Who Do You Cheer For?
A photograph from Saturday’s University of Texas football game will not leave my mind. Students in burnt orange, packed into the stands with 100,000 other people, arms raised after a touchdown. One is throwing the Hook ’em Horns sign. Texas had just come back against Ohio State. They look ecstatic. They look like they belong. They look like any other college student cheering on their team. Apparently that was the problem.
Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, posted the image on Sunday morning with the caption, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” When people objected, he posted the same photograph again: “Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.” Asked to take it down, he refused.
Read that second caption slowly. Body cameras expose criminals. Social media exposes these students. There was no information about immigration status in the photograph, just brown faces.
We now know that at least two of the students pictured are U.S. citizens. Dhairya Gupta came to the United States from India at five and was naturalized as a child. Rahul Kodali was born in New York and grew up outside Dallas, Texas.
I do not want to dwell on their citizenship, though, because doing so risks accepting a premise that I reject, which is that these students would somehow be less entitled to that moment if they were international students.
A naturalized citizen does not owe strangers proof of citizenship before celebrating a touchdown. An alumnus in Tokyo can cheer for their alma mater and serve as an unofficial ambassador of the United States. An American born in New York does not have to explain why he looks Indian. And an international student studying at an American university does not have to earn permission to wear the school colors, learn the traditions, love the team, or feel at home.
Hell, nobody owes anybody a reason to cheer for LSU, but they do it anyway.
The commentary that followed offered no policy analysis because the photo cannot support any. You cannot look at a student in a football stadium and determine whether he was born in Dallas, Delhi, or Des Moines. You cannot tell whether he is a citizen, a permanent resident, an international student, or the fourth generation of his family to live here.
I have strong views about immigration policy, including H-1B policy. This was not a debate about immigration policy, visa categories, labor markets, university enrollment, or the structure of American immigration law. Those subjects have their own legal and policy frameworks, and they should be debated on their own terms. This is something much simpler and much uglier.
People looked at a group of brown students cheering at a football game and assumed they were foreign. From there, their faces became evidence of immigration, demographic change, cultural displacement, and eventually “replacement.” The “great replacement” is a white supremacist conspiracy theory asserting that white populations are being deliberately displaced by nonwhite immigrants and other minority groups. Versions of that ideology have appeared in connection with mass violence in Christchurch, El Paso, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. The Christchurch attacker titled his manifesto The Great Replacement. The Buffalo shooter drew heavily from the same ideological framework.
The hair on the back of our necks should rise when we hear the word “replacement.” We should be extraordinarily careful when language rooted in white-supremacist ideology begins migrating into ordinary political conversation. Violence has followed this language before.
The same logic reached the temples. Some of the commentary treated Hindu and Muslim houses of worship in Texas as evidence that the state is becoming “foreign.” The lawyer in me loses patience here. The Constitution prohibits the establishment of religion and protects its free exercise. The Establishment Clause does not promise Christianity primacy, and religious liberty is not a courtesy that a majority extends to everyone else. A Hindu temple in Texas is evidence that the Constitution is working. We are better for the churches and mosques and synagogues and gurdwaras, for the believers and the skeptics, for the people who inherited their faith and the people still working out what they think.
The law can prohibit the state from sorting people by how they look or what they pray to, but nobody grows up tolerant because of the Establishment Clause. It develops on campuses, in residence halls and advising appointments, in the slow year it takes two strangers to stop being strangers. It is unglamorous, and it does not scale, and I have spent twenty years watching it succeed, and fail.
So I keep returning to the students who saw that photograph. Some of them will decide this week to be less visible.
