It Couldn’t Happen Here

I’ve been talking to people lately.

Dave Walker of the New Orleans Times Picayune interviewed me for a piece about the response of blog communities to David Simon’s show, Treme. Walker and I had a nice long phone conversation about The Storm, what kind of person it takes to capture it in a semi-fictional tv series and the blog as a mere yet powerful medium. I’ll expand on this over at Back Of Town in a little bit.

Big news on the desi intertubes yesterday was a TIME column by Joel Stein entitled “My Own Private India.” Oh boy, you say. Yeah. It seems Stein suffers from some inner turmoil about the changing ethnic nature of his Jersey hometown which Tums and a glass of Shut The F**k Up juice alone could not settle. He had to share on the pages of a national newsweekly. And they accuse the blogs of killing journalism. The inimitable ANNA wasn’t going to let this slide and wrote an appropriately scathing response over at Sepia Mutiny, in which she quotes from emails that friends and I sent in to her. I encourage you to read both before coming back here.

My entire email response to Anna follows. As you read it, keep in mind that the older I get, it’s not the overt racists and the content of the racism that bother me as much as the “latent” racists among us and the why of what they say and do. (South Carolina Senator Jake Knotts calling gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley a “f**king raghead” is the dual-headed demon of old hick racism and dirty politics as usual at play. Then, there’s the super-educated white guy I know who has referred to a bunch of brown folks, including me, as terrorist one time too many. Is it different? Moreover, what does this level of discourse prove and why is it so easy?). Here goes:

“Even if this were a simple observation on Joel Stein’s part of how his town has changed economically through the decades, he could have done it a bit differently. Case in point: ‘In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if ‘dot heads’ was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.’ Like these attributes of Hindu gods are insult-worthy. With this, Stein gave up the protection of self-deprecation and crossed that line. Why is it still so easy to do so?

“I was recently invited to a costume party which encouraged attendance dressed as your favorite Indian of the western or eastern variety. The photo montage on the front of the invite (because such a thing requires overt, graphic description) consisted of badly cut-and-pasted Pocahontas, Sitting Bull, a South Indian dancer, Hindu goddess Durga and Gandhi positioned over a wild west barrel. For a while, I fumed over it. I didn’t move back to the Yankee Midwest from the South to receive not-malicious-but-tasteless shite like this. Even if they live in a small town outside of Akron, OH, these are adults, “professionals” even, who have attended college. How could young, ostensibly educated people in 2010 create and enjoy such a thing, especially when this town overflows with Indians of all walks of life, some of whom employ area residents by the hundreds? Who do these f**ks think they are sending out an invite like that? How would they feel if I were to send them ones for a Come Dressed As Your Favorite Undereducated Small-Town White Bitch party?

“Then I realize that no matter the globalized, trendy clothes they wear and ‘ghetto’ music that they listen to [forget that they’d probably pee their Ed Hardys if they accidentally walked into an actual ghetto], they are products of their upbringing and do not have editors, internal or external, who tell them they ought to know better.

“Time Magazine ought to know better.

“Yet, still, hitherto, even at this point, I can dismiss the whole article as noise. What really cooks me here is not Stein’s provincialism or even how easy it still is to use Indians as the butt of jokes. It’s the Indian-Americans, the ones who keep their heads down, ‘adjust’ and don’t make waves, who will tell us not to be so sensitive and to shrug it off. ‘Let them say what they want. We should not internalize these things and let them bother us. Grow a sense of humor.’ Because of their being doormats, it is easy for the Steins of the world to give ink to the Wholly Unnecessary. They make it so easy to do so. No more. I’m an American. The residents of Edison have been Americans for longer than Stein’s had a column. They don’t need this. Fuck you if you can take a ‘joke.’

“And you can tell the [expletive deleted, but it’s the favorite of one Mr. Al Swearengen] who will inevitably show up in the SM comments’ section, ever pointing out the thin nature of our confused brown skins, I said so.”

One more thing: Not all of us are doctors or engineers, ok? Some of us reserve the inalienable American right to be straight f**k-ups. Like business owners or musicians or geologists or journalists. My mother is as disappointed about this as I’m sure Stein’s mom is.