The most stunning part of Texas Republican Bo French's notorious posts on X about students of South Asian ancestry at a University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) football game is the overt racism. If Texans are interested in continuing the sort of uninterrupted economic and cultural growth they've experienced over the past 40 years, they will spurn nativism and tribalism and embrace the future-oriented, individualistic, and open-minded attitudes and policies that have made the state America's "new centre of gravity" (according to The Economist).
In a way that is genuinely rare today, French didn't sugarcoat his disgust at seeing brown students cheering for the Longhorns after a remarkable comeback, writing, "I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn't believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined." For French, who stresses his genealogical bona fides in his campaign biography ("Bo grew up in a family that's been in the oil business for over 80 years"), Indian Americans simply cannot be real Americans the same way that people descended from Brits, Swedes, or Germans are.
