Chandler Langevin faced censure from Palm Bay council and calls to resign from series of posts condemned as ‘vile’

Chandler Langevin faced censure from Palm Bay council and calls to resign from series of posts condemned as ‘vile’

A city councilmember in Florida is facing backlash from national Indian American organizations, members of Congress, and local residents after posting a series of social media messages that insulted Indian people living in the US and called for them to be deported en masse.

Chandler Langevin, a Palm Bay council member elected last year, made derogatory comments about Indian people across several posts on the social media platform X over roughly three weeks this fall. He claimed that Indians come to America to “drain our pockets” before returning to India, “or worse … to stay”.

His remarks have sparked widespread anger. Since 29 September, residents along with regional and national Indian American groups have crowded Palm Bay city council meetings and demanded that he step down.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    19·
    7 hours ago

    “White” has been pretty malleable in definition over time.

    Here’s Benjamin Franklin complaining, way back when, about how German immigrants were going to make the US non-white and how German immigration to the US would surely all end in tears:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_Concerning_the_Increase_of_Mankind,_Peopling_of_Countries,_etc.

    https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0080

    And since Detachments of English from Britain sent to America, will have their Places at Home so soon supply’d and increase so largely here; why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

    Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

    I also note that somewhere along the way, the “Christian nation” crowd switched to “Judeo-Christian”. And that was after the big fight over whether-or-not Catholics were bad news, and it would be a disaster if the country weren’t just Protestant. People mostly bring up the KKK today as being opposed to blacks, but they also really had it in for the Catholics.