Racial Invisibility
So I'm Indian. Proud of it, mofo.
I am so pissed right now.
It's been painfully evident recently how exoticized and trivialized my culture is in this country. Yesterday on the fucking L-Word, in some random-assed circus fantasy of Jenny's, there was yet another seminude woman with six arms. Hey, American Media-- SHUT THE FUCK UP! Quit it! Just stop! You don't have the right to co-opt my heritage and make it into a fucking freak show. Assholes.
It's not like it's the first time, by any means. Indian actors in this country either play doctors, software engineers, or terrorists. I challenge you to find me another example. And if you do manage to, I'll hush you by saying it's an aberration.
Even my NPR is guilty of mis-/bad representation. On Marketplace today (oh whew, Marketplace is PRI - I was almost really sad for a minute), they did some story about IT in Bangalore. I stress, IN BANGALORE. At the end of the segment, they played the beginning of that hip-hop song with the Bhangra underline (I don't know the name; it's kind of popular here right now). Hey asshole, just because it's from India doesn't mean that i) it applies, ii) it's from the same culture, or iii) it has anything to do with IT in Bangalore. Panjab is on the other side of the country. In a place where dialects change every fucking 10 miles, I sincerely doubt that Bhangra has much origin in south India. No, I'll go further: it's Karnataka! It's totally different, you white bastard!
I'm not saying that everyone in the world should have an extensive knowledge of cultural differences within the country, but when you're a professional journalist, you'd better make damn sure you're accurately representing your subject.
And even worse is the fact that it wasn't even a genuine Panjabi song! It's some rapper's attempt to exoticize his own music. Suresure, cultural diffusion, whatever, but it's still using my background to freak-up an existing form of art. Fuck that.
Hey, Indian people (and other people, too)! Remember in elementary school when we learned about how black people and white people are just the same and there used to be that bad R-word in this country? Wasn't it fun to be completely excluded from the discussion of race? Isn't it fun to be forced to develop your own racial identity without any positive images whatsoever in your country? Isn't it fantastic to have to fight Racism that people won't acknowledge is bigotry? Isn't it great to be outside the political discourse?
Okay, and you know who's really not helping anything? Fucking Bobby Jindal. And Vijay Singh. Breaking the color barrier, eh? Dickwads. But, see, I still have to be mad at them for making a bad name for us folks, because there's no one else. They're so tokenized, they supposedly have the responsibility of representing the entire Indian-American community, and they're fucking it up. I mean, they're not supposed to, they have to, because Americans have no other images. I'm not telling them they should, it's already assumed that they do.
Aah. I might have to call my sister.
posted by anand jay @ 7:30 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
yo so what is really striking me about this post is the voice-- and i've used it frequently myself-- it's the voice of having to take on the role of "cultural expert" in order to counteract this all-consuming, fetishizing, vortex that is whiteness, or in many ways relevant to your post, "American-ness." If you let me talk about whiteness for a minute, you can think of it as this weird-fucking ideology of supremacy, this coalition of immigrant groups that until landing on American shores and distancing themselves from blackness, still retained some sense of ethnic identity. But whiteness as a racial identity is relational-- and it is constructed almost entirely in relation to blackness. It's the whole, "Thank god i'm not black" mentality, it's collecting on the positive mirror of the negative projection imposed upon black people by white anxiety. "I'm hardworking (white) and they're lazy (black). I'm moral (white) and they're lecherous (black), I'm a protestant (white) and they're crazy baptists (black). So at the heart of white identity is, afterall, a selfhood constructed in negation of blackness. Blame it on our uplifting national pasttimes of slavery, lynching, segregation (etc), but black/white racial relations are constructed simultaneously, oppositionally, and dualistically in the US, and we have to acknowledge this history before we begin thinking about how other racial categories fit in the picture.
but with this dualism, with shoving together into a white identity to avoid association with a black one, comes a profound sense of loss. there's a vacuum left where you had to leave ethnic origins/pride behind in taking on whiteness. the irish were thought of as dirty dogs in the US until they developed a keen hatred for black people-- but the transition to power left them white-washed. try making fun of a person with irish heritage, call them a bunch of drunks, and they will generally bristle at the stereotype and enact the safer, less-charged white identity, or they will take it in jest and make fun of themselves-- much as we do indian accents for white people. by performing our own racial stereotypes for a white audience, we are saying both, "haha, yes i'm different from you," but more importantly, "but look, this is only a performance, it's just a game and i can drop it at any time and be white like you."
it's complicated shit.
and so, there comes the question of where the fuck to place the south asian diaspora in this black/white racial matrix. generally, when indians articulate an indian-american identity, they position themselves with other racial groups violated by whiteness. and in some ways, they have been. the whole commodification and exotification of culture is fucking annoying. but the more i think about it, the more i see our immigration heritage (in general) as closer to european migration than, say, chinese or mexican. yes, we're brown. but if you haven't noticed, indians have this huge pathology of black people. we fit quite well into the "at least i'm not black" mold of immigrant patterns (in general of course!). we're quite assimilationist, and we're assimilating to "white american-ness" rather than alternative models of american-ness, most noticeably through class, education and occupational choices. we're becoming white-washed. and as second generation indians, whenever we try to call to mind the Indian Mother that unites us all, we're left with bollywood, bhangra, bharatanatym and barfi.
and when we're on the defensive, trying to distance ourselves from whiteness, we fall into the trap of becoming defenders of the entire subcontinent, obscuring the diversity that we aim to protect. i mean, what the fuck do i actually know about south india? the name of some states and capitals. the names of the four languages. the fact that their scripts are squigglier. dosas and idli. that about sums it up. but when speaking to a white fetishizer i all of a sudden become the expert on hinduism and the origins of bhangra and arranged marriage and what indian village life is like and the language politics of gujarat.
i've been rambling. but i'm too tired to go back and make myself coherent. so to conclude,
i am all of a sudden really in the mood for dosa.
God, you're so fucking right. This is why you're the anthropologist.
To have an identity not tied to any identifying landmarks is to be truly yourself. And those who are now "exotifying" Indian-ness are only unaware, not bastards. As nani says, "Bechare murkh hain"; they only know what they know, not what they do not know. So if you are planning to run in 2024, survive in good health and STOP fucking raising your blood pressure!
Wow. That was a great post.
Just out of curiosity, does Lisa Gerrard (of ex-Dead Can Dance fame) bother you at all? I think she knows the cultures well, but it'd be nice to have your view on her work. I rather enjoy it, but since I have virtually no knowledge of the culture (thank you crappy US public education) I really just like it for the emotive composition and her nice voice.
Oh, also... do you feel the European and Aussie artists in Goa also ripped off a culture to enhance their own art or are they genuine for the most part? (example being that there's only a few bad apples as opposed to an orchard of them)
Oooops....seeing a comment above me makes my questions seem unwelcome...
Feel free to ignore. I apologise if any of this bothers any of you. I was simply curious. I'll try to be more careful in the future.
Jaya-
Isnt funny that they wait until college to make an effort of getting white people to learn about other cultures? That a small percentage of our population will ever have an iota of a clue about the social/political/geographic differences of South Asia? Ignorance, although frustrating, is most of the time not an individual's fault. I know you have the patience and the energy to forgive all of us who do not have formal knowledge of your culture, but are willing to learn.
You say that these golf players need to represent the Indian community, but do you see yourself as having to be an Ambassador of Indianness? When my roommate suggested that I be an ambassador of gayness, I thought it absurd. Golf players are golf players, and to demand that they adhere to some idea of identity suggests that everyone should stick to their identity. What happened to individual definition? I dont want to get into the post-modern/socialogical aspect of this, but it is alot to ask celebrities of an under-represented minority to encompass everything within that culture. Us dumb whities would learn more by interacting with people of the minority than watching golf, anyway.
One Whitie in defence of herself-
Dana
Dana:
I think you may have misunderstood me. I'm not saying that I want Vijay Singh (who is a golfer; Bobby Jindal is a Congressman from Louisiana) to be a cultural ambassador, I'm saying that he is anyway. He is in the position of being one of the very few Indian-American public figures, and as a result, his actions are viewed as representative of a larger community. So the problem is i) his tokenism and ii) he's an idiot anyway.
Moreover, I am not attacking individuals with less-than-expert knowledge of the entire diverse cultural blah of South Asia. I take issue with the *media* and *social* misrepresentation and lack of representation. If someone's going to pull out a piece of a culture foreign to them and put it in the public eye, I expect them to do it responsibly.
And at the same time, as my sister said, I'm taking on the role of someone with extensive knowledge of the subject of race relations, cultural identity, and a whole mess of other stuff that I really know nothing about. Which does not lessen the validity of my being upset, but it does weaken the value of my arguments themselves. I am quite ill-equipped to take on the issue at the present moment.
And to the random kid from Kansas who somehow found my blog:
I think the fake cultural expert bit answers your questions. I'm not a source of knowledge about this stuff, and further, my personal opinion on those issues would be inappropriate and inadequate. I stress, I don't know what I'm talking about in terms of cultural/socio-political implications. Also, I've never heard of those people.
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