Last Night On The Crying Couch
2016 Spelling Bee was another year for Indian-American co-champions.
It was a big night for unusually well media-trained pre-teens with a penchant for linguistic derivations and, let’s be honest, photographic memories. For the third year in a row, the Scripps National Spelling Bee crowned two young Indian-Americans co-champions of the competition, and for the second year in a row, one of the two was a legacy speller (having an older sibling who previously won).
A fair amount of ink has been spilled on the topic of why Southeast Asian kids are so dominant at spelling bees. The most popular explanation is Ben Paynter’s 2010 Slate piece about the minor-league bee circuit, which includes the North South Foundation and South Asian Spelling Bee. But there’s also the fact that these are the children of highly educated immigrants—doctors and engineers—who’ve come to America to settle in suburban middle-American towns that many would otherwise look down their noses at, like Olathe, Kansas and Painted Post, New York. These families are living the American Dream!
Last year, there were enough disgusting social-media displays from people who expressed dismay that the finalists didn’t “look” American or have American-sounding names—whatever the flying fuck that means—to merit a Washington Post article about the backlash. These comments are straight-up horrible and racist. More than two-thirds of NFL players and three-quarters of NBA players are non-white, and our country’s greatest athlete is a curvy black woman who plays the whitest sport of all time, tennis.
No, the only true scandal of the bee is that, for the third year in a row, two nerds had to share a prize and be nice to each other because, for we all know, they could both have both kept spelling the most arcane words we’ve never seen before. If the bee is truly an athletic competition, and I do believe it is (as I have written before, “The etymology of the word “athlete” contains nothing about physical feats — it derives from the Greek “athlon,” meaning prize”), then there should only be one winner.
It’s clear that Nihar and Jairam were the best spellers for the job of tackling twenty-five consecutive rounds of championship words with only three mistakes between them. But look, these kids are young and impressionable, and now is not the time to lie to them and let them believe that life is fair and equal and that prizes can be split and glory shared. For the past three years, it’s been impossible not to detect a slight grimace in the faces of the co-champions who really should have won, not because they were better exactly, but because they fought harder, wanted it more, were recklessly confident. Their names are Sriram Hathwar, Vanya Shivishankar, and yes—Nihar Janga. They knew it, and so did we.
I mean, just look at this kid: