NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, 16 November 2004 — When former US President George Herbert Walker Bush talks about “brown” people, he means Mexicans. He calls his “half-Mexican” grandchildren “the little brown ones.”
But his son, newly re-elected US President George W. Bush, thinks brown-skinned people are all Muslims. Only he’s been taught now not to keep calling them “brown.” Back in May, chatting with Canada’s ambassador, Bush opined: “There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily-are a different color than white, can self-govern.”
What will the Bushes make of Bobby Jindal? Neither Mexican nor Muslim, Jindal is a slight, intense, Punjabi Indian-American who is brown-skinned. A Hindu convert to Catholicism, he’s certainly capable of “self-government.”
In fact, he’s governing us white folks to boot!
Some 78 percent of the mostly-white (85 percent) First Congressional District of Louisiana think Jindal is so very capable of governing that they just elected him their congressman, making him only the second Indian-American in almost half a century — since California’s Dalip Singh Saund’s 1956 election — to hold that office.
And Louisiana didn’t even have to be invaded and occupied to do it!
Twenty years ago, no brown-skinned guy would have been elected to anything in the First District. In fact, the 1978 election of New Orleans’ first black mayor caused Metairie’s population to swell from “white flight.” It would not have mattered if, like Jindal, the brown-skinned guy was really, really smart, graduated from Brown University (no pun intended!) and was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Twenty years ago, brown people visited Old Metairie only to clean swimming pools and homes and wear white uniforms, unless they were cutting grass.
The District includes former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke’s constituency, who in 1989 sent him to the state House of Representatives as a Republican and would have elected him governor had not a statewide struggle ensued.
But Metairie wasn’t completely racist. In 1975, they elected Harry Lee, the first Chinese-American ever elected sheriff in America.
How ironic that in 2003, brown Bobby Jindal ran for Louisiana’s governorship as a Republican against a bayou-born white woman Democrat named Kathleen “Blanco”-”white.” Blanco won 52 percent of the vote and beat Jindal in some parishes where race remains important, but Republicans were impressed with Jindal, whose platform and positions almost identically mirrored Blanco’s.
Why did he win big this time? Jindal strikes a chord defining what makes every American, white, black or brown, inordinately proud. We truly want America to be a great nation where everyone has the same rights, regardless of color, race, or religion. We elected Jindal because of what he represented, not what his color was. And even the most racist Metairiite genuinely believes this.
If we could export this to the Middle East, establish it in people’s hearts and minds and not impose it by force, that would be a triumph.
Here in south Louisiana, it’s a day to be proud. And we did it all by ourselves.
But it’s taken us two centuries.
And it’s still far from perfect. Sheriff Lee’s deputies recently arrested a black millionaire sports star strolling around his own neighborhood that was reported by his neighbor as a “suspicious person,” burbspeak for black. But Metairie now has black millionaires, and a new brown congressman. Amazing! The days of the David Dukers there are numbered.
Bush has never visited India, that big, brown subcontinent. There, he could see brown people truly governing themselves, sometimes greatly, sometimes badly. Just like us here in south Louisiana. Maybe it’s time for him to go. Before another half a century slides by.
— Sarah Whalen is an expert in Islamic law and taught law at Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana.
