Earlier this month, an Indian slate ran for Frisco City Council and school board: Sreekanth Reddy, Vijay Karthik and others. Every one of them lost.
As it turns out, in America, you can be the most educated demographic in America and still watch a sitting member of Congress call your religious traditions "Third World." You can have a $151,200 median household income and still feel unsafe wearing your cultural clothing in public. You can have a vice president whose wife is Indian American and watch the president repost a podcaster who calls your country of origin a hellhole.
The achievement is real. The immunity it was supposed to purchase is gone.
Political scientists describe three options for a dissatisfied constituency: Exit, voice or loyalty. Indian Americans are exercising none of them cleanly. They are not leaving—37 percent have never considered it. They are not organizing. Their attachment to either party is measurably eroding.
What they are doing is waiting: making individual calculations, reading the room, finding both parties wanting. When a diaspora adapts individually rather than responds collectively, both parties get to pretend the problem does not exist.
Five million people with nowhere to go is not a problem for Indian Americans. It is an opportunity for whoever figures out how to meet them where they are. So far, at the national level, nobody has shown up.
The post The Frisco Test: What Happened in One Texas Suburb Signals a National Shift appeared first on Ms. Magazine.