The Urban Desi Dude
I pass a group of young Desi (or Indian-American or South Asian or Brown) guys on a street corner. If you don’t look closely enough, they could be a group of young Black (or African-American or Black-American) guys.
They might have on baseball caps, huge baggy jeans hanging off the wrong part of their bodies, and t-shirts that go almost to their knees. According to Curry Bear (Um, Curry Bear does not seem to be concerned with being PC. Don't say I didn't warn you), most Desi guys fall into these three categories: The Desi Party Guy, the Super Thug, and The ABCD. This group definitely falls into one of the two former. They wear Timbs, hoodies, and the latest, most expensive sneaks.
They sprinkle terms like yo, bro, fo sho, and na’mean? throughout their conversation and use their arms and hands to make themselves understood. They are hip-hop aficionados. They rock out to the beats of Nas and Jay-Z and 50 Cent.
At the same time, though, they are fiercely Desi. In the midst of all those fo sho’s and na’mean?’s is a generous dusting of Desi words. They totally love them some Desi-ness; they are, in fact, full of Brownosity (<---- a technical term borrowed from my second novel :D). They surround themselves with their Brown peeps, male and female.
We could discuss Cultural Appropriation. Or an ugly industry built on the mass consumption of urban, African-American culture. We could talk about the desperate fumbling for an identity when there are no current, urban images of Desi’s in the media in one’s own North American homeland (though I’ve heard it’s not much different in the U.K. and Europe). [Yes, like Native-Americans, images of Brown folks are often ancient, nostalgic depictions. Or they are traditional, in-the-subcontinent images . . . or they are, um, Apu.]*
But for the purposes of this blog, I will leave the direction of the discussion up to you, Awesome Reader. What thinketh ye?
*And dude, please don't flood my email Inbox notifying me of the handful of South Asian faces currently on TV, and the fact that Kal Penn is now a household name, yeah? Much appreciations!
They might have on baseball caps, huge baggy jeans hanging off the wrong part of their bodies, and t-shirts that go almost to their knees. According to Curry Bear (Um, Curry Bear does not seem to be concerned with being PC. Don't say I didn't warn you), most Desi guys fall into these three categories: The Desi Party Guy, the Super Thug, and The ABCD. This group definitely falls into one of the two former. They wear Timbs, hoodies, and the latest, most expensive sneaks.
They sprinkle terms like yo, bro, fo sho, and na’mean? throughout their conversation and use their arms and hands to make themselves understood. They are hip-hop aficionados. They rock out to the beats of Nas and Jay-Z and 50 Cent.
At the same time, though, they are fiercely Desi. In the midst of all those fo sho’s and na’mean?’s is a generous dusting of Desi words. They totally love them some Desi-ness; they are, in fact, full of Brownosity (<---- a technical term borrowed from my second novel :D). They surround themselves with their Brown peeps, male and female.
We could discuss Cultural Appropriation. Or an ugly industry built on the mass consumption of urban, African-American culture. We could talk about the desperate fumbling for an identity when there are no current, urban images of Desi’s in the media in one’s own North American homeland (though I’ve heard it’s not much different in the U.K. and Europe). [Yes, like Native-Americans, images of Brown folks are often ancient, nostalgic depictions. Or they are traditional, in-the-subcontinent images . . . or they are, um, Apu.]*
But for the purposes of this blog, I will leave the direction of the discussion up to you, Awesome Reader. What thinketh ye?
*And dude, please don't flood my email Inbox notifying me of the handful of South Asian faces currently on TV, and the fact that Kal Penn is now a household name, yeah? Much appreciations!