First, Ashwin Madia is a Jain, not a Hindu.

Second, the closest thing I found to what you are talking about was this article. Comparing Madia and his opponent, the columnist wrote, “There are other contrasts. Paulsen, in some ways, is a classic Minnesota pol: He’s white, a family man, a Lutheran and he has a traditional political resume. Madia is Indian-American, a bachelor, his parents are Hindu (he’s less religious than they are) and he’s making his first run for elective office.”

I don’t find anything objectionable about that paraphrasing or characterization, if that’s close to what Ashwin said. What if it’s true? Are you as religious as your parents?

While I agree that it is troubling to see those who deny their heritage just to fit in, or wear two completely different faces depending on the political needs of the moment, I don’t think it is fair to expect a candidate to wear his or her religion on his sleeve, particularly if that just isn’t who he or she is. I don’t think it is fair based on the comment I identified to suggest that Ashwin is somehow “ashamed” of his heritage.

I would suspect that the foremost thing on Ashwin Madia’s prospective constituents’ minds right now is how they are going to survive economically given what is happening to our economy. They are more interested in what Ashwin Madia can do for them than what religion he is. Ashwin himself has a responsibility to be both true to himself and his heritage while at the same time not needlessly distracting from the issues most important to his constituents. Because as we’ve all seen, people can be easily distracted, and manipulated, to not be focused on their own self-interest. Those doing the manipulating generally do not have ordinary folks’ interests at heart.

What I sought to do in my campaign was point out commonalities and bring people together (both on matters of policy and occasionally faith), not to highlight differences. It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and take potshots when you’ve never had to enter a room of people who look a lot different from you, some with scowls on their faces and their arms crossed, and have to reach into yourself, find that reservoir of common experience and humanity, and find the words to connect and persuade them, “I can help you if you give me a chance; we can work together…” I’ve done it. It’s not easy, but when it works, when you see the scowls turn to smiles and the arms unfold, and the hands extend in friendship, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s a moment underscored in all faiths, including Hinduism and Buddhism, “We are all one. We are connected.”

I hope this helps you overcome your reservations and perhaps have a bit more empathy for the challenge Ashwin is undertaking.

Finally, I want to express my profound disappointment at most of the comments above. As much as I enjoy the interesting posts on this site, I sometimes feel that the commentators would rather engage in pseudo-intellectual debate then to go to the heart of the matter and find solutions, or act in a communitarian spirit. I imagine them as passengers on the Titanic denying the water rushing in around them “Well, is it really the H2O’s fault that we are at threat of drowning? Or are there other causes of drowning too, so water isn’t the only thing to blame?” Some of the commentators on this site, I think, would have to be personally beaten while someone screams racial epithets at them before they act. (Even then, they would start debating, “Well, maybe this doesn’t really hurt, physically or emotionally.”)

I don’t have any kind of working theory for this level of denial other than to think it’s a coping mechanism. After all, a person who visits this site wouldn’t come here unless he or she had a decent sense of identity and wants to have a communal spirit founded in large part on ethnic pride. Yet, when people are challenged to understand that there are patterns of political and social thought in this country that simply do not embrace the ideal of America that we do, all of a sudden, people put on this faux show of equanimity almost as a coping or denial mechanism.

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Implicit in that statement is that we have to stand up to injustice. If you are not capable of rallying to Ashwin’s side when the injustice that these people are seeking to inflict upon him is so evident (or for that matter, to Barack Obama’s side, when Sarah Palin says he’s “palling around with terrorists” causing “One Palin supporter” to “shout… a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and [tell] him, “Sit down, boy,” when McCain/Palin supporters shout about Barack Obama at rallies, “Kill him,” and when their supporters in Ohio at their rally start openly calling Barack a terrorist (see this video)–well, I just don’t know how to help you help yourself.

Help yourself. Help the generations that follow. Please go see Comment 10 above, and as the saying goes, “Do the needful.” Fight for the America we were promised.

And here is another way of being a karmic facilitator.

Oh, please.

Is it true that Ashwin Madia is hiding his Hindu faith? Did he tell the local Minnesota media that “he is not that into” Hinduism while telling an Indian-American audience that he is “active” in a local temple? He also skirted the religion question when asked on Sepia Mutiny. If so, it seems his victory, rather than being a moment of pride, would be a slap in the face to those of us who are not ashamed of our religious heritage. I know that you didn’t sell out. In fact, you very openly declared your Hindu identity in your campaign. By obfuscating the issue, Madia is doing South Asian Hindus a disservice – and I for one would not donate to his campaign until his stance is clarified. Let’s hope he’s not Jindal Lite.

Dr. Amonymous, in the rush to defend all of Minnesota and to be high-minded, are you avoiding examining what happened here?

Amardeep, could you please tell us more about what bothered you about this video?

Yes, my opinion is based on the very few conversations I had with blacks and whites about this topic. But my larger point still is correct. Politics is a dirty game and race/religion have been used by both parties when they see an advantage in doing so.

What a tendentious argument. Here are some parallel arguments: scientists and creationists both use words and ideas – we can’t attempt any characterizations about who is more accurate; the U.S. government and the Australian government have both sent troops to Iraq and are therefore equally responsible for the war; human beings and horses have both used math and therefore they have the same relationship to math.

The first step in recovery is to admit you have a problem. If you want to support Republicans, that’s fine – there are many reasons to do so from personal benefit to you (probably on class) to ideological preference to being interested in theocracy- but you can’t do it right now without acknowledging that racism, homophobia, sexism, Christian supremacy have been more frequently and more overtly used by this party than by the Democratic Party over the last 40 years. It’s also very easy to understand why, because it’s people pursuing a pro-rich agenda and ideology who have to mobilize large numbers of people for electoral purposes – and if you can’t do it on economic populism or through force or by cheating then how are you going to do it? You have to figure out a way.

You can look at the details of this specific example in detail and try to understand what’s going on here, and maybe the party ID is not really important – or maybe it’s not a factor at all – but then you actually have to do a pretty detailed search into what’s going on. Staying at the level of broad generalizations that attempt to draw equivalencies on the basis of flawed understandings of history and current events is not enough to do justice to this.

The prevalence of Scandinavian ancestry and cultural tradition among the locals would presage free and unselfconscious expression of racism in Minnesota, and make this kind of crude codification and the assumption that a kind of informal apartheid should “properly” be in place that much more likely. The reporter’s objections are quite surprisingly forceful, though.

You’re ignoring everything we know about this election, race, and where Minnesota has fit in to American politics in recent timmes in order to make this argument based on suppositions about ethnicity and “culture.” See, for example, the David Sirota argument about how Obama won in Democratic primaries where there were small numbers or large numbers of Black people, but not in a range in between.

There are different ways of construing the data, but the idea that Minnesota is inordinately racist compared to, say, Wisconsin, seems less compelling than the argument that Subodh very eloquently made and which is, imo, hard to contest on a national basis. You can look at specifics of Minnesota for other explanations, but the ancestry-culture one seems pretty flawed (and as pointed out in another comment frustratingly essentialist).

Couldn’t agree with this statement more. I think that, quite often, folks on the coasts make these kinds of assumptions about the South and the Midwest “fly-over” states as a means of turning a blind eye to the endemic nature of racism in their own states. There’s a false mythology afoot in this country that proclaims that because people who live in larger cities tend to vote Democratic, racism is somehow less of an issue there. Any analysis – whatever one comes up with – of this particular example needs to be put into the context of the entire country and not just the conveniently distant corner of Minnesota.

*And Minnesotan women have got to be seen to be believed.

Illiteracy, (dire)poverty and (“serious”)mental illness excepted, it was all good for a very long time so long as you were not only white but of Northern European stock (not that this eliminated mental illness or poverty here)…I imagine McCarthy’s ancestors arrived well before 1924… Al Franken’s impending win is a very big change in that context. But hey, Razib, lotteries aside, strict regulations about which of your relatives to bring only come up when immigration is already restricted along racial lines, on the assumption that those relatives can and will bear offspring. Too bad for racial conservatives that laws have to apply across the board. One factor that was not taken into consideration in 1965 was the impact of abortion rights and a series of women’s movements on the growth of white populations. But while racial/national immigration quotas are obviously designed with the explicit intention of preserving racial hegemony within the “protected” borders, educationally based quotas can also limit the pool of immigrants in ways that can be measured in terms of race. What actually happened in Canada? Gotta go…