The mediated life of (Ajit) Pai: Disciplining ‘model minorities’ in neoliberal times

ABSTRACT

The last several years has seen an incredible rise in the visibility of right wing South Asian American politicians. This essay examines the unprecedented media battle waged by and against one such figure, Ajit Pai, the Trump-appointed Chair of the Federal Communications Commission who led a charge to repeal net neutrality. This battle, which took place through promotional videos that Pai produced and a racist meme-driven backlash, is a rich archive for exploring the shifting racial constructions of the ‘model minority’ in neoliberal times. It reveals new ways in which the ‘model minority’ is performing race and in turn being racialized. It thereby extends our understanding of how model minority discourse works as a strategy of state governance and of disciplining people of color. Pai enacts what I call ‘model minority cool’, a subject position that insidiously deploys race: while it performs ‘cool’ to identify as a person of color who experiences racism, it perpetuates white supremacy. In turn, the backlash against Pai reveals that the model minority is now fungible with the intersecting, abject categories of terrorist, fag, and Black, extending the disciplining reach of model minority ideology.

KEYWORDS:

• Model minority
• government
• South Asian American
• politician
• neoliberalism
• cool
• internet
• racialization

Acknowledgement

I thank the many colleagues who supported me as I developed this article as well as Laura Helper and anonymous reviewers who provided constructive feedback. This essay is dedicated to the late Anantha Sudhakar who provided key help early on and whose friendship I sorely miss.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. SAALT reports that in 2015, ‘there were 257 anti-Muslim hate crimes, a 67% increase since 2014, and the highest level since 2001.’

2. The Internet has always been structured by inequality; the repeal exacerbates already existing issues.

3. Rashad Robinson from Color of Change argues: ‘Pai’s plan to dismantle neutrality is an attack on twenty-first-century civil rights. Net neutrality is the foundation of our free and open internet, which has been an indispensable tool for Black communities and others fighting for justice.’

4. After World War II, U.S. desires to appear as a benevolent world leader fueled its effort to dismantle its more obvious exclusionary policies. Politicians fostered racial liberalism – ‘the growing belief…that the country’s racial diversity could be most ably managed through the assimilation and integration of nonwhites’ – to construct Asian Americans as ‘assimilating others’ (Wu 4). This, in turn, paved the way to the model minority myth.

5. In 1947, scientific and technical institutions numbered 38 and trained close to 3,000 students; by 1961, 102 institutions trained nearly 14,000 students.

6. As Prashad reports, ‘Between 1966–1977, of the Indian Americans who migrated to the U.S., 83% entered under the occupational category of professional and technical workers (roughly 20,000 scientists with Ph.D.’s, 40,000 engineers, and 25,000 doctors)’ (75).

7. For a description of the political uses of ‘brown’ see Nitasha Sharma, ‘Brown’ (Schlund-Vials et al.)

8. Net neutrality rules are supported by 55 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans ‘Majority of Voters Support Net Neutrality Rules as FCC Tees Up Repeal Vote,’ Morning Consult, 29 November 2017, (https://morningconsult.com/2017/11/29/strong-support-net-neutrality-rules-fcc-considers-repeal/).

9. As Karen Shimakawa describes, the process of abjection is ‘an attempt to circumscribe and radically differentiate something that, although deemed repulsively other is, paradoxically…an undifferentiated part of the whole’ (2). Shimakawa reads Asian Americanness as a national abject that ‘continually must be made present and jettisoned.’ (3). The repulsive Asian American in the figure of Pai is here remade into other figures of abjection.

10. This cartoon appears in an article-length profile of Ajit Pai (Varadarajan).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Falu Bakrania

Falu Bakrania is Associate Professor of Race and Resistance Studies (RRS) in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University (SFSU). She was also Co-Director of SFSU’s South Asian Studies Initiative for over a decade. She holds a B.A. in sociology and economics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. in sociology from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University. Her scholarship and teaching focus on the South Asian diaspora, gender and sexuality, nationalism and transnationalism, and popular culture.