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The recent kerfuffle between the Hillary and Obama campaigns over his anti-outsourcing memo laid bare an issue that needs to be addressed.
Let me be clear - I don't want this thread to become another Hillary vs. Obama slugfest; my own preference remains Obama, despite my South Asian heritage, as I highly doubt this document was his work and even if it was, I'm willing to overlook it's distastefulness in favor of a larger picture.
But the problem the memo displays is a common one I see around DU and in a lot of anti-outsourcing sentiment. I'm not attacking those who criticize outsourcing; rather, I'm attacking those who attack outsourcing by consistently linking it with the association with India. People need to make a clearer distinction between criticizing outsourcing and criticizing a nation and its people. And it is racially sensitive to emphasize "India" and "Indians" in a pejorative context. And no, I'm not just talking about the "D-Punjab" line but the letter's tone of hostility to Indians and India.
Plenty of DU'ers, even those who have no racist sympathies, will defend such remarks by saying they're just attacking dual loyalty and the beneficiary of outsourcing. But those who claim that consistently repeating "India" or tarring people with guilt-by-association isn't racism need to consider the rhetoric of, say, the Minute Men or people like Tom Tancredo. They don't employ literally racist language, but they consistently discuss the "threat" that "Mexicans" represent. Or consider the Willie Horton ad, which didn't do anything explicitly racist but clearly played on people's fears of Blacks in its gratuitous use of his picture.
And frankly this gets at a larger issue - all too often on DU, people go from simply criticizing free trade to demonizing other countries; you can do the first without doing the other. Other countries are simply trying to compete on the terms the world powers have laid out. Criticize the terms on which competition takes place, not the countries and not the people.
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