Say it loud, I'm brown and I'm proud...
I'm gonna be doing a presentation on this article tomorrow...:
Gautam Malkani on race and masculinity.
It's a looong one for an online article (although kinda lightweight if you're looking at it as an academic piece).
It's interesting to me that brown guys in the UK are making being East Indian a 'macho' thing... there are many parallels (or at least there can be attempts to make parallels) to the experience of blacks. But then in the end, we're not black - the major difference is that brown people have generally assimilated into the 'white man's culture' (or have been allowed to do so) pretty well in North America and the UK.
What's interesting is the recent rejection of this stereotype of the 'good', desirable kind of immigrant by younger South Asian males, by equating your level of 'whiteness' (i.e. academic achievement), with a lack of manliness. I remember this going on when I was in high school, myself - generally, being black meant being a cool and tough man, and being called 'white' was an insult, it meant you were weak, or nerdy, or gay, or possibly all three... so you didn't want to be 'white', you wanted to be more like the black kids. Although I had long hair down to my shoulders, was into grunge and read a lot on my own, so I remember being mocked a lot by the black guys in my class (when they would show up) for 'talking like a book'... being 'smart' was not cool at my high school.
Malkani wrote a novel called 'Londonstani', which I read in December or so, and is about much the same stuff he's describing in this article. Those of you who work at bookstores and get employee discounts should check it out (if you haven't already)... ;).