“I exist legally in your imagination”

This is a great discussion. At 26.5 minutes, it’s relatively compact. They discuss, among other things, Vivek Ramaswamy’s having come down to Earth to realize that his party will not accept him as a real person.

Millennial White Men DISCRIMINATED Against? (w/ Vijay Prashad) by Briahna Joy Gray (YouTube)

At about 18:00,

“I mean, there’s real racism but also for political reasons. It’s very useful to believe that groups rise or fall because of their kinds of intrinsic ability, because then they don’t have to spend money on any policies to try to create any kind of equality. Right? Like, that’s the real game. It’s like to cut government spending by saying that anything that you observe where a group is struggling is their own fault.

“But he can’t point to the the difficulties that any other group faces because, in his mind, it’s their own fault. And that’s why I think he’s having this existential crisis, like he thought that we were doing merit.

“This is why he got in trouble about a year ago around the holidays, defending H-1B-visa immigrants because he was like, “Oh, I thought we all agreed that if someone is smart and does a good job and is in a quote unquote burden on society that they should come here.” And then all the white people were like, “No, the game is white people get good stuff and nobody else does. We run this joint. It’s not about merit. It’s about white supremacy.” And he was like, “Oh shit.” He thought that the merit stuff was legitimate and not a pretext.”

Vijay’s response was brilliant, saying he has no empathy for people like this.

“Vijay PrashadThe two people you mentioned are both South Asian, Usha Vance and and Vive Ramaswami. They’re desperate to assert the fact that they’re white and they are not migrants, in a way, because a migrant is a person that needs to be deported by ICE. They are somebody who wins a prize in Cincinnati, Ohio because they were born in Cincinnati. You know, there can be other people born in Cincinnati who deserve to be expelled by ICE because they are illegal migrants. They’re illegal not in their status, but they’re illegal in the imagination. They shouldn’t be there. What he’s trying to say is, ‘I exist legally in your imagination.’ And that’s either malicious—he’s trying to claim whiteness—or it’s naive. And I think he’s not naive. I think he’s malicious.”