As South Asians, we can’t be complacent anymore. Black Lives Matter!
The murder of George Floyd has been one in many unjustified uses of excessive force by the police in America. The protest worldwide is a call for solidarity amongst various factions towards the injustices Black community face in America as well as the greater Western world. Anti-blackness is “toxic” because it perpetuates a generalization about Black individuals shaping the modern socio-political system that marginalizes against people of colour in totality. South Asian and East Asian immigrants in America are considered “model minorities.” Though this term is an American construction, the attitude it promotes find roots in Asian diasporas all over the world. I am an Indian living in the Greater Toronto Area in Ontario, Canada, I can attest to some problematic anti-Black sentiments within the Indian diaspora as well as broader South Asian one. There is an acceptance of the “model minority” tag, a narrative perpetuated by white majority ruling classes. This classifies which immigrant group is non-problematic and can adhere to the “laws, culture and ethics” of their land; this places the South Asian community on a higher pedestal. We learnt to take pride in being engineers and doctors — hard workers who’ll put their head down to do the work- laying a path for our upward economic mobility. But this acceptance of the cultural identity of “model minority,” validates an assumption rooted in a system that facilitates and rewards “whiteness.”
The Black communities often do not get grouped in a minority category which is “model.” The stereotypes about Black people perpetuated by white supremacy get passed down to “us”- the model minority group. Instead of solidarity that one minority community should have for another, we often see the perpetuation of stereotypes and generalizations about the Black community. This is beautifully showcased in one of the rare depiction of an interracial couple (both minorities) in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991). Many a time, there isn’t a deeper nuance or context given to the historical injustices faced by black communities across the Western world which has created socio-economic traps that restrict black youth’s access to high-quality education and economic mobility. On the other hand, for many young South Asian diasporic members, Blackness is often co-opted to gain cultural agencies; black culture through music, dance, cinema and art has created a space in urban popular culture to represent their unique voices; it’s the co-optation of the N-word into a term of endearment which must not be used by non-Black communities.
South Asian as a minority group that vies for cultural recognition shouldn’t co-opt Black culture because their immigrant experiences don’t match up to the daily experiences of a Black person. Again, there is no comparison of who’s oppression is greater, but rather solidarity amongst various racial and ethnic minorities. Hasan Minhaj in his visible frustrations through his Netflix show Patriot Act makes us confront the hypocrisy rooted in South Asian culture, where we have normalized the usage of a term like Kaala — employed while making fun of darker-skinned members of our community. In South Asia, it’s evident that many black students (mainly from Africa) face racism and discrimination. Their perceptions in South Asian communities are often unfavourable and racist; this is partially because of what I see as a failure of decolonization, where colonial notions of whiteness still ring. South Asian popular culture projects “light/fair skin” as a mark of beauty and social status, this is evident in Bollywood and other regional film industries across India — where lead roles are often offered to fair skin actors, and the dark skin ones who get cast in any major roles — are deemed as beautiful only in “contextual” sense. Dark skin is often co-related to poverty, where fair skin actors wear black/brown face in a bid to appear poorer. Many Bollywood stars are seen promoting skin-lightening cosmetics, solidifying South Asian obsession with “whiteness.”
Similarly, the racial attitude held by white supremacy trickles down to the “model minority,” where the South Asian immigrants who do well economically disassociates themselves with other minority categories. This complacency of accepting the “model minority” tag hurts us in the long term. When we start seeing ourselves through the lens of “whiteness.” It’s accepting racial injustices part and parcel of accepting the privilege that comes from closely associating with “whiteness,” well we may very well are part of the problem, I suppose! We must use our newfound socio-economic and cultural privileges to deconstruct systems of white supremacy. The conversations have to happen now: with the growing and thriving South Asian diasporas in the West; there are many prominent South Asians like Hasan Minhaj, who is speaking about it; he is criticizing the bigotry held by South Asians; evident by the mega “Howdy Modi” rally, where the Hindus are appeased by the white conservative base of America through the whispers of we want more model immigrants like you — the group who isn’t criticizing the “caste-based” discriminatory system that’s been reignited in India. Similarly, Minhaj also points out that even South Asian Muslims communities perpetuate this perception when interacting with many Black Muslim communities. Anti-blackness in South Asia and as a matter of fact in Asia transcends religion, it’s a problematic manifestation of olden colonial supremacy that dictated such racial distinctions.
Affluent South Asian communities in the West can’t be complacent now. We need to address the anti-Black sentiments that are plaguing our communities and the larger system. The hard conversations with Uncles and Aunties have to happen now; they need to understand that being a good American/Canadian/British etc is not about satisfying ourselves with the tag given to us by the status quo. Our economic mobility is a consequence of the historical efforts led by many Black leaders across the globe who paved the way for civil rights and easier immigration rules for people of colour; now we have to help pave way for our Black friends for a socio-cultural revolution where we don’t mimic whiteness, but rather embrace in-between categories of South Asian and the West, and become an ally in a movement greater than our self-interest by supporting the Black communities who have been facing the ire for centuries, and shouldn’t have to explain themselves to another ethnic minority. Black Lives Matter.
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Anushray Singh is a Juice Editor who has completed his MFA in Film & Media Arts from the University of Windsor. His academic and artistic work aims to facilitate a space for a South Asian “transnational” network. Find out more about Anushray on our team page. You can also follow his Forking Opinions Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Originally published at https://juicedroplet.com.
“PERSONAL POETICS” OF THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN THE WEST
South Asian diaspora in the West traverses a transnational existence – their identities simultaneously connected to both the discourses of their home and host society. South Asian communities are made up of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nepalis, Sri Lankans, also arguably Afghanis too. These national categories can be broken into sub-communities based on languages, religions and the region/provinces of the country they hail from. The South Asian diaspora is spread across the globe – with major flows to the Anglophone West, which is Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. Despite socio-political disagreements in the Indian subcontinent, its diaspora often finds commonality in their shared sense of physical similarities, cultural processes, cuisine, languages and social structures. One of the biggest contributors in opting for “South Asian-ism” in the West over some sort of fixed national identities – are the common experiences of racism, cultural insensitivity and stereotyping.
These perceptions are often reflected in Western popular culture spearheaded by the film and mass-media products of the United States. South Asian identities are often relegated to a one-dimensional treatment – characters often performing “oriental/third-world” culture. This is the eccentricity of the “Indian” accent, curry-based cuisine, Bollywood singing & dancing; then there is the Slumdog Millionaire trope of abject poverty and extreme chaos, which has somehow become a major referential point for South Asian identities. Other problematics are based on career restrictivism— South Asians in popular culture are only imagined as taxi drivers, convenience store owners, engineers or doctors; these tropes are accentuated through constant emasculation of South Asian men – funny sidekicks who have miserable luck with the opposite sex; the rare depiction of South Asian womanhood, and if it's even explored, it's through a lack of “agency” – a generalized notion of South Asian patriarchal oppression or through their “exoticization” – a Eurocentric beauty norm – where women of colour’s beauty are conditional – hence, exotic to the standard Western norms.
These narratives are now being challenged through “cultural agencies” gained by a second-generation non-resident and cosmopolitan South Asian artists. Opposed to the older first-generation immigrants, they observably assimilate better in their Western host societies and forge strong cultural bonds. Growing up “brown” in the West or a very Anglo-centric cosmopolitan South Asian environment helps them traverse a transnational as well as a “hybrid” culture: negotiating a complex hyphenated South Asian-Western identities. These identities are significant in countering “inauthentic” South Asian representation in popular Western culture which invariably influences global perception. Breakout cultural voices in the form of Hasan Minhaj, Kumail Nanjiani, Priyanka Chopra, Mindy Kaling, Riz Ahmed and many others have now challenged these problematics by taking authorship of their own stories, of an “authentic” South Asian experience in the West – ranging from immigrant upbringings to the connotations attached with being “brown” in mainstream Caucasian societies. South Asians artists through their creative involvement in Western mainstream cultures are negotiating the meaning of being an Indian-American or British-Pakistani or Bangladeshi-Canadian and so on.
South Asian-ism is one’s “personal poetics,” finding solidarity in a unified pan-ethnic front that is more than cultural references of curry, Bollywood and other “third world” oriental stereotypes. Postcolonial and postmodern school of thoughts often see the transnational/intercultural/hybrid identities as part of “cultural hybridity” that can help enunciate a “third culture,” bringing two disparate cultures together: one of the East and one of the West. The intercultural involvement of minorities in a Western mediascape can help forgo its old Oriental self – a colonial construction of binaries “Us v/s Them.” Through meaningful cultural exchanges, one can examine new ways of knowing, seeing and perceiving – beyond stereotypes, perceptions, imaginations and generalizations.
Minorities given authorship of their own stories help in inclusive national discussions bordering on identity, race, gender, sexuality, cultures and nationalism. South Asian writers, comedians, filmmakers, musicians and artists through sufficient cultural nuances of ‘desh’ (motherland) and ‘videsh’ (hostland) can pin-point problematics in both their own diasporic as well as Western cultures. This unique cultural position makes many hybrid South Asian artists often speak truth to power – champion diasporic voices of the marginalized, both within & outside their diaspora – women, LGBTQ+, lower social classes etc. Through “art-based” inquiries – both in mainstream and independent media, propagated through a broader transnational network around the world can lead to an effective narrative — of racialized minorities. The poetics of private and the public self can merge into one, where being “brown” or belonging to another minority identity can be viewed through nuances rather any retrograde framework that have often created the categories of “the Other” – non-white & Western identities – with limited agencies interrupting the mainstream cultures from margins not – from “within.”
This article is originally published at Juice,
South Asian “personal poetics” imagined through various identity tags of cultures, ethnicities religions, and stereotypes.
Capitalism: Everything can and will be monetised!
Personally, I have a hard time understanding the nature of modern-day work culture. The work culture is designed to reward individuals who can sacrifice a major chunk of their adult lives to become indispensable and then they’re rewarded in monetary gains that perpetuates decadent consumption. A capitalistic model where men, women and children are seen as economic entities defeats every human purpose. If we see Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, we understand the nature of human motivations much clearly. There is an obvious need to work and earn money when you need it for basic survival needs in the form of food, shelter and providing for any dependents you may have. When one’s paycheck is more than enough to cover basic needs or one’s existing financial conditions is already stable enough (maybe because of one’s family inheritance), then one should investigate the motivations behind one’s work.
The contemporary capitalistic model has created an environment that in order to build friendship, social status and foundation for happiness, we have to look at the free market for answers which trades in everything human. People are seen as one-dimensional products; every emotion can be monetised; people’s time is equivalent to money. Capitalism has also cracked the mantra for happiness by bombarding us with ideas that a suburban house shoud be your end goal despite the crushing weight of mortgages or the new shoes you need to sport or the food that you get in fancy sounding eateries which is pretty enough for your Instagram to earn social brownie points. This loop of consumption of products will eventually fill that vacuum inside of you or else you’ll become addicted to money and the supposed short-lived happiness in terms of products it may buy.
Humanity's pursuit for happiness stems from meaning, and this comes from meaningful pursuits that are derived from relationships formed, work done, physical and mental well-being. Anyways, what is the motivation of young people when they go out for work? What is the point of being in debt by buying stuff that is just for pomp? What is the point vanity that eventually leads to a society that is being pushed from a successful technological optimism to a cyberpunk pessimistic future? These questions are asked often, but no one really instropsects on a personal level, and eventually gives in to the idea of a stable mundane job that pays well enough so that we keep buying stuff that capitalistic society have affirmed as the markers for a supposed ideal lifestyle. A pursuit for things, stuff and purchasable endeavours make us keep showing up to our work. In schools, colleges and in conversations with our parents and relatives and friends, we are just encouraged to gain a skill that will eventually help us land up in a job that pays well. It’s just all about getting paid and buying stuff. There is no enquiry in individual aspirations rather it is termed as hobbies, that is reserved for free time.
Karl Marx, and yes let’s not demonise him for a second, but understand his insights about capitalism. Marx observed that free time is not a bad thing but an indication for a well-developed society that is conscientious.His understanding of how capitalism isn’t really a perfect replacement of say oppressive systems such as Feudalism and Monarchies becasue it still promotes this ideology of masters and workers. An egalitarian society has been humanity’s dream, but now capitalism has created a bourgeoise or the middle class and a worker class that on the surface are way better than the last century, but still experiences a divide in social classes and power hierarchies. The democratic capitalist systems might have given an illusion that power is in the hands of people, but still, there is a powerful upper class in the names of bankers, politicians, elites, billionaires and lobbyists who thrives because of capitalism. Capitalistic models create a narrative of winners v/s losers; if you find yourself struggling to pay your credit card bills or student loans or your rent, well then you are a loser. A winner eventually will ride the capitalistic wave that will provide resources that will eventually feed into a capitalistic system of creating rich-poor and winners-loser dichotomies. The middle class is the target audiences and sheep for the ruling capitalists who effectively through advertisements which is literally everywhere these days have created a narrative of decadent consumption. The homeless folks, the misfits, the unfortunates, and the strugglers are the losers, whom capitalistic juggernaut have considered to be weaklings that society doesn’t and shouldn’t care about. There are talks about taking care of your community, planet, cul-de-sac neighbours and what-not, but it's coneveniently reserved for people who are doing well and playing by skewed capitalistic rules. There is an illusion of virtuous deed when we need to sign petitions and participate in some sort of protests, but generally, capitalism cares for individual self-interest over actual community care. I believe empathy is something that needs to be cultivated to actually care about one another rather adopting a cavalier attitude that one’s failure is a result of one’s failure to pull oneself by one’s bootstraps. What a bunch of baloney! George Carlin describes the condition of capitalism hilariously by observing that, ‘the upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep 'em showin' up at those jobs.’ Now, the way capitalism works is that it takes the power away from its scathing critic by commodifying it; this exact George Carlin quote will be printed on t-shirt, mugs and other stuff, and it will be monetized. Now the message is lost because George Carlin has become a product that can be monetized in this new market of criticising capitalism. Capitalism sells everything and sees everything as marketable, and if there enough purchaser then the anti-capitalistic revolution can be monetized in a capitalistic fashion. That’s oxymoronic, ironic and sad, all at the same time.
Capitalistic consumptions don’t really care about Earth as well. You need constant manufacturing to feed addicted consumers, and who cares if it creates ecological imbalances, contributes to global warming and climate change. Third world countries and other developing countries are keen to remodel themselves in order to get on the capitalistic wave. China, who have anti-democracy and anti-American stance have embraced capitalism wholeheartedly. They understand that its a useful tool to keep the middle class busy in meaningless pursuit of money and products and hollow vanity. Marxism is just plainly dismissed because of its a scathing critic of what our society has become today: a land where everything can be packaged and sold to clueless addcited customers. Thanks to the internet, even anti-capitalistic stance in the name of communism, socialism, Marxism and what-not have a market, which is antithetical to the idea. For instance, socially and morally conscious people who tried to embrace mindfulness, veganism and other form spiritual endeavours found themselves to be absorbed by capitalism which now observes these services as products, which can be marketed, advertised and sold to potential consumers. Capitalism has converted a planet of humans who wants to be governed by their meaningful pursuits inform of survival and sexual needs and eventualy pursuit of self-actualisation to a gigantic global market of commodities and services. Your walk, talk and emotional responses can all be monetised and have been monetised thanks to social media giants such as Facebook and Google. Don’t be a Marxist or a Socialist, but don’t blatantly say that capitalism is the endgame and we can continue this form of capitalism that we are observing at present. Maybe it’s good to have capitalist endeavour to run athriving business and a working economy but constructive criticism of when and how it’s getting out of hand is necessary because exacerbating consumption of resources to feed the capitalistic juggernaut is destroying the ecosystem, basic human dignities and altering meaningful pursuits of happiness?
Romanticising Past to Escape Present: Midnight in Paris
A time that once was…...the people that once were…….and that past era has now been swept by the tide of linear time that marches forward. I often see people romanticising the past: its purity, cultural integrity and the human spirit. People my age (the millennials), we romanticise about a time when there were no smartphones and people didn’t need to check their hands every five minutes. The generation that raised millennials seems to be complaining even about the time that we romanticise about. This human condition of looking at the good old days is something that plagues everyone and anyone. This feeling of finding comfort in an era that you might have been acquainted through books, tele or movies tells a skewed narrative, yet we fell for it. We want to escape present, and our best bet in this escapist pursuit is romanticising the past. Future is too uncertain to predict, but the past is laid in front of us to pick and choose from.
A still from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011)
Midnight in Paris is a wonderful film talking about its protagonist's journey exploring the nature of past and present. An American screenplay writer feels that his artistic soul is being trampled by working in a formulaic Hollywood environment. He dreams about rubbing shoulders with his literary icons that once existed in what he believed was the golden era. 1920’s Paris was the time when Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Picasso and many other artists worked, partied and thrived. As an artist, he tries to find the semblance of the time that once was and looks for his motivation to complete his novel that is in fact about selling artefacts in a nostalgia shop. Woody Allen’s way of communicating this human latching of past to escape the present is through this American writer and his journey to gain what he calls in this film as the ‘mini insight’. This means that even the ones that lived and breathed the supposed ‘golden generation’ of 1920’s Paris wished that they were born during what they feel is the golden generation. This supposed ‘golden generation’ is an unicorn which exists in imagination.
Past has been sealed away and can serve as a lesson to live in what is the moment that is present. A man stuck in a time that wasn’t his or worse stuck in a moment that he once lived will always try to weasel out of the present. We complain about how smartphones are ruining the way things were done in the past that but instead of complaining we can learn from the ways of the past and instead of fighting the inevitable technological, social and moral changes that society will go through, we can embrace it by using the lessons that our personal or the collective past of our world has to offer.
If humans condition of disliking the present is evident that there is another condition that I am sure all of us are pretty familiar with: the idea of the place that we are in, people we interact with and the moments that we are experiencing right now pales in comparison to the other uncountable ones that the world has to or is offering other people. There is no doubt that people travel or move to better places in order to find the work that they love or meet people who inhabit mindsets that might match theirs. Commonly, people just love to complain and feel dissatisfied of their current bearings. There is always a better party or a better city or a better crowd or a better lifestyle; and if not there are collective hubs of metropolises, getaways and collective human gatherings that may merit our insatiable search for happiness. To find happiness, we as a human might move to a new country or city or province, but somehow this emptiness that might come out of loneliness, lack of meaning and your usual existential ideas should urge that human condition of believing that moving somewhere fancier is the answer.
Midnight in Paris speaks of this desire for our confused American writer to move to Paris in order to find happiness. Maybe his move to Paris was just an escapist dream but as the film progressed, we sense that his main motivation stems from his deeper appreciation of past, and the artistic inspiration that this city gives him. If moving to a new place or making a new friend instigates this feeling of inspiration, motivation and doing something meaningful, then it merits to such ideas. The human mind is fickle because you have apparently trained it to find excitement every day and that can be only found in the swanking metropolises of the world or the exciting parties or the people with interesting stories, but what will you do in the morning when the shine of the city fades away? Or the people with interesting stories run out of new interesting ones to narrate?
Midnight in Paris first introduces these two human conditions: one which is romanticising past to such extent that present is demonised and second which is about moving to a new place in order to be happy. The film does provides us with this solution, which asks us to appreciate the past to make sense of the present, and subsequently it’s not about the new city or the new exciting people, but rather your intrinsic motivation to embrace this new situation that the old one may have failed to provide. Our American writer never criticised America but rather felt a disconnection with Hollywood’s interpretation of art which made him develop a deep connection with the beautiful city of Paris that once inspired his literary heroes. Instead of criticising the place we inhabit, we might want to explore that new supposed better place that may inspire us in ways that our present bearings has failed to do so. Rather looking for vain attempts of finding happiness in new places, experiences and peoples…..because frankly over time they’ll be same, old, repetitive and uninteresting as the previous ones.
What is Forking Opinions?
Forking Opinions is a personal catalogue of ideas and opinions of this man who considers himself to be a positive/optimist nihilist (aka Anushray Singh). Through podcasts, writings and videos, he wants to express himself. Over the course of years, one thing has become clear to this man that there is no apparent meaning of life or there are no apparent ways to happiness. There is no good reason to fall into an abyss and become negatively affected by the wretchedness of the world. Money, power and pleasure do influence us all, and the societal constructs make us fall into the traps of this triad. Without digressing, the point is to look within yourselves, ask questions that make you and other flinch and start doing something that lifts you and helps you see the world in all its hidden glory.
I wrote a book, ‘In India: Everything is Sunshine and Rainbows’ to let out my frustrations and pent up writer’s angst. The book wasn’t professionally put together but rather a hasty collection of essays that talked about a young man’s trials and tribulations in a beautifully chaotic country that I call home: India. Like many other young souls in India, I did Engineering out of societal pressure. Quickly, I realised there wasn’t any inquisitive curiosity about life, philosophy, and inner exploration being done in any educational institutes. Families wanted their children (largely boys) to take up an office job, marry a girl from the same socio-economic strata, buy a house and a car and then raise their children in the same fashion. When you encourage young men and women to devalue their chaos, rebellion, inner explorations, sexuality and inquisitiveness, then you are contracting the societal free will. Philosophers, writers and thinkers have always countered such institutional behaviours that are borne out of religious dogmas or just a continuation of regressive societal foundations. Indian society has largely shaped itself on the principle of honour and what society will think of you.
As a counter-culture to regressive religious and institutional societal norms: a liberal Indian movement about creating social change through art, music, films, comedy etc is brewing. Millennials and the generation Z are kinds of seeing these patterns in a society which misconstrue religion according to their needs. Anyways, I am a product of this Indian liberal counter-culture surgence. I want my films, writings and podcast to put forth ideas and opinions that talks about the inherent meaning of life, society, culture, art, media et al.
Welcome to Forking Opinions! I urge everyone to introspect, think out loud, express freedom to find meaning and purpose over fleeting materialistic happiness and fall into the clutches of instant gratification. Ciao!