The Indian diaspora in the US and other Americans have reacted strongly to the comments of Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, who has raked up a controversy by calling India a "shi*hole" during her interview with Tucker Carlson, a news anchor at Fox News.
Wax was attacking the Indian immigrants who judge the United States for its racism or expensive health care, and went on to say that “at some level, their country is a shi*hole.”
“I think there is just a tremendous amount of resentment and shame of non-Western peoples against Western peoples for Western peoples' outsized achievements and contributions. I mean, it’s really unbearable,” she added during the controversial interview.
Wax directed her attacks particularly at Brahmin women.
"Here’s the problem. They (Brahmin women from India) are taught that they are better than everybody else because they are Brahmin elites and yet, on some level, their country is a shi*hole," she said in the interview.
“They’ve realised that we’ve outgunned and outclassed them in practically every way… They feel anger. They feel envy. They feel shame… It creates ingratitude of the most monstrous kind,” the 69-year-old professor added.
Twitter did not take her remarks lightly.
'Open Bigotry is No Secret'
Aseem Shukla, a paediatric urologist and a scholar at Penn Medicine, wrote, "some of us Indian American docs @PennMedicine do our part to make America the great healthcare system you describe. So, yeah, we have the right to criticize it too."
Other Indian-Americans joined in on the outrage. Neil Makhija, a Penn Law lecturer and the executive director of Indian American Impact, told Axios, "It's irresponsible to use your position to lend credibility to these overtly racist sentiments that don't recognize Indian Americans for who we are."
Elie Mystal, the justice correspondent of a newspaper known as The Nation, also gave a strong reaction to Wax's comments.
Wax is yet to comment on this particular controversy.
A spokesperson for the University of Pennsylvania's law school said that "Professor Wax's views do not reflect our values or practices," Axios reported.
This is not the first time Wax has made controversial remarks. In July 2019, at the Edmund Burke Foundation's inaugural National Conservatism conference, Wax had said, "Embracing... cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites," according to National Review.
In December last year, during her interview with Brown University professor Glenn Loury, she claimed that “the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration."
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)