In third grade, I came home from school in Westchester and announced to my parents that I wanted to be Jewish.
Most of my friends were. Their families had holidays the school calendar already knew about and traditions with a settled place in the neighborhood. I was the only Zoroastrian besides my brother. One of my high school textbooks even called the religion extinct. Substitute teachers stumbled over my name. For years I wanted to change it — not because I disliked it, but because it introduced me before I could introduce myself.
My parents never told me to assimilate. They modeled it instead: excellent schools, professional careers, achievement inside American institutions. The instruction was never spoken, which made it harder to argue with. I drew the conclusion an 8-year-old draws: If difference creates friction, reduce the difference.
The numbers suggest that it is not that our demographic has failed to assimilate, but that we have done so too well and achieved too much.
I thought about that kid again this week after a 19-year old man allegedly attempted to carry out a mass shooting at a Hindu temple in Aurora, Illinois. According to prosecutors, the suspect told co-workers that he “couldn’t wait to kill Indian people” but had to abandon the attack when his rifle jammed. On Thursday, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi revealed that he was praying at the temple during the attempted shooting.
The attempted shooting is the latest chilling example of increasing anti-South Asian bigotry on the right. A recent report from the Center for the Study of Organized Hate put numbers to something that has become difficult to miss. Researchers identified roughly 542,000 hateful posts targeting South Asians on X between January 2025 and June 2026. Monthly volume was up 240% since January 2024. Nearly half of the posts portrayed South Asians as invaders, job thieves or a demographic threat.
The numbers suggest that it is not that our demographic has failed to assimilate, but that we have done so too well and achieved too much. Late last month, hugely influential right-wing activist Chris Rufo and far-right book publisher Jonathan Keeperman published a podcast discussing what they termed “the Indian Question” — and arguing that Indian Americans could never be assimilated despite their successes.
Rufo and Keeperman’s discussion was sparked by a hateful post from Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission. The morning after the University of Texas’ football team came back to beat top-ranked Ohio State, French posted an image of South Asian students celebrating in the stands.
“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” he wrote, “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
After the 1965 immigration, reforms opened the country to skilled migration and the desi community that arrived built the sort of résumé that American meritocracy claims to reward.
The students were performing one of the most familiar rituals of American life: cowboy hats and a football game. Had assimilation really been the question, the photograph would have answered it definitively. Instead French made the picture evidence of a sort of invasion. One of the students, Rahul Kodali, waved off the compliment he was offered by people rushing to defend him as sufficiently assimilated. “I’m going to the games because I like the team,” he said, not to offer some demonstration of cultural adaptation. But French did not weigh their qualifications and find them lacking. He saw their faces and stopped there.
Assimilation in the ordinary sense is real and unremarkable. People take on the texture of a place and belong to it. My family did, across generations, and it built the life I have today. But the trouble is not with adaptation itself, it begins when adaptation stops being a process and becomes an audition — that the right credentials, in the right order, settle the question of Americanness when belonging is something you are made to prove rather than something you have.
After the 1965 immigration, reforms opened the country to skilled migration and the desi community that arrived built the sort of résumé that American meritocracy claims to reward. Median household income for Indian-headed households reached $151,200 in 2023, and 77% of Indian Americans over 25 held a bachelor’s or advanced degree. Achievement at that level carried the promise of a bargain: that enough credentialing could make the question of foreignness disappear; that you could become too accomplished to be told you did not belong.
You cannot.
French’s reaction, Rufo and Keeperman’s serious treatment of “the Indian question,” the waves of hate against south Asians (including Republicans) from the right — all this is the proof that the audition can never be passed. These students had the credentials. It changed nothing, because the objection was never to a lack of fitting in. It was to their skin color.
That is what 8-year-old me could not have known. He was right about the small part — familiarity does reduce friction, at least at the level of the substitute teacher or the after school hangout. He was wrong about what it buys. He believed that with enough of it, the question of whether he belonged would eventually stop being asked — that belonging was a credential he could earn and then keep.
So I earned them. I went to four Ivy League schools. The students in Austin donned cowboy hats and screamed for the Longhorns. Krishnamoorthi got elected to Congress. None of it moves anyone who has already decided what our brown faces mean. None of it reaches a person who has already decided that an Indian face is a thing that requires explaining or exterminating.
Indian Americans were told that success was proof we belonged but, increasingly, our success is being used as proof that we don’t. I wanted to change my name because I thought I could make my belonging easier for other people to recognize.
The mistake was not wanting to fit in. It was believing that my Americanness was ever theirs to certify.
The post An attempted mass shooting is another chilling message to Indian Americans like me appeared first on MS NOW.
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