Funny, somehow I managed to avoid knowing what you look like or how to pronounce your first name (I assumed it was Milan “like the city”) or even that your last name is Singh, which I now realized has been at the top of every piece you’ve written. That probably doesn’t say anything good about me, a white man!
In any event, I’ve enjoyed reading you. Please keep writing, you have a gift!
This piece made me think about my own ambivalent reaction to the reaction to Pete Buttigieg. When he and I were kids (he's a bit older) gay men belonged somewhere near the front of the pack in the grievance olympics. We (or really my elders) were despised with an intensity people have a hard time remembering, the community was devastated by a deadly plague and the two things went together. I remember Barack Obama saying he opposed gay marriage because "when it comes to marriage, God is in the mix." I didn't hold this against Obama at all (TBH he was clearly lying) but it definitely reinforced my sense that I was part of a group that would always be marginal and disliked.
Now things have changed *so* much that the reaction to the first out gay presidential candidate wasn't "what a ridiculous stunt it is to pretend a gay man could ever be elected president" but instead "he's just a boring white boy" or "if he were really queer he'd have blue hair and dress androgynously." These reactions make me furious, even though I don't have a strong opinion about Pete personally. But on reflection I'm overjoyed: for all our problems we live in a much more tolerant country than we did ten years ago, let alone thirty.
Very nice. For what it’s worth, as a kippah-wearing Jew from childhood, I can relate to a lot of this. As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate my marginalization from mainstream American culture as a source of strength and novel perspective. In the long run, I think it was all worth it. But man was it a tricky way to grow up.
White people have always acted in their own interests as a racial group, and have taken great pains to distinguish themselves racially.
No one’s doing anything TO them. (Other than not being invited to the BBQ.)
When black folks are willing to stand up and point out the systemic racism well documented in the past (e.g redlining) and they have the guts to also tell and record the evidence of current systemic racism and oppression (e.g. violent police discrimination, low real estate appraisals) currently, and a white man,s response is WHAT ABOUT ME?….that’s not going to be very helpful.
Despite the feeling that you didn't fit in, you've done extremely well for yourself and have a bright future. Thanks for keeping SB on track! You'll be missed here.
It's tiring as hell trying to "pass", even as a white north-western European who immigrated because of dad's H1B visa at age 12. I don't have an accent, but I do have a funny name people can't pronounce. There is a whole part of my background that my coworkers, friends - and even my spouse - will never be able to understand.
On the one hand, I understand why Jindal would take the course he did. On the other hand, I strongly believe there is a real limit to what you can achieve in this country when your first name is Piyush. Making such an extreme attempt at passing (changing your religion and your name) is kind of pathetic because it will never, ever, ever work.
"Even in my first year of college, I let my literature professor mispronounce my name for the whole semester because I was too scared to correct him."
Not to try to detract from your experience, but I once TA'd for a class, and the teacher introduced me to the students as "Carol" and I was too shy to correct him.
Thanks for writing this Milan. It's interesting to hear the perspective of an Indian Gen-Z.
Despite my Substack handle, I am a South Asian millennial and I can relate to about half of what you said here. On the one hand, I don't go through extra checking by the TSA very often, and for whatever reason, I have almost never felt like I don't belong here because of my race.
On the other hand, seeing celebrities and politicians who look more like you is a nice feeling. It's not something I missed exactly: I never had an issue with the Apu character and didn't feel upset that he was the only brown man on TV. But when this changed, I did find myself unexpectedly pleased about it.
My dating life is the one aspect where I suspect I face strong discrimination because of my race. But I can't really prove this is true - I might just suck! And I do have strong beliefs that women have the right to avoid dating people of other races for whatever reason, socially justifiable or not. So I end up rarely thinking or talking about it, but it always resonates when other brown guys bring it up.
I think "lived experience" is a flawed concept, but when I see comment sections like this it does make me think that it's often unfairly dismissed in its entirety. Clearly, while this doesn't apply to every member of a group, there's some salience to the idea that experiences between groups can be just *different* in difficult-to-quantify ways, and there's a lot of back and forth about how someone's subjective experience is actually wrong and they're just being paranoid based on race. It really is a strange dynamic to see so many people try to invalidate an experience that they have only a window into instead of a lifetime into, and it seems to only come out in force over identity politics.
Imagine if someone said "I felt like an outsider at school because I listened to goth music and hated sports" and many people who barely know them piled in to say "you only felt like an outsider because you were self-obsessed, no one cares about sports or music, besides sometimes people made fun of me too." It would be weird!
No wonder people in identity groups fall back on saying their lived experience is sacrosanct and beyond reproach. It seems like an overcompensation for the fact that their relaying of direct experience is considered a prime target for debate by people who don't have that direct experience.
I don’t think the reply to “I felt like an outsider at school because I listened to goth music and hated sports" and many people who barely know them piled in to say "you only felt like an outsider because you were self-obsessed, no one cares about sports or music, besides sometimes people made fun of me too." Is weird. In the right context it identifies the insecurity and compensatory narcissism of adolescence. With respect, that is, at least in part, what Milan is expressing.
Thank you for this comment. Is it my imagination or have the normie Democrats around here been slowly getting replaced by libertarians and Wes Yang superfans?
I’d say there’s been a shift even since I joined in 2021. I think the desire to criticize the excesses of the far left in this comment section brought a lot of people who want to just bash the woke and has caused some political drift towards the right.
One of my favorite Scott Alexander insights: "if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." (I'm not saying Matt tried to found such a community, nor are there that many "witches" here compared to some places, it's just a very light instance of the same issue.)
I don't think that's accurate on Matt's writing. One of his leading takes, YIMBYism, is very libertarian accessible and adjacent on the grounds of land development being too regulated by the government.
Very fair, in my head I was basically thinking of libertarianism ex-YIMBY. Some concrete examples are the "regulate porn" "regulate gambling" and "raise the alcohol tax" takes.
"The much more plausible explanation is that no normal person’s experience of freedom tracks the conclusion that New York is less free than South Dakota. You can, obviously, do a much wider range of things in New York than in South Dakota. People attempting to construct some alternate definition of freedom that will better-track the libertarian political program will try and fail to put together a metaphysically workable distinction between “negative” and “positive” freedoms that immediately collapses in the face of air pollution, unsafe driving, lawsuits, etc."
You find libertarians? I feel like not so long ago someone was saying libertarianism is only white guys and I went googling for "prominent libertarians" and found every race and ethnicity and social class background represented. But even if it was true, it doesn't feel like a great way to take a dig at a philosophy.
In any case is this even the right topic? I feel like the take is more that the site has gotten more crank and reactionary or something, not libertarian in any way I find meaningful. But that said, people have been saying "it's getting more right wing" since I signed up and when I go baac and look at old comments they don't really feel all that different.
Funny, somehow I managed to avoid knowing what you look like or how to pronounce your first name (I assumed it was Milan “like the city”) or even that your last name is Singh, which I now realized has been at the top of every piece you’ve written. That probably doesn’t say anything good about me, a white man!
In any event, I’ve enjoyed reading you. Please keep writing, you have a gift!
I enjoyed the article, best of luck in your future endeavors.
Hey I'm not sure if I ever commented before but I found this really moving.
This piece made me think about my own ambivalent reaction to the reaction to Pete Buttigieg. When he and I were kids (he's a bit older) gay men belonged somewhere near the front of the pack in the grievance olympics. We (or really my elders) were despised with an intensity people have a hard time remembering, the community was devastated by a deadly plague and the two things went together. I remember Barack Obama saying he opposed gay marriage because "when it comes to marriage, God is in the mix." I didn't hold this against Obama at all (TBH he was clearly lying) but it definitely reinforced my sense that I was part of a group that would always be marginal and disliked.
Now things have changed *so* much that the reaction to the first out gay presidential candidate wasn't "what a ridiculous stunt it is to pretend a gay man could ever be elected president" but instead "he's just a boring white boy" or "if he were really queer he'd have blue hair and dress androgynously." These reactions make me furious, even though I don't have a strong opinion about Pete personally. But on reflection I'm overjoyed: for all our problems we live in a much more tolerant country than we did ten years ago, let alone thirty.
Very nice. For what it’s worth, as a kippah-wearing Jew from childhood, I can relate to a lot of this. As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate my marginalization from mainstream American culture as a source of strength and novel perspective. In the long run, I think it was all worth it. But man was it a tricky way to grow up.
White people have always acted in their own interests as a racial group, and have taken great pains to distinguish themselves racially.
No one’s doing anything TO them. (Other than not being invited to the BBQ.)
When black folks are willing to stand up and point out the systemic racism well documented in the past (e.g redlining) and they have the guts to also tell and record the evidence of current systemic racism and oppression (e.g. violent police discrimination, low real estate appraisals) currently, and a white man,s response is WHAT ABOUT ME?….that’s not going to be very helpful.
This is beautiful. Well done Milan
Despite the feeling that you didn't fit in, you've done extremely well for yourself and have a bright future. Thanks for keeping SB on track! You'll be missed here.
What a great piece. Thank you.
It's tiring as hell trying to "pass", even as a white north-western European who immigrated because of dad's H1B visa at age 12. I don't have an accent, but I do have a funny name people can't pronounce. There is a whole part of my background that my coworkers, friends - and even my spouse - will never be able to understand.
On the one hand, I understand why Jindal would take the course he did. On the other hand, I strongly believe there is a real limit to what you can achieve in this country when your first name is Piyush. Making such an extreme attempt at passing (changing your religion and your name) is kind of pathetic because it will never, ever, ever work.
"Even in my first year of college, I let my literature professor mispronounce my name for the whole semester because I was too scared to correct him."
Not to try to detract from your experience, but I once TA'd for a class, and the teacher introduced me to the students as "Carol" and I was too shy to correct him.
🙏❤️ Matt & Kate were lucky to have found you. Good luck on the next steps of your life journey!
Thanks for writing this Milan. It's interesting to hear the perspective of an Indian Gen-Z.
Despite my Substack handle, I am a South Asian millennial and I can relate to about half of what you said here. On the one hand, I don't go through extra checking by the TSA very often, and for whatever reason, I have almost never felt like I don't belong here because of my race.
On the other hand, seeing celebrities and politicians who look more like you is a nice feeling. It's not something I missed exactly: I never had an issue with the Apu character and didn't feel upset that he was the only brown man on TV. But when this changed, I did find myself unexpectedly pleased about it.
My dating life is the one aspect where I suspect I face strong discrimination because of my race. But I can't really prove this is true - I might just suck! And I do have strong beliefs that women have the right to avoid dating people of other races for whatever reason, socially justifiable or not. So I end up rarely thinking or talking about it, but it always resonates when other brown guys bring it up.
Great piece Milan! You've done an amazing job at Slow Boring and I will miss your posts and comments. Best of luck to you!
Great to hear this perspective. Clearly a promising future ahead.
I think "lived experience" is a flawed concept, but when I see comment sections like this it does make me think that it's often unfairly dismissed in its entirety. Clearly, while this doesn't apply to every member of a group, there's some salience to the idea that experiences between groups can be just *different* in difficult-to-quantify ways, and there's a lot of back and forth about how someone's subjective experience is actually wrong and they're just being paranoid based on race. It really is a strange dynamic to see so many people try to invalidate an experience that they have only a window into instead of a lifetime into, and it seems to only come out in force over identity politics.
Imagine if someone said "I felt like an outsider at school because I listened to goth music and hated sports" and many people who barely know them piled in to say "you only felt like an outsider because you were self-obsessed, no one cares about sports or music, besides sometimes people made fun of me too." It would be weird!
No wonder people in identity groups fall back on saying their lived experience is sacrosanct and beyond reproach. It seems like an overcompensation for the fact that their relaying of direct experience is considered a prime target for debate by people who don't have that direct experience.
I don’t think the reply to “I felt like an outsider at school because I listened to goth music and hated sports" and many people who barely know them piled in to say "you only felt like an outsider because you were self-obsessed, no one cares about sports or music, besides sometimes people made fun of me too." Is weird. In the right context it identifies the insecurity and compensatory narcissism of adolescence. With respect, that is, at least in part, what Milan is expressing.
Thank you for this comment. Is it my imagination or have the normie Democrats around here been slowly getting replaced by libertarians and Wes Yang superfans?
I’d say there’s been a shift even since I joined in 2021. I think the desire to criticize the excesses of the far left in this comment section brought a lot of people who want to just bash the woke and has caused some political drift towards the right.
I'm against the excesses of the far left but ... I'm kinda tired about the complaining about them here too.
One of my favorite Scott Alexander insights: "if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." (I'm not saying Matt tried to found such a community, nor are there that many "witches" here compared to some places, it's just a very light instance of the same issue.)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
The libertarian shift has to be a law of internet communities or something, because Matt's writing evinces approximately zero sympathy for it.
I don't think that's accurate on Matt's writing. One of his leading takes, YIMBYism, is very libertarian accessible and adjacent on the grounds of land development being too regulated by the government.
Very fair, in my head I was basically thinking of libertarianism ex-YIMBY. Some concrete examples are the "regulate porn" "regulate gambling" and "raise the alcohol tax" takes.
Finally, allow me to link to one of my favorite Matt takes of all time: https://slate.com/business/2013/03/mercatus-freedom-map-and-the-fallacies-of-libertarianism.html
"The much more plausible explanation is that no normal person’s experience of freedom tracks the conclusion that New York is less free than South Dakota. You can, obviously, do a much wider range of things in New York than in South Dakota. People attempting to construct some alternate definition of freedom that will better-track the libertarian political program will try and fail to put together a metaphysically workable distinction between “negative” and “positive” freedoms that immediately collapses in the face of air pollution, unsafe driving, lawsuits, etc."
White dudes read these sites, white dudes comment, and where you find white dudes...
You find libertarians? I feel like not so long ago someone was saying libertarianism is only white guys and I went googling for "prominent libertarians" and found every race and ethnicity and social class background represented. But even if it was true, it doesn't feel like a great way to take a dig at a philosophy.
In any case is this even the right topic? I feel like the take is more that the site has gotten more crank and reactionary or something, not libertarian in any way I find meaningful. But that said, people have been saying "it's getting more right wing" since I signed up and when I go baac and look at old comments they don't really feel all that different.
Good luck at the next step on your journey - hope you can still stop by to visit SB as a poster or commentor!