Why does Aparna Gopalan hate African Americans?

The contribution of African Americans to our shared, global, popular culture is incalculable. This is why 'Black Lives matter' is a slogan with visceral impact across the globe. How many of your favorite musicians and entertainers and sportsmen are African American? In religion there is Dr. Martin Luther King. In Politics, there is Obama. In Economics there is Thomas Sowell and Roland Fryer whose work explains why ending systemic discrimination improves things for everyone.

Sadly, there are people who think Black Lives Matter only because African Americans are abject folk. We should care about them the same we should care about some unattractive species which, nevertheless, is endangered.

What happens when worthless shitheads of this type jump on the BLM bandwagon?

Aparna Gopalan is one such shithead. She blames Obama for 'legitimizing' Modi by being his buddy. Perhaps this causes her to take a dim view of African Americans. Or maybe she is simply as stupid as shit because she is doing a PhD in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research and writing focuses on the reproduction of inequality and poverty in rural India. Fortunately, Indians won't let this cretin have any policy influence in India. So she won't be able to reproduce inequality and poverty in her country of origin. Hopefully, she will go to China and try her luck there.

Writing for Scroll.In, she asks-Five questions for Indians (who think they are) in solidarity with Black Lives Matter
Actually there is only question which matters for anybody. Is it in your interest to see America flourish? If the answer is yes, then it is in your interest for America to do proper mechanism design in the field of criminal justice. If this isn't done, there is increasing allocative and dynamic inefficiency in the American economy. This hurts people who trade with America or invest in America or who like the products of American culture.

By contrast the 5 questions Gopalan asks are irrelevant or mischievous-

1. Am I personally anti-black or racist?

This is irrelevant if you are Indian. All that matters is whether you want America to do well or if you want it to under-achieve. This depends on your rational self-interest.
Suppose you are anti-black, you would still want America, a predominantly White country to properly exploit Black labor power, not shoot it or lock it up. An anti-white racist may want Whites to fuck up. But if America goes down the tubes, the first to suffer will be coloured people.

This shouldn’t be an easy question. Personal racism does not just mean a straightforward revulsion towards black people or minorities (and yes, this includes religious and caste minorities too).

But, Gopalan, it also includes members of the RSS and the Bajrang Dal and Manuvadis. Why not denounce Scroll.In for its prejudice against Hindutva? 

It includes stereotyping, implicit bias, whitewashing, exoticising, purity politics, endogamy

so Gopalan feels Muslim girls shouldn't have to marry only Muslim boys. Good to know. 

and much more that is deeply embedded into our socialisation.

Gopal's 'socialisation' involved brainwashing against Modi, Trump and so forth. 

This type of racism can’t just be tackled in one individual’s mind:

Yes it can. 

reversing it requires anti-racist education to be institutionalised in schools and families from a young age.

No it doesn't. Anti-racist education has failed completely. Why? Because those subjected to it realized that they hadn't been taught to rite gud or do rithmetic. Their life-chances had been reduced. Meanwhile kids from China or even India who hadn't been exposed to that shite did well in STEM subjects and started making a lot of money. Kiran Majumdar has an Indian degree in Zoology and then trained as a brewmaster. She couldn't get a job in India and so went to Scotland. She impressed all she met. So she got backing to return to India. She has enriched our country by many billions of dollars. By contrast, Gopalan's Harvard PhD will render her utterly useless for the remainder of her long life. Anyone she teaches will become as stupid as her. Any political cause she supports will suffer reputationally as a result.

Black activists in the US have been doing this work with campaigns to mandate Black History Month in schools each February and to create classroom resources for teaching about difference.

But Black History Month has been institutionalized since the Ford Administration. What was the result? The differential incarceration rate of African Americans shot up. The thing is wholly useless. Devi & Fryer's recent paper shows that the only thing which works in tackling the underlying problem is Federal and State 'Pattern or Practice' investigation. Economists and Lawyers can help here. Social Anthropologists of Gopalan's ilk can only sit around with their thumbs up their asses saying 'Boo to Racism!'.

But in India, parents and teachers are unlikely to teach acceptance to children when most Indian adults themselves are notoriously racist.

Most Indian adults are as poor as shit. Few teachers aren't utterly ignorant. Still, responding to incentives, Indian students can rise up and do a lot for their country. But only by ignoring Gopalan type shitheads. 

Indian cricketers derogatorily call black colleagues “kalu,”

but they also call God, Krishna or Shyamji- which means 'black skin colored'

Indian entertainers are fairness cream salespeople and mobs going after African residents in Delhi may well be led by Indian politicians.

What is Gopalan trying to say? India is just like Amrika, yaar. We should have Black History Month, isn't it? Most Indian Mummies and Daddies are so ignorant they don't even have a PhD from Tufts- I mean Tufts for Chrissake- in phenomenological intersectionality. Chee, chee! Indians are such duffers. Isn't it ironic that the so called 'world's largest democracy' doesn't have even one African in its Senate? 

Indians abroad, cushioned in caste privilege and enjoying the benefits wrought by anti-racist struggles, now increasingly side with white supremacist leaders like US President Donald Trump.

Only because their PhDs in intersectional phenomenology are from shitty places like Tufts. What is the result? They vote for anti-semites like Trump.

Indeed, at this moment of global uprising, many see India’s most visible icon of justice – Gandhi – as standing on the wrong side of anti-black racism. Protestors targeting Gandhi’s statue right alongside the statues of slaveholders should remind us that interrogating and undoing all types of personal racism is a simple prerequisite to saying black lives matter.

The fact is some Africans hate South Asians- including Gandhi. This does not mean we have to hate ourselves unless we are doing a PhD in a shite subject at Harvard and our name is Gopalan. 

2. Do I turn a blind eye to anti-minority violence at home?

Criminals are a minority. In general, the non-criminal minority does indeed turn a blind eye to violence directed at them by their intended victims. 

The second question to ask yourself is: do I think minorities’ lives in my own country matter?

Minorities should be exploited in a sustainable, i.e. incentive compatible, way. That is why their lives matter. If you kill them, they will run away. But so will the guys who sense they are next in line. 

There has rarely been a time when this question has been more urgent in India than now.

Nonsense! The last majority to ethnically cleanse its minority was the Muslims of the Kashmir Valley. But it wasn't a real smart move- as they now realize. Minorities work harder and figure out smarter ways to do things. This opens doors for the poorer section of the majority. 

From encounter killings to custodial death and torture, from drastic over-policing to arrest without trial, from everyday harassment to being disappeared, the burden of police violence in India falls squarely on minorities.

As a result of which they can't run amok. That's a good thing. 

A 2019 survey showed that 50% of police personnel in India believe Muslims are more likely to commit crimes, and it shows.

A similar survey of cretins like Gopalan would show that they think that 100 % of all naughtiness is caused by Modi, Trump, Neoliberalism and lack of proper education in Phenomenological Intersectionality- unless it is from a non Ivy League shithole like Tufts.

Just months ago, Delhi police joined Hindutva supporters to attack the city’s Muslims,

after Muslims killed Delhi policemen

following a decades-old pattern of police working as enforcers of majoritarian might rather than law.

Gopalan thinks the law says Muslims are allowed to kill cops and non-Muslims. 

Indeed, just as George Floyd’ lynching became a viral video, so too did a clip of Faizan, the young Muslim man savagely beaten by the police on the roadside and made to sing the national anthem. For Faizan and the many other Muslims thus murdered, there have been no protests, no arrests, no charges, no dismissals, and no outrage.

Why? Because in South Asia, a minority has to toe the line or else it gets beaten and ethnically cleansed. India is exactly like its neighbors in this respect though no doubt it does a better job of letting those who are peaceful and industrious get rich while keeping their culture and religion.

In America, racist policing is linked to over-powerful Police Unions and a nexus between organized crime and corrupt cops who keep their quotas by arresting a lot of harmless people without the money for good legal representation. Killing a suspect actually increases your value to the Cartel which has you on retainer.

India too had 'encounter specialists' but they were extorting so much money from the majority community that they fell out of favor. 

Dalits and Adivasis similarly know the police mainly as collaborators in upper-caste violence. Rather than registering cases against caste Hindu offenders, police are more likely to themselves detain, brutalise, extort, rape, and mass murder minorities. Just Google “Dalit lynched” and you’ll see headlines no less horrific than if you Google “African American lynched.”

Keep Googling and you will see that the RSS, and therefore the BJP, has become the default national party precisely because it worked to break down 'untouchability'. Dalits found that nobody would stand up for them when they were slaughtered by Muslims- as is happening in Meo dominated parts of Haryana. That is why they vote BJP. It is pointless telling lies on this subject. Dalits know their own problems much better than some cretinous Gopalan. 

So don’t chant George Floyd’s name if you don’t care about Jitu Khatik (the 26-year-old Dalit man who died in Rajasthan police custody in February),

But the BJP does know Jitu Khatik's name. He was killed by a Congress administration. The RSS will keep the matter alive till elections are held. By contrast only a microscopic minority of Indians know George Floyd's name. 

and don’t talk about black incarceration if you don’t mention the dozens of Muslims being arbitrarily arrested during a pandemic.

Or just don't talk at all. Who do you think you're kidding anyway? If you really are American, fuck off back there. Why stick around in India pretending to be woke? Come to think of it, if the Muslims get the upper hand, you will have to run for your life in any case. 

3. Can I question the existence of police, prisons, army, and other instruments of state violence?

Why not? They may be 'maya'- a delusion. Then you get involved in a little light domestic terrorism and get beaten by the police and thrown in jail. At that point you cease to question the existence of police and prisons and so forth.

For all those who want to say black lives matter but then continue to “patriotically” support the Indian police force, army, prisons and anti-terror laws, I’ve got bad news.

You are coming back to India.

The strands of the Black Lives Matter movement that are quickly becoming dominant are not striving only for minority civil rights or against racist police, not demanding just the arrest of offending officers, and not calling at all for police retraining and legal reform: instead, they are calling for the abolition of policing and incarceration altogether.

Then fuck them. They are as stupid shit. Either their idiocy gets Trump elected or Biden will double down on his famous 1994 Crime Bill. He will flush the woke nutters out of the Democratic party and turn Blue States into bastions of Unionized, highly discriminatory, policing. In other words, LBJ's legacy will be erased and the Democrats will go back to being the party of choice for poorer Whites. It should be remembered that African Americans are only about 12 % of the population. It is only the great talent and 'soul' they contribute to popular culture which causes fellow Americans to grossly over-estimate their numbers.

Just as abolitionists of slavery “believed that slavery could not be fixed or reformed [but] needed to be abolished”, so too today’s abolitionists aren’t trying to reform policing and prisons (themselves byproducts of slavery)

though Britain, which never had slavery, has policing and prisons

but to “shrink [them] into non-existence” because they see that institutionalised punishment does not make us more safe.

So these cretins will cause a backlash of the type Devi & Fryer have described. The police will stand by till crime goes through the roof. Then they will return on higher salaries to use more brutal 'killology' then ever before. It is a familiar cycle. Gopalan will help reproduce it in Urban America because our doughty peasants won't let her reproduce inequality and poverty in rural India. 

They argue that repackaging the problems of poverty, homelessness, mental illness, and addiction as “crime” only amounts to “treating the symptom instead of the disease” and that too with a treatment (caging and state violence) often worse than the disease itself.

And we argue that their repackaging their woke bullshit benefits only Trump.

This is why the demand coming from the streets of Minneapolis (where Floyd was murdered) and from countless other American cities is to defund and disband the police, replacing it with community-based public safety measures.

Sure. Let the Cartels take over. Once the neighborhood is full off burned out shops and rickety crack-houses, the time will be ripe for money to be laundered by redeveloping the areas for high end Condos or an Amazon Warehouse.

In India, where half the public condones police violence even before a trial, abolition seems like a laughable idea. Even the other half isn’t calling to shrink the scope of policing. Well-meaning NGOs put out reports insisting that strengthening the rule of law requires building India’s police capacities. Journalists bemoan how India only has 144 police personnel per 100,000 people, falling short of the United Nation’s recommendation of 222. Even Human Rights Watch calls for higher police budgets. The entire discussion focuses on how to increase India’s investment in policing.

Gopalan's point is that India is a rich country like America. If some shitheads in America say 'defund the police', similar shitheads in India should say the same thing. Why aren't they doing it? Must be because their PhD is from a shithole like Tufts. 

But this misses the fact that policing isn’t just about the police: it’s about the use of force to enforce an existing order.

But, in India, the existing order was not enforced by the police. It was enforced by traditional power-brokers- often of a hereditary type. How fucking deracinated and ignorant is this PhD candidate? 

By that definition, policing in India – by paramilitary, military, jailers, and sanctioned vigilante groups – already enjoys better funding than education, welfare schemes, and public health do.

Why? It is because in many parts of India Government teachers don't teach, Government Doctors don't practice medicine and welfare schemes benefit only the rich. Thus the public wants them defunded. By contrast, the police do quite a good job unless there is political interference. 

So even though abolition is inconceivable in India at the moment, yet if you dare not conceive it, you can’t lay claim to this movement.

No. You can say 'Black Lives Matter' to me because
1) African American culture plays a big part in my life- e.g. the music I listen to, films or sports I watch
2) I trade with or have an investment in America. What is good for America is good for me. Improving the efficiency of a mission critical public service means better macro-economic outcomes.

Gopalan by contrast says 'unless you say you want the police to be abolished so anyone can rape your daughter with impunity, you have no right to say 'Black Lives Matter'.

What is our answer to Gopalan? We have to agree with her impeccable logic. However, a careful reading of Foucauld's Discipline and Punish would show that Policing is essentially epistemic. Thus only by defunding epistemic institutions- like the one where Gopalan is doing her PhD- will we tackle the underlying problem. But is defunding Universities enough? No. Because of the manner in which epistemics is imbricated in language. We must abolish language first. Gopalan may reply, 'I have already done so. I am writing gibberish. Only a fool like you would have thought there was some rhyme or reason to the word-salad I just randomly typed out'. Our reply is 'Damn you Gopalan! You must be an Iyengar! For thousands of years you clever too clever Iyengars have been running circles around us dim-witted Iyers.'
Gopalan says 'Xxaewr2q344 gikikw43v wzhk;ljer. tee!'
Being gentlemen, we let her have the last word.

Except it isn't really her last word. There is still this further question-

4. Do I think poverty is moral, natural, or normal?

If poor people have kids they can't provide for, there will be poverty. It isn't moral. Using a condom is perfectly natural and normal. Lots of poor people don't have kids precisely because they don't want to perpetuate poverty. 

Abolition seeks not just to end policing but to also end the unequal society that necessitates policing in the first place.

An open society needs policing. A closed community does not. But, in that case, outcomes are even more unequal. Gopalan wouldn't have been let into America. Indeed, she wouldn't have been let out of the agraharam. 

This is why Americans in the streets are making what we’d see in India as “economic” demands rather than just “human rights” demands, calling to defund institutions of punishment and to instead invest public money in schools, hospitals, housing, social security, and work for all, especially marginalised citizens.

Some Americans are demanding this. But they may be merely virtue signalling or just drunk off their heads. Some Cities may go the way of Camden NJ and get rid of the Police Dept and contract in policing services. Others could embrace community policing as part of a program or urban regeneration. But such an approach will fail if 'woke' nutters aren't disintermediated. 

Protestors point out that up to 40% of many US cities’ budgets go to policing, an amount larger than what is spent on violence and substance abuse prevention, mental health, affordable housing and schools put together.

Why does this happen? Police Unions. Often they have more power than either the Police Chief or the Mayor- this was the problem in Minneapolis.  Politicians are reluctant to take on Public Sector Unions. It is the Right, not the Left, which has been pressing for Police Reform.

How much safer could communities be if this money was invested in residents rather than armed patrollers?

This depends on whether they have guns and a neighborhood watch. 

Meanwhile in India, Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis are the poorest of every rung of the poor: they already “can’t breathe” in India even before the police or mobs get to them.

Still, they seem to have no problem 'reproducing poverty and inequality' by having babies. 

So by all means, say that black lives matter

Black American Lives matter because Black Americans are contributing a lot to our popular culture

– but only if nine people owning as much wealth as half the country infuriates you, and only if India spending 9% of its budget on the military and only 3% on health is also the target of your ire.

But if this makes you angry, then you are stupid and ignorant.  It is easy to see that 'half the country' had babies who were bound to be poor. Nor is it very difficult to see why- provided you know a bit of Econ- it is better if certain types of wealth are concentrated so as to overcome Agent Principal hazard and thus improve allocative efficiency.

But Gopalan is studying a worthless subject . That is why she is in effect saying 'only if you are stupid and ignorant, like me, can you say Black Lives Matter'. 

But if India’s system of hereditary poverty and disinvestment from minorities does not morally horrify you, then you aren’t an ally.

Yet, 'hereditary poverty' is caused by poor people having babies who are bound to be poor. There can't be 'disinvestment' from minorities when there was no investment in them, or indeed in the majority, in the first place. 

5. Am I afraid of revolutionary demands and antagonistic action?

No. The shitheads who indulge in such things soon get slapped down. Next question. 

The current protests in the US have been compared to the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India:

which helped the BJP and hurt Congress and the Left. 

both saw a largely young crowd of protestors, widespread dissent from big cities to small towns, majority groups coming out in solidarity, and a brutal reception from police and politicians.

Majority groups? What has Gopalan been smoking? 

However, despite cosmetic similarities the two protests differ in essentials.
Unlike the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act whose demands were primarily defensive (remove this law and return to the existing order),

but, under the existing order non Muslim refugees were getting Citizenship. There was no change whatsoever.

Black Lives Matter’s demands have been offensive (change the existing order by abolishing policing).

This hurts Democrats and helps Trump. Also, it breaks the lockdown in a manner that delights Trump. So this is a win-win for the Right. 

Even when some factions of the movement call for reform, others immediately propose revolutionary alternatives for direct mass accountability.

And the thing turns into a nuisance unless Trump actually dies laughing at these cretins. 

The tactics of Black Lives Matter are also revolutionary, drawing on both the civil disobedience of Martin Luther King Jr. and the militancy of the Black Panthers.

Very true. They helped Trump get elected just as Nixon was elected thanks to stupid hippies.

This is why the most potent symbols of today’s movement are all moments of collective law-breaking, whether it is the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct on fire, slaveholder Edward Colston’s statue being thrown in the harbour in England, or protestors throwing tear gas back at the US National Guard outside the White House.

This benefits the Right. Having read Devi & Fryer's paper we can predict that crime will go up immediately and policing will become more savage a year down the line. 

These images sit in stark contrast to the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act as symbolised by a peaceful sit-in at Shaheen Bagh, a tactic that put protestors in the defensive position while allowing the government to dominate media coverage and demobilise public support. All this points to an urgent need to rethink the watered-down version of satyagraha (as a sit in without antagonism or leverage) which now comes all too naturally to us.

Hilarious! This lady seems to forget that when the protests spread to North Delhi there was violence against the police and non-Muslims. The very next day the tide turned against the Muslims. Meanwhile, Yogi Adityanath's strategy in U.P was vindicated. He will be Modi's successor. What a wonderful outcome!

However, if you prefer law and order to dissent and justice, and want the appearance of a revolutionary without taking on the labours and risks of one, don’t say black lives matter.

Who the fuck wants 'the appearance of a revolutionary' in India today? The police will arrest you as an urban Naxal. You'll be jailed under UPA. You will grow old and die having your bail appeals turned down. I suppose Gopalan is speaking on T.N or Kerala. Sure, if you live there you could pretend to be a Revolutionary. But you will end up having to sponge off that cousin of yours who set up a scrap metal business. Sad.