Elitist UWM Professor: Sneering at Ordinary Americans

Browsing through the letters column of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel sometimes turns up some bizarre items.

This one caught out attention.

What’s attractive?

The xenophobic and jingoist rant against immigration is likely to find itself running out of gas in the foreseeable future. Immigration from variously skilled and resourced nations to the United States is likely to come to a trickle and stop altogether with the existing media infrastructure in sports-concert complexes.

“JumbotroNazism,” my coinage, shows nothing but distasteful images of monstrous, corpulent whiteness, which will repel a physically normal world. No one will want to live in a country of hideous proportions and ungainly movements and behaviors.

Media conspirators will respond by showing hotness, a.k.a. other white women - not! America’s idea of attractiveness is overrated and bankrupt in the global bank of good taste.

K.E. Supriya
Shorewood

Such a wonderful window into the world of elitists who don’t like ordinary, especially working class Americans, who may be overweight and may do silly things when the TV cameras are turned on them at a sports event.

Consider, for example, the phrase “corpulent whiteness.” Ms. Supriya is apparently especially offended by overweight whites, but the reality of obesity is interesting.

In general, the prevalence of overweight and obesity is higher in women who are members of racial and ethnic minority populations than in non-Hispanic white women. Among men, Mexican Americans have a higher prevalence of overweight and obesity than non-Hispanic whites or non-Hispanic blacks. For non-Hispanic men, the prevalence of overweight and obesity among whites is slightly greater than among blacks.

But of course, phrases like “corpulent blackness” or “corpulent brownness” would be politically incorrect.

The real grudge people like Ms. Supriya have against working class Americans is simple: they are uppity. Rather than accepting the tutoring of their betters on how to live, they do things like driving trucks and SUVs, living in the suburbs, shopping at Wal-Mart and voting for Bush.

And they have the quaint notion that they have a right to live their own lives, regardless of what the Supriyas of the world think of it.

Even worse, they have one vote each, which is just as much as Ms. Supriya and her friends have. What a horrid injustice.

Of course, these JumbotroNazis make the United States an evil place, so everybody is going to stop wanting to come to America. But in the real world, vast numbers of people want to come here, oblivious to the elitist standards of “taste” of people like Ms. Supriya.

Now what do you suppose would be Ms. Supriya’s occupation?

A simple Google search shows her to be on the Communications faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee!

And given her name and appearance, she seems to be of Indian descent. But, unlike the vast majority of Indians who migrate to the U.S., she has been thoroughly socialized into academia. So she thinks like a college professor.