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Two of the University of Texas at Austin students who were targeted in a tweet posted by Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, fired back, pointing out that they were U.S. citizens and calling French’s post “blatantly racist.”
This weekend’s college football matchups saw the Texas Longhorns mount a shocking come-from-behind win over the Ohio State Buckeyes, sending fans who had spent most of the game nervous wrecks into jubilant celebration.
For French, however, the joy expressed by the UT students at the game was something to be criticized. He shared a photo that included several students of apparently Indian or South Asian descent, and wrote, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
French’s tweet was swiftly and loudly condemned by UT alumni, political commentators, and elected officials — including numerous Republicans. Veteran Republican operative Karl Rove was so disgusted by French’s tweet he denounced the candidate as a “bigot” and said he would be voting for a Democrat for the first time in 30 years, according to a report by The Texas Tribune.
However, both Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the GOP nominee for Texas’ U.S. Senate seat, offered statements generally criticizing racism without specifically calling out French. Paxton wrote that he “condemn[ed] racism in all forms” without mentioning French by name and instead attacked his opponent, Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D).
French has remained unrepentant, shrugging off calls from his fellow Republicans to delete the tweet and instead reposting the photo, declaring that Americans were being “displaced by foreigners” and it was “far worse than any of us could imagine.”
A report by Aarón Torres for The Dallas Morning News Monday included interviews with several of the students who were in the photo French shared: Dhairya Gupta, seen in the bottom right corner with a backwards white baseball cap and his hand raised in the Longhorns’ “Hook ’em” sign, and Rahul Kodali, to his right with the paler orange polo shirt and cowboy hat.
Gupta and Kodali, who are both seniors majoring in computer science, told Torres they were U.S. citizens.
Gupta moved to the U.S. from India with his family when he was “about 5 years old and gained citizenship in his childhood,” wrote Torres, while Kodali was born in Syracuse, New York — making him a natural-born citizen — and “[h]is family moved to the Dallas area when he was a toddler.”
Kodali graduated from Flower Mound High School, located in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs, and is paying in-state tuition at UT, Torres wrote.
“Whether or not we are immigrants, that doesn’t change anything,” said Kodali. “I’ve been an American my entire life.”
Gupta described the moment captured in the photograph as “just us having some enjoyment” during “an innocent moment at a football game,” but “now it’s just people being blatantly racist toward us.” He added that he had never heard of French before the controversy.
It was concerning that French is running for a statewide office, said Gupta, but he was still “not scared to say this kind of thing.”
“It’s becoming to the point where this kind of racism just isn’t looked down upon as much as it used to be — or it feels like that,” he added.
Torres asked the two students if they had any message for French:
Asked if there’s anything either would like to say to French if they met him, Kodali said there’s nothing he could say “that could knock a dent in a person that talks like that.”
Gupta said he would tell French that being an immigrant doesn’t mean UT’s culture will shift one way or another.
“We have a different color in our skin, we might speak different languages, but at the end of the day, all of us are still going to the same university,” Gupta said. “We’re still standing behind the same team.”
The post UT Students Targeted by Republican’s ‘Blatantly Racist’ Tweet Fire Back: ‘I’ve Been an American My Entire Life’ first appeared on Mediaite.
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