it, but woke.
This weekend, The University of Texas played The Ohio State University in Austin, TX. A screen shot went viral on Twitter showing a crowd of Indian students celebrating the victory.
"Heritage Americans", the dissident right, the Woke Reich, or whatever you want to call them went crazy, pointing out the massive demographic changes in Texas that are happening. This is true. Anyone who has been to Texas knows whites are a minority here in any medium sized and larger city. The changes have been stunning and within 30 years, it is unrecognizable.
Critics rightfully pointed out that they were pretty much just being racist. You talk about integration, and here are immigrants and children of immigrants celebrating a victory in football wearing cowboy hats. What is more American than that? You clearly just don't like Indian people.
An Indian politician said that this is what Texas is. If you don't like it, LEAVE! There is some truth to this. This is what Texas is now, but historically the South Asian population has been tiny. This is a very recent development. Is 20 years all it takes for Texas to become something new? If you are 30 and above, you probably grew up with almost no Indians. Now this is what Texas is and you have to leave if you don't like the changes?
This reminds me of the UK. Pre-Windrush, the UK was 99.9% white. As recently as 1991, it was 95% white. Now though, if you complain, you are going against British values. For thousands of years, the UK was essentially 100% white. Within a few generations, it is a multi-cultural country and if you don't like that, LEAVE! We are not a white society, and actually never were. I could go on and on, but with the exception of Reform, that is the general consensus now.
Back to Texas. It's crazy how quickly this can happen. Mass migration can happen and within one generation, this is seen as the new default and any complaints about this are seen as against the new values. Of course, the biggest gatekeepers of this isn't the left. They really have no control over their outgroup other than canceling people and social pressure, but if you don't care what they think, what can they really do? The center-right has also rushed to condemn people criticizing the massive demographic replacement in Texas. People like Dan Crenshaw rushed to condemn the racism and call out this anti-Indian racism and essentially sided with the left, who hates them. They have essentially said the same thing as the left and that these aren't Texas values to be racist. So basically, love it or leave it, but woke. If you don't like the new Texas, leave.
But where will they go? You basically have to live in a state like Texas for access to the best jobs. schools, dating, etc. It's insane to me how fast we can accept something new that is unprecedented as the new normal without considering the consequences. Only weirdos and disagreeable people point this out, and by the time people start to see the consequences, it will be too late (assuming there are negative consequences, which should be obvious is my POV).
To be clear: it wasn't a crowd of Indian students. It was a group of like a dozen Indian students in the foreground, but the wider shot shows a crowd of mostly white/hispanic students (which is what you'd expect for UT's student demographics). The students in question are themselves almost certainly American.
The actual problem here is the division between people who view America as a white nation for white people (and who thus see any non-white people as a threat to the integrity of the nation) and people who view America as defined primarily by values. You can still be xenophobic and still cleave to the latter view on assimilationist grounds, but it's hard to sustain particular objections in the face of clear evidence of assimilation. However, if you're just a white supremacist, no amount of assimilation matters.
Where are all the white Texan refugees who have been expelled from their land? Did the non-whites kill them all? Is the mainstream media covering it up?
Having racial preferences in this manner has been seen as pretty sketchy for at least half a century. As alluded to above, even most racist people are not racial supremacists. While it's been long understood that the white supremacists didn't evaporate into thin air after the civil rights movement, it was the sort of thing you usually kept to yourself.
They expelled themselves through not having kids and importing other people from other areas of the world. The mainstream media, and people on message boards, are quick to jump on anyone noticing that demographic change or the trends that are highly suggestive of it.
That is until it became extremely popular to blame whitey for all of non-whitey's problems. Seems that when your institutions start talking about and emphasizing race, people suddenly start talking about and emphasizing race.
Yes, that's my point. "Demographic replacement" is a motte-and-bailey where people equivocate between ethnic cleansing and declining TFR + immigration. Sometimes there's a desultory effort to blame declining TFR on immigration, but these arguments aren't very compelling. You get "jumped on" for "noticing demographic change" because said "noticing" primarily takes the form of undisguised, conscious racism, as in the case OP brings up. Even your garden variety racist isn't ideologically racist, and explicit racial preference doesn't square with the idea that you're just worried about assimilation or whatever.
This is the popular excuse, but, again, not very compelling. The causation cuts both ways here - right-wingers have spent decades pushing a narrow and exclusionary vision of American identity that elevates Christian, rural/suburban, and preferentially white Americans above the rest and are shocked when the rest decide to give them the middle finger. The white supremacists have always been looking for a way back to respectability (or at least ways to implement their policies without getting slapped down by civil rights law) and the main foot-in-the-door to re-mainstream ideological white supremacism has been nativism, not counter-organizing against particularist minority activism (not the least because many right-wingers think any minority activism is particularist).
There is literally no acceptable way to voice concerns about demographic change in the mainstream that will be positively absorbed by any socially left-leaning, or even most of the middle leaning populace. Even some percentage of hardcore Republicans shun the concern. It cannot be done. You can't not be racist and make a comment like that in public and it have a positive reception. You could probably find some veiled comments from Rubio or Vance that touch on the subject, but even then those comments are more about ideology and culture than demographics.
People often times are not compelled by facts or reality. They're either too banal or too painful to absorb. Note that you specified the type of white person when mentioning which group spent decades pushing a narrow and exclusionary vision of American identity. That's a group defined by religion, geography, and ideology, with race as one input among several. I'm sure you've seen this and this before. You bring up motte-and-bailey, and then present your own motte-and-bailey:
The motte being the white supremacists, the bailey being the those "noticing" and expressing concern about demographic change.
We know, with a high degree of certainty, that entire countries have similar feelings to "white supremacists" here in America. Japan being a prime example. China and South Korea do too. Naturalization in the Gulf states is effectively closed. Malaysia has ethnic preferences in its constitution. Recently Russia has made their own ethnonationalistic considerations. There are all kinds of "supremacists" all over the world. Jus sanguinis is the global rule, not the exception. We are the exception, and for people who "notice" it, that exception has been abused beyond what any country should tolerate.
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So…the literal definition of an own goal.
Yeah, big time.
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If the Indians comprise 0.1% of the crowd but they just so happen to all be concentrated in one corner of the stadium, then this by itself is proof positive that they are unassimilated. What "assimilation" looks like is for each subgroup to be evenly spread throughout the population in proportion to its numbers, which is evidently not what's happening here.
I'm not saying that this even dispersal is what causes assimilation; rather, someone who is culturally assimilated will naturally find that their circle of acquaintances (such as the people they go to football games with) is representative of the population.
(I rather doubt that anyone on Twitter is making this argument. The interpretation that the whole crowd is 90% Indian is more provocative and thus more likely to go viral.)
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