a response to racialicious

Racialicious article: NPR sortof hates Black music.
http://www.racialicious.com/2009/10/20/npr-sort-of-hates-%e2%80%9cblack-music%e2%80%9d/#comment-2030405

in a way its nice perhaps as a so-called south-asian to not have to deal with these sorts of things. there is, after all, no concept of what brown-skinned “indian-looking” folk listen to. The only crap i could assume would be potentially, beyond Ravi Shankar, probably Bollywood movie soundtracks (which do sell well), or perhaps Bhangra (which’s regionally specific to my grandparents, all four, place of origin). Beyond that… perhaps the whole grime/hip-hop/rnb deal going on over in the UK that brit “asians” seem to be getting into.

But yeah… i think that without being raised within a Sikh and Indian-American community, I would have never been exposed to all that, not just the music itself, but the knowledge that such music was listened to within the Indian-American, and to a lesser extent Asian-American diaspora in America.

So, while in a way it’s a shame we don’t really find music that originates in India, or music written/performed/sold by Indian-Americans aka South Asians aka Brown Skinned easterners… heh. (i’d rather be called brown-skinned than indian as i have no tie to the country, and its really the skin they’re trying to classify me by, so do it outright, goddammit, heh)… while thats a shame, its nice in a way that we don’t have such misconceptions about our community.

although… perhaps you could say that what we have instead is worse… that burning hole of absolute lack of knowledge about our community by outsiders, in any way whatsoever… no education in the schools, really no exposure to the Joe Schmo besides their television and perhaps for the few vigilant detectives, net searches.
____________

Racialicious makes some comments on racist halloween costumes
http://www.racialicious.com/2009/10/21/the-racialicious-halloween-roundup/#comment-2030426

interesting. i had an… interesting halloween experience in 2003. freshman at the Ohio State University meant I was dragged out to the OU halloween party, a massive city-wide drunk-fest, where folk dress in costume and get pissed, New Orleans-Mardi Gras style ‘cept out in the Midwest. So back then I had long hair, a putka, which is akin to the turban, as a kid in a predominantly-Sikh family. Whilst I’d raised protests to the outward sign of faith that more or less was a personal lie, i was strongarmed into keeping the hair intact by my folks. (don’t worry, that didn’t last, fast forward 6 years and we’ve since reconciled over my long-since shorn hair, heh)

But back to the story, walking the streets, semi-blasted myself, with my gargantuan local friend and former Highschool classmate, and folk’d glance me, drunk themselves, and decry “Osama!” Now… more or less these guys got a bit of a break, given that it was Halloween… I was cautioned to give them some space, as my first gut instinct was to sock the guy in the face, but i was held back by said gargantuan friend… this happened a couple times in the night…

long story short, i had just gone out without a costume, none of us in our group had one, as we’d just impromptu driven to the town for the drinks, and had no idea there’d be a city-wide street-side Halloween party boozefest. All in all the crawl was pleasant, hardly anyone bothered me really, but the thing is… essentially I’d been taken for a halloween costume… my parental-encourage religious garb, sign of faith, had been reduced to a pop-culture reference of extremely offending nature… lovely.