Weirdly, he is (IIRC) a first generation Bangladeshi immigrant with mixed race kids. Not sure how it all makes sense in his head. I imagine that someday his kids will read his archived comment history and feel embarrassed.
Right, so someone who understands that Bangladesh is the way it is in large part due to Bangladeshi culture.
I’m not raising my kids with any foreign identity or culture, just like my parents didn’t raise me with any foreign identity. My dad doesn’t own a Bangladeshi flag and thinks calling him a hyphenated American makes him a second class citizen.
The view that “brown people” have to cling to the culture of some dysfunctional country they left—waving around the flag of a country their ancestors built into something they had to leave—is one that was dormant when I was growing up, fortunately for me.
> mixed race kids
The concept of “mixed race” is a vile holdover from segregation. It’s a way of designating something superficial as meaningful. We don’t talk about “mixed eye color kids.” Luckily for my kids, all three came out three different colors, so they understand intuitively that skin color is just about how much their mom attacks them with sunscreen and isn’t an identity.
> I imagine that someday his kids will read his archived comment history and feel embarrassed.
My kids unfortunately will be reading this from an America where mass immigration without assimilation has led to political factionalism and dysfunction. A place that’s more like Syria or Iraq, where people vote based on group membership than individual preferences. And they’ll unfortunately know I was right.
I genuinely hope that you and your kids have a great future in this country. Politically, that's what I'm fighting for. The Republican white nationalist fever dream is not the America I grew up in and once admired.
¹ (Strange example to pick given that Mormonism is pretty far removed from Evangelical Christianity, but whatever.)
There is nothing great about Queens. It’s just a richer version of Dhaka. Loud, chaotic, fractious, politically dysfunctional cities are a dime a dozen all over the world.
Utah, meanwhile, is a fucking treasure. It’s clean, organized, orderly. The people are rule following, cheerful by default, emotionally repressed, legalistic, and punctual. They’re socialized to be that way from an early age. There’s only a handful of places in the world like it in the world and it’s precious.[1]
America’s greatness isn’t whatever bullshit you’re on about. That’s not why my parents left everything behind to come here. What makes America great is that I can go down to my county office and get a birth certificate printed in 20 minutes. It’s people who are so rule following that they’ll jump off a bridge if you give them paperwork that says they have to do that. That’s what a rarity in the world.
[1] The fact that Mormonism is very different from evangelical Christianity proves that my point isn’t about religion. I don’t care what religion you are. If Little Bangladesh was clean and orderly and efficient like Salt Lake City I would live there myself go to mosque and get fat eating Bangladeshi desserts: https://yelp.to/0XejznQCXp
¹ (Immigrant-friendly and deeply multicultural democratic socialism without psychos at the helm.)
P.S. "ret-conning America" -- America was never supposed to be frozen in ice. I take what some dusty philosophers said 200 years ago under advisement. Other than that, they can fuck off.
My greatest regret is that I wasn’t born Japanese.
> I've found great personal joy and meaning in the aspects of our messy, polycultural society
Good god. Are you one of those people who goes to India and marvels at how “vibrant” it is? That sentence just radiates inefficiency.
> Meanwhile, I'll do everything in my political power to make your nightmare of a woke dystopia take root at home
I already thought that is what democrats were aiming at.
> Immigrant-friendly and deeply multicultural democratic socialism
You’re describing India, except the “immigrant-friendly” part. You’re not describing any functional country that actually exists today. You’re certainly not describing any version of America that’s ever existed.
You’re committing us to an unprecedented social experiment based on romantic bullshit.
They've been in power for at least 10 years, "joking" about a third term, telling us America should be ruled by dictatorship, and you just trust that they won't actually do it? How do you know?