When a 'big Black kid' pushed nerdy Vivek Ramaswamy in school: Unpacking his rant against American culture

As many social media commentators claimed that Vivek Ramaswamy's 400-word rant on

American culture

reflects how he struggled to fit in as a kid, the Republican leader and the co-chief of the Department of Government Efficiency wrote a great deal about his school experience in his book

Nation of Victims

.
Republican commentator Scott Jennings mocked Vivek Ramaswamy's meltdown and said, "Somebody got stuffed in a locker" reacting to Vivek Ramaswamy's 'Math olympiad is better than prom queen culture' rant.
Ramaswamy explained why top tech companies prefer to hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over native Americans. In his explanation, he said it's not because Americans have low IQ but the culture is very different. "A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers," he said and then ranted about some mediocre television shows like 'Friends'. More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers, more science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons, more books, less television, more creating and less "chilling" is his formula for raising good kids.

Many saw this as a sad account of what 39-year-old Ramaswamy's childhood must have been with no chilling and only studying.
In an old podcast, he said he attended a public school which was not particularly great. There he got pushed down the stairs and this incident forced his parents to change his school. Ramaswamy did not name the school but it was identified as

Princeton Junior High School

in Cincinnati. In his book, he recounted the incident and wrote: "...a big Black kid thought it would be amusing to push a nerdy high-achieving Indian kid down the stairs. Whether our races were relevant, I don’t know, but I’ve learned that others think it’s part of these stories.”

After the incident, he was sent to St Xavier High School -- one of Cincinnati's most elite schools. He often found himself as an outsider as a Hindu at a Catholic school. Then he went to Harvard where he was a valedictorian and then he went to Yale Law School.
In 2015, Vivek Ramaswamy got married to Dr Apporva Tewari who studied MD at Yale University. The couple have two sons: Karthik and Arjun