Joe Biden campaign style: He shows up, with fast-food take-out, at this one guy's house.

Yesterday in North Carolina, I stopped by Eric’s house to have lunch with him and his two sons. I brought some Cook Out. They were an impressive family—Eric’s an award-winning educator and his sons are both athletic and academic all stars. We talked about the importance of… pic.twitter.com/UX9JMpWD4z

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 20, 2024

I hope Biden fans don't feel body-shamed. Are your kids athletic? You'd better be "an impressive family" if you want a chance at being the place Joe stops by next. Ease up on that take-out food, for now. Get your kids in shape. Then maybe Joe will come around with a bag of Cook Out.

"For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed... a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions..."

"... that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students. When, as a student at Harvard Law School, I was booed and hissed and told to 'go die' for articulating pro-life or other conservative views, exactly zero administrators cared about my feelings. Nor did it cross my mind to ask them for help. I was an adult. I could handle my classmates’ anger. Yet how sensitive are administrators to student feelings under other circumstances? I had to chuckle when I read my colleague Pamela Paul’s excellent column on the Columbia School of Social Work and she quoted a school glossary that uses the term 'folx.' Why spell the word with an 'x'? Because some apparently believe the letter 's' in 'folks' renders the term insufficiently inclusive. I kid you not...."The rule cannot be that Jews must endure free speech at its most painful, while favored campus constituencies enjoy the warmth of college administrators and the protection of campus speech codes.... "

Writes David French, in "What the University Presidents Got Right and Wrong About Antisemitic Speech" (NYT).

French concludes (and I agree): "[P]rotect students from harassment... But do not protect students from speech.... The answer to campus hypocrisy isn’t more censorship. It’s true liberty. Without that liberty, the hypocrisy will reign for decades more."

Biden on Ketanji Brown Jackson: "And, by the way, she’s brighter than the rest. (Laughter.) She is one bright woman."

Isn't that a microagression?

I'm reading "Remarks by President Biden at the Howard University Class of 2023 Commencement Address."

It's my subjective experience — disagree with me if you want — that "bright" is a patronizing word. It's used for children, and when it's used on an adult, it's looking down on the person as if they are something like a child. It expresses vague surprise that the person stands out and can do reasonably difficult tasks, but it sets them apart as not able to do the most sophisticated things that the speaker imagines himself to be doing. Older men in superior positions have said it through the years about younger associates and, especially, women. And I think it's what a racist would say about a capable black person.

Here's the context at the speech (in which Biden is openly pleading for black people to vote for him):

Policing the "overcalculated playfulness" of actors wearing fashions that might not align with their sexual orientation.

I'm reading "Is Celebrity ‘Queer Baiting’ Really Such a Crime? Even as gender and masculinity are more fluid than ever, it can still rankle when male stars co-opt traditionally gay codes and styles" by Mark Harris (NYT Style Magazine).

"Each student read from a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty..."

"... of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills. This might be just another lament about 'woke' campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was 'Race and the Limits of Law in America.' Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization...."

 

From "A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell" by Vincent Lloyd (Compact). This is a long article, well worth reading.

Lloyd has a recent book, "Black Dignity" (paid link), highly recommended in by this essay in Sojourners:

Is the NY Post just missing the humor?

I'm reading "Gen Zers insist on wearing sexy clubbing outfits to the office: ‘Like who’s going to stop me?’"

In a recent TikTok video, Dani Klarić, a young interior decorator/creative director, gleefully shared her workday outfit: a white miniskirt, a short-sleeve shirt worn totally unbuttoned to reveal a lacy yellow bra and a pair of sheer yellow thigh-high socks. "If I had a corporate job this is how I would go dressed to work," the TikToker says confidently in the post, which has garnered more than 200,000 likes. "Like who’s going to stop me?"

Key word: "If." She has a job: It's making TikToks that get likes. And the Post is scampering to show — what? — that it can keep up with what's in social media? But it can't! And it even said the word that exemplifies dull, trudging Jebbishness: "garner."

Now, to be fair, this article does quote somebody at Rent the Runway who has such a cool name that I almost feel like believing her: Suzanne Smallshaw:

"Racism, dead penguins and retaliation: Why the Vilas Zoo lost its only Black zookeepers."

That's the headline for a Madison.com article about the zoo here in Madison. You might think racism is somehow killing penguins — those birds who might seem to embody the peaceful harmonization of black and white.

There were 2 black zookeepers, and each left to take a job at a zoo in another city. But their exit interviews contained some criticisms, including some things about the treatment of animals, most notably the decapitation death of a penguin. Who would decapitate a penguin?! A raccoon. Wild local raccoons take the liberty to come and go as they please, including slipping into the enclosures of captive animals. 

We're told that, according to an exit interview, the zoo's general curator, Beth Petersen "decided to stop trapping raccoons that got onto zoo property and instead put Epsom salts on the ground in an attempt to repel them." At least one raccoon was insufficiently repelled, got into the penguin exhibit, and bit the head off Alice, the "elderly African penguin."

"Your 7-year-old has perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the moment. Righting wrongs — and there are always more than enough to choose from — is virtuous..."

"... if sometimes humorless. But inventing infractions merely to put people in the wrong is not." 

The advice columnist "Miss Manners" answers a woman whose daughter chided her for using the automatic door button when she is not disabled.

The words "Your 7-year-old has perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the moment" feel humorous, and I hope the girl has a frivolous foible that she will outgrow. Or maybe she has a sense of humor and the mother is the humorless one who's overly afflicted by the zeitgeist. But it's terrifying to think that Generation Alpha is going to be grimly looking for meaningless micro-offenses.

I've said it before — I'm investing my hope in the babies — "those who will be born over the next 5 years, and kids up to the age of 10": "What are these people going to be like — after living through the lockdown and witnessing the heightened, hysterical, hypocritical empathy of the millennials." I said: "I was hoping they rebel against the prudery and the repression of the millennials."

But what if they lean into the worst tendencies of the millennials and Gen Z?

"The usual racist racial drivel WAPO thrives on" — that's the top-rated comment at WaPo...

... for the article "Many Black women felt relieved to work from home, free from microaggressions. Now they’re told to come back." The article is written by Natachi Onwuamaegbu, a "reporting intern" who has a BA from Stanford in Political Science, English and African and African American Studies.

A comment on the comment says, "WaPo Pulitzer Prize winning level reporting you term 'racist racial drivel'. How many Pulitzer Prizes has Breitbart garnered?" 

I'm mainly quoting that because I keep track of the word "garnered." This is an interesting case of the use of "garnered." Most often it's used as a fancy substitute for "got." But here it's used to avoid "won." If WaPo gets a Pulitzer Prize, the prize is won. But if Breitbart ever got one, it would only be garnered.

"Microaggressions at the office can make remote work even more appealing/Extended remote work during the pandemic has highlighted how much energy people of color, women, and people with disabilities expend dealing with microaggressions in the office."

A headline at WaPo. From the text:

In a Twitter discussion on office microaggressions, people said working at home has largely spared them from having to deal with such incidents as:

• having colleagues touch their hair 

• being mistaken for another colleague of the same race (a problem solved by having names displayed in video meetings) 

• overhearing insensitive commentary on or being pressured to discuss traumatizing news events such as racist violence or coronavirus outbreaks in their home country 

• fielding comments from passersby on their “angry” (actually focused) expressions....

Allowing people to work in an environment where they don’t feel the need to keep their guard up means “releasing that mental burden from people who are … getting paid to think"....

Notice the potential for a legal argument: Denying the work-at-home option constitutes race/sex discrimination. There's also new reason to see a failure to accommodate the disabled:

"I like to say that when you see stuff like that you should give me credit for doing it intentionally, so I need to disclaim credit in this case."

"If I'd thought of it myself or even noticed it after I did it, I would have rewritten it to avert microaggression. But I'm not so fussy and fearful that I'll change it now, and I'm not such a creature of The Era of That's Not Funny that I feel that I need to strike the 'LOL.'" 

That's something I wrote in the comments to the previous post after an "LOL" directed at Jack Klompus. Klompus, reacting to my post, had written: 

The "Ah! So..." triggered me into doing an impromptu Charlie Chan impersonation. Very problematic. 

I had to look back at the post, which is about a WaPo article, "The Biden administration confirms some but not all of Trump’s Wuhan lab claims." Had I written "Ah! So..."? Yes, I'd quoted something from the article, then exclaimed: "Ah! So it's not that you've determined that any of these claims are false." The "Ah!" was independent of the "So," but the "So" directly followed, and I have inadvertently caused the "ah"/"so" combination to come into being in a post about the Chinese. 

I'm sure some of you who comment here think there's nothing even wrong with saying "Ah, so!" intentionally, even with a Charlie Chan-style intonation, but I've got to find my own balance of correctness/incorrectness. In this case, I would never purposely exclaim "Ah, so!" while talking about the Chinese or even while talking about anyone else. It's just pointlessly disrespectful. And I do mean to imply that sometimes disrespect is justified and warranted. But casual disrespect — disrespect as a go-to demeanor — is lazy, dumb, destructive, and degrading. 

***

For a serious, critically acclaimed examination of the Charlie Chan character, read "Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History" by Yunte Huang. I'd read it, but I've never watched any Charlie Chan movies, so I have no context — other than the context of hearing various Americans imitate Charlie Chan, usually by saying "Ah so" (and just meaning something like "Yes, I understand").

"Lindsey Graham, who says that Trump is a 'handful,' a word usually leveled at spirited women, is going to Mar-a-Lago this weekend to golf with his sovereign lord..."

"... and try to explain the importance of the 2022 midterms to Trump’s legacy. But Trump doesn’t give a damn, except how he can use the midterms for revenge or self-promotion.... By coddling Trump on his election fakery, the Republicans gave it so much oxygen, it led to tragedy. Trump, the supreme ingrate, wasn’t grateful for McConnell’s nay vote. He promptly composed a masterpiece of spleen, a statement threatening to primary Mitch’s candidates and calling him 'a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack' who lacks political wisdom, skill and personality.... Ted Cruz’s truckling may be the most jarring, given Trump’s attacks on Cruz’s wife and father in the 2016 campaign. But I’ve always said the story of Washington should be titled 'Smart People Doing Dumb Things.' Cruz wouldn’t even study with people from what he called 'minor Ivies' while at Harvard Law School but didn’t think twice before leaving Texans starving, freezing and dying to go catch some rays in Cancun and then blaming his daughters. We’ll see if Trump can sustain this king-in-exile routine without the infrastructure he once had. Consider his asinine election challenge with all those crazy lawyers. Ever the shrew, all he has left now is his forked tongue."

From "The Tale of the Untamable Shrew/Republicans are still trying to muzzle a smack-talking Trump" by Maureen Dowd (NYT). 

1. Dowd is comparing Trump to Kate, the shrew in Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew." As I've said more than once, there is something womanly about Trump. And there are times when the way people react to Trump is like the way they react to an untamed woman. Dowd talks a lot about "Shrew" but also wanders all over the place and never really explores the hypothesis that Trump's wildness is something like a nasty woman. Why do we feel this deep need to control him? What does it say about those who think that he did not belong in our serious, well-established institutions and that he spoke with shocking directness and exhibited self-dramatizing emotion?

2. Here's a whole Wikipedia article on the "nasty woman" meme that originated in the 2016 campaign.

3. Is it true that the word "handful" is usually leveled at spirited women? I'd guess it's mostly used about children — a nice way to say the kid is hard to manage. If you say it about an adult, you are loading in the concept that you are into manipulation. Both "manage" and "manipulate" are built from the Lain word for "hand" ("manus"). If you think an adult is a "handful," maybe you ought to consider why you're putting your hands on her/him.

4. Let's take a closer look at the last sentence of the column: "Ever the shrew, all he has left now is his forked tongue." I see 2 ways to go with this:

a. Metaphor screw up. A forked tongue is characteristic of some reptiles, notably snakes. A shrew is a small mole-like mammal.  If you don't mean to refer to the animal, but only to the extremely irritating person, then don't bring up an animal characteristic like "forked tongue." Sharp tongue would be fine.

b. Microaggression alert. Are we still using "forked tongue" to refer to lying?! I would have thought it was relegated long ago to the dustbin of potential microaggressions. Background from Wikipedia: "This phrase was... adopted by Americans around the time of the Revolution, and may be found in abundant references from the early 19th century — often reporting on American officers who sought to convince the tribal leaders with whom they negotiated that they 'spoke with a straight and not with a forked tongue' (as for example, President Andrew Jackson told the Creek Nation in 1829). According to one 1859 account, the native proverb that the 'white man spoke with a forked tongue' originated as a result of the French tactic of the 1690s, in their war with the Iroquois, of inviting their enemies to attend a Peace Conference, only to be slaughtered or captured."

"Supplied with Cruz’s address by a knowledgeable friend, I drove the fifteen minutes from my Houston apartment to the uber-rich River Oaks neighborhood where Cruz lives."

"From the street, Cruz’s white, Colonial Revival-style mansion looked dark and uninhabited.... [T]hen I heard barking and noticed a small, white dog looking out the bottom right pane of glass in the senator’s front door.... As I approached to knock, a man stepped out of the Suburban parked in Cruz’s driveway. 'Is this Senator Cruz’s house?' I asked. He said it was, that Cruz wasn’t home, and identified himself as a security guard. When asked who was taking care of the dog, the guard volunteered that he was.... I took a photo.... Some on Twitter have questioned whether the dog is in fact a poodle, suggesting alternative breeds such as a Bichon Frise. I couldn’t get close enough to tell, and I’m no canine expert, but 'Ted Cruz’s poodle' just sounds funny. As soon as I posted the photo on Twitter, noting that Cruz 'appears to have left behind the family poodle,' all hell broke loose...."

From "Ted Cruz Abandons Millions of Freezing Texans and His Poodle, Snowflake" (NY Magazine).

It's creepy going to someone's house like that, and the dog is clearly better off at home with a trusted person taking care of him, but Ted Cruz's trip to Cancún at this time when his state is in crisis has been deemed the top story of the day, and everybody always wants to hear about dogs. 

Dogs are at the top of the list of things deemed newsworthy that are not in fact newsworthy. Get dogs in your story and you'll have masses of readers. It's especially good if a dog saves a child, but the very best is when a Republican does something that can be presented as hurting a dog, like when Mitt Romney strapped his dog to the roof of his car and when mean old Trump offended all of dogdom by failing to own a dog. 

Now, we have Ted Cruz not bothering his dog with needless plane trips and confinement in hotel rooms. The heartless wretch!

ADDD: "'Ted Cruz’s poodle' just sounds funny." That is a microaggression! It is an old stereotype that a gay man would have a poodle. "'Ted Cruz’s poodle' just sounds funny" is a homophobic microaggression. 

Here's a 2014 article in the Village Voice, "Fifi or Fido? New York’s Gay Men Defy Worn-Out Canine Stereotypes": "The old stereotype held that like attracts like: the prissy hairdresser with a pampered, manicured poodle or Chihuahua; the growly muscle bear controlling a giant, ultra-butch Great Dane or mastiff...."

And years ago, Dan Savage, who is gay, told a story on "This American Life" about his anxiety about being seen with a poodle:

"[T]here is a lot of demand for me to address the situation at Vox in detail or to assimilate my personal story into a larger narrative about 'wokeness' or the culture wars."

"Personally I’m not a huge fan of navel-gazing. So I’ll just say that my personal interest in reclaiming my status as an independent, blog-like voice transcends any particular issues with any particular publication. I wanted to do this, not go find a different job, and I thank those of you who’ve joined me on this journey."

Matt Yglesias has a thing called "What's wrong with the media" at Slow Boring, his new place.

Are you a fan of navel-gazing? 

Navel-gazing or omphaloskepsis is the contemplation of one's navel as an aid to meditation. The word derives from the Ancient Greek words ὀμφᾰλός (omphalós, lit. 'navel') and σκέψῐς (sképsis, lit. 'viewing, examination, speculation'). Actual use of the practice as an aid to contemplation of basic principles of the cosmos and human nature is found in the practice of yoga or Hinduism and sometimes in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In yoga, the navel is the site of the manipura (also called nabhi) chakra, which yogis consider "a powerful chakra of the body".The monks of Mount Athos, Greece, were described as Omphalopsychians by J.G. Minningen, writing in the 1830s, who says they "...pretended or fancied that they experienced celestial joys when gazing on their umbilical region, in converse with the Deity". 

However, phrases such as "contemplating one's navel" or "navel-gazing" are frequently used, usually in jocular fashion, to refer to self-absorbed pursuits.

As long as Yglesias brought up wokeness, I just want to say that the jocular use of "navel-gazing" is a micro-aggression. You've got an unexamined premise that there is something backward about Hinduism (or the Greek Orthodox Church).

"Since beginning online learning, she explained, Saige has been liberated from hearing negative tropes about Black girls in the lunchroom and hallways."

"For one, the eighth grader can control her exposure to racial microaggressions. When a classmate wore a 'Make America Great Again' hat — attire that some people see as a symbol of racism — during a video class session, Saige simply changed her settings to view only the teacher. 'Although the violence is still there, she has the ability to maneuver in a way that she didn’t have when she was in school,' Ms. Aryee-Price explained... [S]ome Black families value keeping their children at home... to protect them from racial hostility and bias.... More than 40 [Black] parents [of 373 in a private Facebook group] said they appreciated virtual schooling because it allows them to, as one put it, 'hear how the teacher speaks to children.'... Cheryl Fields-Smith, an associate education professor at the University of Georgia, studies why Black families choose to home-school. 'I’ve never had a parent tell me it was one particular factor,' she said. 'It’s a multitude of factors, and a lot of them revolve around what I would just plainly say is racism.... If Black children so much as wiggle, it’s "Keep still!" White kids are wiggling, and they don’t say a word. It’s nothing but misgivings, misinterpretations, mis-whatever about Black people moving,' she said. 'They feel like they’re being picked on.'...  Dr. Aryee-Price, a former public-school teacher... said while she truly believes in education, she sees schools as 'sites for anti-Blackness.'" 

 From "'You’re Out of Your Mind if You Think I’m Ever Going Back to School'/When learning is virtual, Black parents can watch for unfair treatment" (NYT).

And yet teachers — as a group — seem to take special pride in their anti-racism. But it's hard to be a teacher. They have to interact with so many students at once. How can you serve them all well? Maybe students with a strong need for physical activity should be be in a different group and using different methods from the ones who easily sit still and adhere to book-learning. I sympathize with these parents who see their own children stigmatized — or believe that's what they are seeing. 

I'll bet a lot of parents of male children would make some similar observations. It's deeply disturbing to see your own child treated as a problem, when your own child is simply an individual with needs that don't align well with the needs of the group. And it's so much more disturbing if you think it's not just that your child is an individual who isn't appreciated for her individual characteristics but that your child is seen as a member of a group and the group is regarded — intentionally or not — as inferior. 

The urge to take your child out of school altogether is strong. It's the parent's primal urge to protect one's own children. What's new, with coronavirus, is the real experience that has been imposed on all parents — a different mode of learning, with the child required to be out of the classroom. It's harder to go back to a less-than-perfect situation than it is to keep going. Stopping school created an occasion for reflection and judgment, and re-opening school creates a new occasion for decision-making. The child's resistance to school is a familiar occurrence in normal times. But abnormal times have arisen, and all the resistance is coming at once.

"It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about 'micro-aggressions' for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots..."

"… and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face. How did this grotesque inversion of the truth become the central narrative for what seemed to be the entire class of elite journalists on Twitter? That’s the somewhat terrifying question. Ruth Graham on Slate saw a 16-year-old she’d seen on a tape for a couple of minutes and immediately knew that he was indistinguishable from the 'white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s' or other white 'high school boys flashing Nazi salutes.' Even after the full context was clear, Graham refused to apologize to the kid, or retract her condemnation.... Across most of the national media, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the narrative had been set. 'I’m willing to bet that fifty years from now, a defining image of this political era will be that smug white MAGA teen disrespecting a Native elder and veteran. It just captures so much,' Jessica Valenti tweeted. 'And let’s please not forget that this group of teens … were there for the March for Life: There is an inextricable link between control over women’s bodies, white supremacy & young white male entitlement.' This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it.... Liberal democracy is being dismantled before our eyes — by all of us."

From "The Abyss of Hate Versus Hate" by Andrew Sullivan (New York Magazine).

"When Did SJW Culture Start?" — "There are 6 different causal threads...."

A lesson in how to keep activists from winning: Don't let acceding to their demands be the path of least resistance.

There are 2 murals at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Koreatown, which is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District:

There's this one, by Beau Stanton, which is attacked because the rays emanating from the head remind some people of the Japanese imperial battle flag, and which the L.A. school district plans to paint over.

And this one, by Shepard Fairey (who's famous for those Obama "Hope" posters) which depicts Robert F. Kennedy.

Now, Shepard Fairey is using "the only leverage I have" and saying that if Stanton's mural is painted over, he demands that his own RFK mural be painted over.

The Stanton mural is not on the theme of Japan or Korea. It's a painting of Ava Gardner!

Fairey said it’s important for the school district to understand that it made a poor decision in succumbing to what it apparently considered to be the path of least resistance. The artist said he wants to create and encourage some counter-resistance.

His Kennedy mural is arguably one of the school’s defining visual elements. It is on an outside wall of the entrance to the library, which is built on the footprint of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom where Kennedy gave his last speech, in 1968. Moments later, an assassin fatally shot the presidential candidate in a pantry area next to the kitchen....

“I have talked to a teacher from RFK about where the students stand, and they overwhelmingly want the mural to stay,” Fairey wrote to [school board President Monica Garcia, who represents Koreatown]. “If Beau’s mural is removed I will reach out to students to have them take part in my mural being painted over as a symbol of the sacrifices that are sometimes necessary to stand up for important principles."... 

“What [Stanton] has in his mural is nothing close to the battle flag. It’s not the same color scheme. It’s not the same focal element. It’s stupid to me. I thought that cooler heads would prevail because this is absurd.”

The school district's senior regional administrator, Roberto Martinez, has compared the Stanton mural to Confederate statues and argued that, in both cases, the value of the art doesn't outweigh the offense to people. Fairey says:

“I’m from the South,” Fairey said. “I know that loving the Confederacy is at best a nostalgia for some sort of rebellious identity that probably never existed except as fantasy, or at worst it’s coded racism. The comparison of the mural to Confederate statues is asinine.”...

Confederate statues do display respect for the Confederacy, but I don't think anyone believes that the sun rays in the Ava Gardner mural were intended to display respect for the WWII Japanese.

Sun rays are a common element in Stanton’s work, and Fairey has used them, too. Critics of the decision have pointed out that it could be an aesthetic, ethical and logistical quagmire to begin purging representations of sun rays from all or parts of Los Angeles.

They want to get rid of the sun!

"Powwow"?! Can you say that? Microaggression!

I'm trying to read this Washington Post article but I'm having a problem with the headline: "Fact-checking Trump’s rowdy powwow with Pelosi and Schumer."

Did Trump speak with forked tongue?

"'Long Time, No See' Is Considered Offensive, Non-Inclusive Language at Colorado State University/Viewed as derogatory towards those of Asian descent."

A headline at Reason, linked by my son John at Facebook. I don't know about Asian. I'd have said Native American. Here's my comment over on John's post:

And don't substitute that you haven't seen the person in "many moons" or that you are "heap big" glad to see them. Don't say "Me talk-em Indian talk." Talk standard English. But, of course, to speak standard English is to exercise white privilege, so be very very careful. Or just don't say anything. You see someone you haven't seen in a long time? You could just pretend you don't see them.