Outrage over Time columnist's take on Asian Indians in Edison

[✡ Hindu Zionist ॐ]

The article:

I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.

My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime. (See pictures of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park.)

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 didn't 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 Johnson's 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. (See TIME's special report "The Making of America: Thomas Edison.")

Unlike some of my friends in the 1980s, I liked a lot of things about the way my town changed: far better restaurants, friends dorky enough to play Dungeons & Dragons with me, restaurant owners who didn't card us because all white people look old. But sometime after I left, the town became a maze of charmless Indian strip malls and housing developments. Whenever I go back, I feel what people in Arizona talk about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that spicy.

To figure out why it bothered me so much, I talked to a friend of mine from high school, Jun Choi, who just finished a term as mayor of Edison. Choi said that part of what I don't like about the new Edison is the reduction of wealth, which probably would have been worse without the arrival of so many Indians, many of whom, fittingly for a town called Edison, are inventors and engineers. And no place is immune to change. In the 11 years I lived in Manhattan's Chelsea district, that area transformed from a place with gangs and hookers to a place with gays and transvestite hookers to a place with artists and no hookers to a place with rich families and, I'm guessing, mistresses who live a lot like hookers. As Choi pointed out, I was a participant in at least one of those changes. We left it at that.

Unlike previous waves of immigrants, who couldn't fly home or Skype with relatives, Edison's first Indian generation didn't quickly assimilate (and give their kids Western names). But if you look at the current Facebook photos of students at my old high school, J.P. Stevens, which would be very creepy of you, you'll see that, while the population seems at least half Indian, a lot of them look like the Italian Guidos I grew up with in the 1980s: gold chains, gelled hair, unbuttoned shirts. In fact, they are called Guindians. Their assimilation is so wonderfully American that if the Statue of Liberty could shed a tear, she would. Because of the amount of cologne they wear.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00.html#ixzz0shP2o7Jd

After the outrage from Indian-American community..

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.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00.html#ixzz0shP86lpv

http://www.mycentraljersey.com/article/20100703/NEWS/7030331/Anger-outrage-greet-Time-columnist-s-take-on-Asian-Indians-in-Edison

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My take:
Does TIME's have guts to publish such article on African-American community or Latinos or Muslims/Pakis of Michigan? What disappoints me is that they are concerned about Edison, while Indians are least threat to any demographics, these liberal media have chosen to ignore grave problems posed to American culture by other communities in USA.

[Rubystars]

It's natural to feel uncomfortable when a place you are accustomed to being filled with your own people is suddenly filled with people of a foreign type.

He's lucky in a way that it was Indians and not blacks or low-class Mexicans that filled it up, both of which would have brought a lot more crime (especially blacks) and would have brought nothing or almost nothing positive. One thing this article fails to mention though, is that once another group comes in and fills up the town, people who are native to the town are suddenly made to feel unwelcome there. I don't know if the Indians act that way, but other groups sure do.

I used to live in an almost all-white neighborhood growing up and when I went to see it again it was full of Mexicans that definitely gave me the impression that I shouldn't be there.

[✡ Hindu Zionist ॐ]

the columnist is being branded as racist by certain Indian-American groups after this article, but i dont think he is racist. Considering that the columnist is a Jew, he would surely himself know what racism is. However he should have refrained from using the term "dot head". the term used extensively by Nazi group in the 80s called the Dot Busters who murdered Indians.

I can testify that the Indians in America are more racist than the Americans in America. The first piece of wisdom an Indian guy coming to USA. gets from Other Indians residing in America is that the blacks are thieves, the mexicans are cheap, the whites are not smart and alcoholic. And over the years I have seen this attitude in many lesser educated Indians and some of the more educated ones too.

[cjd]

It's natural to feel uncomfortable when a place you are accustomed to being filled with your own people is suddenly filled with people of a foreign type.

He's lucky in a way that it was Indians and not blacks or low-class Mexicans that filled it up, both of which would have brought a lot more crime (especially blacks) and would have brought nothing or almost nothing positive. One thing this article fails to mention though, is that once another group comes in and fills up the town, people who are native to the town are suddenly made to feel unwelcome there. I don't know if the Indians act that way, but other groups sure do.

I used to live in an almost all-white neighborhood growing up and when I went to see it again it was full of Mexicans that definitely gave me the impression that I shouldn't be there.

      The columnist has a strange writing style the article seems to be filled with sarcasm... He knows darn well what would have become of that neighborhood had it not been adopted by people from India.
      Neighborhoods change over time. Let 20 or 30 years go by and change can be seen almost anywhere. I use to live in Flushing N.Y a place that has become world   known as "Little Chinatown" .... I think little China Town has become even bigger the the actual one in Manhattan.  The entire neighborhood people homes businesses look nothing like they did 20 years ago when I moved away... Corona another nearby less expensive neighborhood  where my Grandparents had a home for 75 years has under gone a few changes during the same time. Mostly Italian up until the 70's to everything under the sun in the present day. It went from a very safe neighborhood to one that every window and door needed to have iron bars on it.  Now it seems Little Chinatown is also moving into Corona and things are starting to look a bit better. I could not live in any one of the places again they are not bad but very congested and not what I am use to.... If I had stayed it might be different.         
        As for New Jersey many of the towns there went through a state of decline making them very affordable to people coming to America on a tight budget. That part of N.J once had the factories of some of the largest companies in the world. The list of big name companies that had factories there 50 or 60 years ago would be endless and the amount of people they employed would even be longer. Companies like Emerson Electronics, General Electric and countless other big names. When the stuff started being produced over sea's the factories closed down and original residents  quickly moved on to greener pastures. They left  behind nice homes and comfortable neighborhoods that could be bought or rented at reasonable prices.  Neighborhoods not adopted by immigrants with a work ethic have gone sower and are not fit for human habitation... For the most part I find people from India very easy to live around... They like being American and fit themselves into a neighborhood nicely. The dot head thing can't be helped and will never go away.  I don't see it as being used to denigrate.  The problem here in America is whenever someone describes a person and says so and so is  Indian confusion sets in as to American Indian or people from India... The easiest way is to say dot not feathers. Is it right or nice who knows but that's just the way it is.

[Ithaca-37]

Given that he's a writer for Time, we can safely assume that Stein is a leftist.  He took a risk at writing a piece of satire, and it went off like a grenade in his face.  Stein failed to realize that there are certain sins that cannot be swallowed by the left, and one of those is to cast doubt on the hard-left belief in the inherent superiority of brown people.  As one of the earlier posters noted, Stein dare not risk writing such a satire on the ugly foibles of American blacks, so he picked a target that he thought would be self-confident enough to be safe:  Asiatic Indians.  And the satire missed its mark, and now Stein must spend his time in the stocks of public humiliation.  No doubt Stein will become a feverish open-borders advocate to demonstrate his penance.

Several months ago, I read an article written by a college professor, who spoke of a hard-left colleague who dared speak a genuine point-of-fact about American history.  You may have heard that black slaves were counted as something like 3/5 of a person in a census back in the first half of the 19th century.  It was always assumed that Southerners considered blacks as 3/5 human.  The professor noted that it was the Northerners who insisted on the 3/5 mark, while the Southerners wanted 1:1.  Naturally, that makes sense, as the Southerners were looking to boost their numbers to increase their portion of Congress, and the North had the opposite interest.  However, the typical campus black militants heard that a professor was daring to run contrary to the idea that only Southerners viewed blacks as less than humans, and the professor, a hard leftist, was driven from his tenured job.  He was literally consumed by his own.

My reason for writing this second paragraph is this:  If I ever caught the ear of Stein or this aforementioned college prof, I would ask this question:  "How's it taste?  How does it taste when you cheered the monster of Cultural Marxism when it chewed on guys like me, only to have it turn around and find it swallowing you?  Does it burn going down your throat?"

37

[Zelhar]

I couldn't find any malice in the writer's words. Yes he is sarcastic, exaggerative, and comic. Look how he also describes himself and his old white friends as shoplifters.

Anyway I think it is a perfectly legitimate way of writing a personal anecdotal article. Of course it would be completely wrong to write like that if the subject were blacks. Blacks are perfect human beings. In fact they are so perfect that they are above human. They are  as magnificent as the majestic Elves  from the land of Valinor. 

[syyuge]

Whatever papistanis do is least expected to be criticized. Leftist Eurocommunists will continue to supply them with f-16 and f-18 as donation and free of cost.