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.