Dem
51
GOP
49
Unfortunately, racist bigotry is as American as apple pie. We wish it weren't, but we know better. The wife of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, Usha Chilukuri Vance, is the daughter of Telugu-speaking Hindu immigrants from India and some Republicans don't like this, even though she was born in San Diego and graduated from Yale. And, after all, she is not the vice presidential nominee, her hubby is. Her father, Radhakrishna Chilukuri, graduated from IIT Madras (think: MIT) in mechanical engineering and teaches aerospace engineering at San Diego State University. Her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, is a marine molecular biologist and provost of Sixth College at UCSD. Usha's parents are not undocumented, are not fentanyl smugglers, are not criminals, and are none of the other things Donald Trump is constantly carping about.
Online posts have targeted the vice presidential nominee for marrying a non-white person, particularly one who is not only not a Christian, but a practicing Hindu. White supremacist and all-around bigot Nick Fuentes—who, let us recall, has dined with Donald Trump—recently said: "What kind of man marries somebody that isn't a Christian? What kind of man marries somebody named Usha? Clearly, he doesn't value his racial identity, his heritage. Clearly, he doesn't value his religion. He doesn't marry a woman that professes Jesus Christ? What does that say about him?" Because surely if there's one thing we can agree on, it's that Jesus was all about exclusion, and making sure to identify which people were not pure enough to be a part of his movement.
Many of the racist posts, from Fuentes and others, which talk about the Great Replacement Theory, have gotten hundreds of thousands of views. A group called Stop AAPI Hate has recorded thousands of hate-motivated incidents since 2020, when COVID generally increased hate of all Asian-Americans, even though India was as much a victim of COVID as the U.S. So anti-immigrant hatred is not limited to poor people from Central America wading over the Rio Grande, but is also aimed at highly educated nonwhite immigrants who came to the country legally and who have good jobs and pay taxes. (V)