Redneck Asians
Kash Patel, Zarna Garg, and the new whiteness of south Asians
Longing for whiteness is not new for south Asians or Asians as a whole in America. “We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog,” writes Cathy Park Hong in her seminal book, Minor Feelings. She’s referring, of course, to the classic model minority complex, wherein we try to be such perfect citizens that we fly under the radar, not so much leaping over racial barriers as sneaking under them. But it’s not a neutral position: to be a “perfect” citizen means to absorb and regurgitate the biases of white citizens, namely against Black people and Latinos. If you’re a south Asian in a room with only other south Asians—especially but not exclusively older ones—there’s a 100% chance you’ve heard the most grotesque remarks about both these groups.
“You know, she’s actually quite smart,” one elderly relative said about her Black home aide. She looked shocked. Just last week, my Indian dentist told me how much she loved living in Toronto in the early ‘90s, but it’s really gone downhill since then because of “too many immigrants.” We both knew she was not talking about south Asians.
Racism towards other POC is just one mode of trying to approach whiteness. There are many others, from skin lightening to code switching to performing all sorts of emotional labor on behalf and for white people. We engage in all of them. But I think a new strain of seeking whiteness is now emerging among an already privileged segment of south Asians.
On Sunday, FBI Director Kash Patel celebrated the US men’s hockey team’s win in Milan in their locker room. He chugged beer, sprayed it everywhere, banged on a bench, jumped up and down, and acted generally unhinged. “There was a threat at the president’s residence at MAL, Americans in Mexico are facing major threats by cartel members, Nancy Guthrie is still missing, and our FBI Director thinks he’s a frat bro?!,” Xochitl Hinojosa, a spokeswoman for ex-Attorney General Merrick Garland, wrote on X.1
For south Asians, the video invoked a very particular set of feelings: largely embarrassment, but I’m willing to bet, for a certain portion—maybe even a sizable one—some level of jealousy. Here was a man of Indian origin who’d fully crossed over into whiteness: not only was he the first person of color to head up the FBI, but for a moment, he wore an Olympic Gold Medal around his neck for hockey—one of the whitest sports by all measures.2
Like I said, the longing for whiteness among south Asians is nothing new. But Kash Patel and other notable south Asians seem to be pursuing a new, very specific type of whiteness: not just conservative or patriotic, but redneck.
For the last century, redneck hurled as a slur at rural, poor white southerners, particularly those with racist or reactionary views. The typical redneck “hates Blacks, Jews, hippies, union organizers, aristocratic southern whites, Yankees, and, for good measure, ‘foreigners’ in general,” writes historian Patrick Huber.3 They’re crackers, white trash, hoosiers, looked down upon by the rest of the country and by elites in their own region. But starting in the ‘60s, many poor and working-class southerners began to reclaim the term, using it to refer to honest, tough, patriotic, hard-working men and women who identified with traditional southern social and religious values. Rednecks were salt-of-the-earth folk who lived by the sweat of their brow. They sure weren’t lazy like those white trash people, nor were they uppity snobs like some southerners.
In A Turn in the South (1989), V. S. Naipaul recounts a conversation with a realtor in Mississippi who described the redneck:
He’s going to wear cowboy boots…He’s going to smoke about two and a half packs of cigarettes a day and drink about ten cans of beer at night, and he’s going to be mad as hell if he doesn’t have some cornbread and peas and fried okra and some fried pork chops to eat… And the son of a bitch loves country music. They love to hunt and fish. They go out all night on the Pearl River…They don’t give a shit. They’re descendants of pioneers…They’re Scotch-Irish in origin. A lot of them intermarried, interbred. I’m talking about the good old rednecks now. He’s going to have an old eight-to-five job. But there’s an upscale redneck, and he’s going to want it cleaned up. Yard mowed, a little garden in the back. Old Mama, she’s gonna wear designer jeans and they’re gonna go to Shoney’s to eat once every three weeks...I’m probably a redneck myself.4
Growing up in Calgary, I’ve been called a redneck more than once, both by locals and out-of-towners, both with affection and disdain. Alberta is after all “the Texas of Canada,” a conservative oil province where cattle and cowboys are the main cultural touchstones. To fit in was to love country music. It was to wear cowboy boots and line dance and eat steak and watch a dozen rodeos and drink beer so vile it didn’t deserve the name. In Calgary, to pretend rurality was cool, to act country and working-class was urbane. Being called a redneck did not strike me as an insult but incited in me a little thrill. Being a redneck in western Canada meant being one step closer to whiteness.
Today, “redneck” largely remains a derogatory term. But unlike most racial slurs, it’s not too broad, too all-encompassing, applicable to everyone and anyone of a certain race. It’s specific, rooted in regionality, class, and values all on top of race. In some ways, it’s the most authentic type of whiteness there is—which is precisely what makes it so alluring to people of color looking to climb the ladders of power and acceptance.
Patel, I’m sure, does not want to give up his wealth or move to the South. But he is very interested in demonstrating that he’s a good ol’ boy, a man’s man, your buddy from back home in the countryside. He’s performing this image in multiple ways: not only does he like country music, he is dating Alexis Wilkings, a 27-year-old country singer. (He’s flown government jets at least 5 times to visit her in Nashville.) Clearly, he likes to drink—beer but just as symbolically important, bourbon, first distilled by Scottish and Irish settlers in Kentucky and recognized by Congress in 1964 as a "distinctive product of the United States.” Patel smokes cigars, arguably a manlier version of cigarettes. He fired an FBI trainee who had a gay pride flag on his desk.5 He likes UFC, flying yet another government jet to Vegas to attend a bout in Nevada. He hunts, too, visiting a luxury ranch in Texas to gun down exotic animals like addax and Nile lechwe.
Most of these behaviors are not necessarily bad in and of themselves. (To be clear: flying taxpayer-funded jets and discriminating against queer people or allies is BAD.) What’s most disturbing is how Patel weaponizes these markers of the redneck stereotype to endear himself to hard-core conservatives and Trump loyalists. And it seems to be working: as of September, 70% of Republicans viewed him favorably, with 60% saying he was doing a better job running the FBI than previous leaders.6
On first glance, the Indian comedian Zarna Garg is the last person you’d label “redneck.” She wears salwaar kameez and bindi. She speaks with an Indian accent and has built a career out of mocking south Asians’ biases and dysfunctions. But look closer and the picture blurs, changes.
On a recent Daily Beast podcast, Garg outed herself as a Trump apologist and anti-immigrant reactionary who lacks a basic understanding of both humanitarian law and our current immigration system.
The Indian community loves Trump…Why is that? Well, first of all, all our politicians are crooked back home. So that just seems to be a job requirement…[And] of course, he’s cheated on his wife. Like, they all do. So we don’t even consider any of those issues.
Now, when it comes to immigration, Indian people, by and large, are legal immigrants in America…So the whole illegal immigration thing was something that we never really got on board with. We did not understand what was happening during the Biden administration. We could not understand why they were not taking this seriously, because we all ask any Indian person. We have relatives who’ve been waiting 15 years in line because that’s the right thing to do. And then yet it felt like anybody who was breaking the law was getting rewarded…
A lot of the problems that he [Trump] has highlighted are real problems. And just saying that the problem doesn’t exist is not going to make them go away…
What was admirable was that President Trump could be seen as like a business person because that is something that Indian people can understand and aspire to in their own families constantly. So that real image really did win favor with a lot of Indian people.
In the last Presidential election, Asian American voters shifted right by 5 points.7 So Garg is certainly not alone in her views. Nor does the way she present them invoke outrage right away. She even says in the podcast that she doesn’t agree with Trump’s execution in many respects. But it’s that veneer of logic, of reasonableness, of fairness that points to how dangerously close south Asians are to disappearing into America’s white “amnesiac fog.” As sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, “the South is not exceptionally racist. The South is quintessentially American in its racism.” The racist gibberish that Garg spouted was both quintessential south Asian and white American.
Garg’s aspiration to “redneck whiteness” is visible not just in what she says but also in how she projects herself to the world. She’s married to an Indian man, upholding the long south Asian tradition of endogamy8 (A lot of them intermarried, interbred…). She loves America. Her Instagram feed brims with reels where she’s cleaning and cooking—always Indian food or tropical fruit. She hosts a podcast with her family, emphasizing her strong “family values.” In the podcast, her husband doesn’t even try to hide his misogyny. The majority of her jokes focus on the difficulties of being a desi mom, a “good ol’ gal,” if you will. Even her dress, her use of “namaste” and other Hindi words in her performance signal a strict adherence to tradition and custom. Yet, at the same time, she’s complained about how she doesn’t fit in with other Indians because of going into comedy in her ‘40s—and the part she hasn’t said: because all her comedy is geared at making white people laugh at the expense of south Asians.
“The jokes arrive pre-loaded: the loud Indian mother, the emasculated husband, the entitled children, money as religion,” writes Stela Day in The Print. “Her jokes don’t punch up or sideways; they punch inward. Immigrant life becomes a caricature frozen in time, stripped of contradiction or evolution.”9
All of that to say, Garg projects herself at once as trad-wife and as too individualistic, innovative, and rowdy to fit in with other women,10 either white or Indian. And whether you see “redneck” as a slur or banner of pride, that blend of tradition and rugged individualism beats at the pulsing red heart of redneck identity.
Like I said at the top, trying to approach whiteness is nothing new among south Asians. Nor is the shame of watching someone of your race simultaneously degrade themselves and the humanity of others. White liberals must feel this shame all the time. Yet, it remains painful, bizarre and frankly, frightening. From simply staying quiet and staying away from anti-racist movements to playing critical leadership roles in tech companies like Palantir that target the most vulnerable immigrants, south Asians have long been complicit in white America’s racism in a hundred different ways. But Patel and Garg represent a dangerous new breed of assimilation. Soon, we’ll no longer be taking orders from whiteness, we’ll be coming up with the orders ourselves.
https://apnews.com/article/nhl-sports-hockey-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-1fc28e1d7db391c2bec6203fa19fda1f
https://www.southerncultures.org/article/short-history-redneck-fashioning-southern-white-masculine-identity/
V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South (Knopf, 1989), 206-208.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/24/kash-patels-acts-of-service
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/fbi-director-remains-popular-with-republicans/ar-AA1Ne1BS
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/asian-americans-exit-poll-harris-trump-rcna179005
https://oar.princeton.edu/rt4ds/file/6472/9397; https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/59/5/1929/318326/Patterns-of-Panethnic-Intermarriage-in-the-United
https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/zarna-garg-trump-remark/2812865/
So good, so real, so sad
Not surprising because caste has been the foundational arrangement of indian society & caste IS hierarchy. So the aspiration towards whiteness shouldnt be surprising...disappointing..sure...so kash patel, zarna garg, usha vance, vivek ramaswamy and similar south asians show the same behaviour.