What it means when the right calls Indian Americans a ‘question’

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — Recently, Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist best known for leading the charge against “critical race theory,” took up a different matter of identity.

On a podcast Rufo hosts with Jonathan Keeperman, an even further-to-the-right figure known online as Lomez, the two spent upwards of an hour discussing what they chose to call “The Indian Question.”

That meant talking about whether, in their estimation, people who traced their roots to the Indian subcontinent could ever assimilate into American society, whether their culture was at odds with American culture and what should be done about their growing numbers and prominence in the US.

The catalyst for the “question,” Rufo said in the introduction, was a post by Texas politician Bo French that had been roiling the MAGA universe over the past few weeks. French, a Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner with a history of extreme posting, had shared a photo on X of University of Texas at Austin students celebrating the football team’s comeback win against Ohio State. To his dismay, many of the exultant people in cowboy hats, burnt orange T-shirts and other spirit gear appeared to be of South Asian heritage.

“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

The post was widely and roundly condemned across the political spectrum, including by many Republicans. But as French dug in and continued to falsely portray the students as “foreigners” displacing “Texans,” Rufo and Keeperman took it as an opportunity to promote ideas about ethnicity and Americanness that have long animated factions of the political right.

What is “the Indian question” exactly? The podcast description on YouTube laid it out like this: “Is it about race, class, or something else entirely? We confront America’s most uncomfortable immigration debate.” And then, in a pinned comment from the hosts’ account: “Was Bo French’s tweet racist, or just the truth people are afraid to say?”

By using that title, Rufo and Keeperman were invoking a familiar, now infamous, rhetorical device — putting a marginalized or minority group at the center of a “question” to debate their status in society.

Phrases referring to this or that group as the subject of “the x question” emerged at the end of the 18th century and became widespread in the early 19th century, said Holly Case, a historian of modern Europe at Brown University and author of “The Age of Questions.” Pamphleteers, essayists and legislators in Great Britain considered what the British should do about its North American colonies under the banner “the American question.”

By the late 19th century, diplomats, debaters and activists had expanded their concerns to all sorts of other “questions”: the woman question, the worker question, the Jewish question, the Eastern question. In that era, “the Indian question” referred to the indigenous population who had occupied North America before the arrival of European settlers.

“Instead of being understood as questions to be answered, these were treated as problems to be solved,” Case writes in her book.

But the answers to these “questions” weren’t necessarily predetermined, Case said. In some cases, the “question” was brought forth by the group at its center — she said Poles raised “the Polish question” to bring the prospect of an independent Polish state into the international sphere.

Similarly, women weighed in on their rights in debates about “the woman question,” and Jewish thinkers engaged with “the Jewish question,” discussing the extent to which their communities should integrate into the broader societies of the countries where they lived, said Lila Corwin Berman, professor of American Jewish history at New York University.

To pose a “question” in a political pamphlet or the pages of a newspaper, Case said, was a surefire way to invite the broader public to weigh in on the issue. “It’s not just deploying an idiom,” she added. “It’s deploying an idiom that is designed for amplification.”

Over time, though, the use of the term shifted to something less participatory — a framing device for people to declare what they intended to do about other people, Case said. The 20th century saw European diplomats and Ottoman authorities debating “the Armenian question,” or what should become of Armenians living under the Ottoman Empire.

And then, in 1942, Nazi Party and German government officials gathered to discuss the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” — the systematic annihilation of Jews. From then on, if anyone chose to raise “the Jewish Question,” it was understood that the answer that person had in mind was the Holocaust.

Contemporary neo-Nazis and other organized bigots use the term “the Jewish Question” — or “the JQ,” when they want to be coy — to signal their embrace of antisemitism.

In that light, “the x question” today often reads as shorthand to describe a group that the question-asker wants to see removed from society.

“It’s using language as a political tool to emphasize the otherness of a group of people, and to try to rally people who are not part of that group to come together and feel some sense of unity,” Berman said.

In the podcast discussion of “the Indian question,” Keeperman argued that the very fact that people like French objected to the picture of the football crowd showed that Indian Americans were not part of the American mainstream.

“Successful assimilation is precisely that you wouldn’t notice it,” Keeperman told Rufo. “The mere fact of us being able to notice — that no, this is not an assimilated group, this is just a bunch of Indians at the game — is itself sort of definitionally the case that they’re not yet assimilated.”

At another point, he called Indians “visibly conspicuous, in the way that darker-skinned people are.”

Asked whether he intended to invoke the Holocaust in the title of his podcast episode, Rufo responded in an email: “That’s a ridiculous comparison—anyone can read my moderate, mainstream views on immigration here,” linking to a commentary he published in City Journal, the policy magazine of the conservative think tank Manhattan Institute, where Rufo is a senior fellow. He added a complaint about CNN and a wish for its employees to lose their jobs.

Rufo did not respond to a follow-up question asking him to clarify whether he was aware of the use of “the Jewish question” when titling the podcast. Keeperman did not respond to a request for comment.

In the City Journal article, Rufo described the idea that “people of Indian descent are an eternal Other who will never become Americans” as a “lie,” and cited the Texas football photo as evidence that Indian Americans “have demonstrated a strong capacity for assimilation.”

He also wrote that Americans were anxious about large-scale immigration, warning that “mass immigration always carries a risk of increasing cultural tensions, balkanization, nepotism, and dislocation” and noting that there are “cities in Texas that are now 20, 30, or 40 percent foreign-born” (that is, 80, 70, or 60 percent native-born).

And, notwithstanding Indian Americans’ ability to enjoy college football, he argued that Indian immigrants were importing a “high-stakes testing culture” that was at odds with what he called the American approach.

In the podcast, he returned to that point, even as he disputed some of Keeperman’s other anti-immigrant positions. “You’re not supposed to study for the spelling bee,” Rufo said, nodding to Indian Americans excelling in spelling competitions. “It’s just a fun thing you do once a year … That’s the American culture. The Indian culture is different.”

The question the hosts were debating, by pointing to a specific subset of one immigrant group, was precisely how incompatible Indian Americans were with American culture, and by what degree Indian immigration should be discouraged.

Rufo is open about his desire to use rhetoric to achieve political ends. “You have to fight on terms that you define,” he said in a 2022 speech at the conservative Hillsdale College. “You have to create your own frame, your own language. And you have to be ruthless and brutal in pursuit of something good.”

On X and in media interviews, he has stated plainly that he seeks to use propaganda to further his goals. When asked on “The Ezra Klein Show” about Tucker Carlson promoting false narratives that fed the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, Rufo claimed that the underlying claims beneath the bigotry had merit.

“In fact, it’s just a basic question — a question that people in the United States have been asking since the 1770s: Who are we? What is an American?” he said. “And if we are a sovereign nation, we have not just the right, but really the obligation, to determine these great questions of who comes in and who doesn’t come in.”

Though Rufo prefers to present himself as just asking questions about Americans’ concerns about race and immigration, he also promotes bigotry. After Donald Trump falsely claimed in a 2024 presidential debate that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs, Rufo offered a $5,000 bounty to anyone who could substantiate the claim. A few days later, he claimed success, sharing a grainy video from 2023 that was filmed in Dayton, Ohio — not Springfield — showing an unidentified and ambiguous-looking animal on a grill, attributed to a purported cook who was not Haitian.

In posing “the Indian question” on his podcast, Rufo tried to strike a similarly measured tone. He said that some Indian Americans, “especially upper caste Indians where we’re skimming from in our immigration system,” had proven themselves to be highly capable of assimilating and that the group’s regard for success, family stability and education were admirable.

But the reality, he said, was that too many immigrants — Indian and otherwise — had arrived in the US in too short a time. And their presence, his co-host added, threatened the white majority and the “Anglo-American” character of the nation.

“It’s important even to preserve a white majority and preserve this white, Anglo-Protestant sort of character,” Keeperman said. “That actually is essential to who we are.”

That premise is more and more openly expressed by the political right in the US, including many of the most powerful and influential members of the Trump administration. The country’s current immigration policies are controlled by people who believe that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended exclusionary quotas against non-European immigrants including South Asians, needs to be rolled back.

The political right has been targeting Indian Americans for more than a year, with racist rhetoric deployed against the H1-B visa program, Sikh truck drivers and Hindu temples and festivals.

Researchers from the Center for the Study of Organized Hate report a sharp increase in anti-South Asian sentiment on X and fringe social platforms since 2025. Raqib Naik, the center’s founder and executive director, said that the team documented an influx of posts portraying South Asians as invaders, job thieves and a demographic threat, evoking Great Replacement theory and remigration rhetoric. He also noted the emergence of doxxing networks targeting South Asian individuals, influencer-led harassment campaigns and documentary-style videos from right-wing organizations that frame the presence of Indian immigrants as an inherent problem.

The podcasters’ choice to hold forth on “The Indian Question” is helping manufacture the idea that Indian immigrants pose a threat to American society, Naik said.

“We need to understand the fact that the real-world harm to these communities doesn’t happen as one straight step. It’s a process,” he said. “This demonizing, this hysterical, stereotypical, violent language contributes to that process, and people with platforms as huge as Chris Rufo contribute immensely to that process.”

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