desi people
i am a desi diaspora chick interested in people and their browness in various forms (especially those that might deviate in different ways from the slick bollywood images that i/we regularly consume)
browness is a fluid term used by many in many different ways. i generally use it as we did growing up; desi peeps
There’s a great new FB page on the topic(s) of love + solidarity b/w black and desi folks run by my bestest friend: http://www.facebook.com/BlackBrownLove
yes! yes!
p.s. There’s a great new FB page on the topic(s) of love + solidarity b/w black and desi folks run by my bestest friend: http://www.facebook.com/BlackBrownLove
(Source: facebook.com)
Answer:
Could you send a link to your blog? Tried googling it with little success.
jasonsudeikissunderthemistletoe:
Mindy Kaling interview on the new E! chat show, Love You, Mean It, with Whitney Cummings
i
(Source: bobbymoynihans)
I am watching The Mindy Project
11 others are also watching The Mindy Project on GetGlue.com
“We’ve been ‘cool’ for a very long time, and in that sense our culture has been taken for a very long time. How do we define when we’ve arrived? It’s not when a young, white girl in Berkley is wearing nice garlands or those nice buddhist beads, or wearing bindi. I don’t feel like my life in anyway has been improved because she has the ability to do that and thinks that’s okay. My life hasn’t improved. The life of my mother has not improved. Our voice as a community within this economic system has not improved.
A good friend of mine, she’s south Indian, and she grew up in Connecticut. Her mom would make her wear her bindi and go to school. She would get harassed by kids… she would be harassed so much that what she would do, is that because she was so ashamed to have that bindi on her head, she would leave her house, wipe it off… and then come home and put it back on.
To the point where a child would have to think about such a deliberate attempt to refute their own culture I think is pretty profound. If there’s a white girl wearing a bindi walking down central avenue in the heights, she’s not considered a dot head, even though she has a dot on her head.
For me, the feeling is disgust and anger. The way I look at it if I see it, I just get so mad because I think, how dare this person be able to wear that, or hold that, or put that statue in her house and not take any of the oppression for that. How dare they. That’s not fair. We have to take so much heat and repression for expressing ourselves.
I’m going to rip that thing off your head, and I’m going to scrub that mehndi off your hands, because you don’t have the right to wear it. Until the day when you walk in our shoes, and you face what we face… the pain, and the shame, and the hurt, and the fear, you don’t have the right to wear that. It is not your right, and you’re not worthy of it. I feel like it’s so superficial and it’s so disrespected. One day, wake up, be me, and then you’ll see how powerful what you’re wearing is. ”
—Raahi Reddy, Yellow Apparel: When the Coolie Becomes Cool
who care abt social justice issues and
also live in south asia?
“Brownies”, a web series about desis navigating arranged marriage and internet dating. I just hope it stays hilarious.
OBJECTIVE:
Acculturation and loss of ethnic identification have been proposed as risk factors for eating and body image disturbance among women of color. This study investigated whether being teased about racial or ethnic features might also play a role in these disturbances in minority women.
METHODS:
One hundred twenty-two college women of South Asian descent completed questionnaire measures of disturbed eating behavior, body image dissatisfaction, distress, self-esteem, acculturation, ethnic identification, and racial teasing.
RESULTS:
History of hurtful racial teasing, but not acculturation or ethnic disidentification, was associated with disturbed eating and body image, even after controlling for distress, self-esteem, and body mass.
CONCLUSION:
The psychological impact of racial teasing may be a potent but neglected source of eating and body image disturbance among minority women.
Full pdf here.
An interesting part from the paper:
Researchers and theorists interested in eating disturbance among ethnic minorities may need to look beyond women’s relations to the dominant and origin cultures. If a history of being hurtfully taunted about one’s ethnic appearance is associated with eating and body image disturbance, then it may be the majority culture’s response to the minority individual, not just her psychological accommodation to it or estrangement from her ethnic origins, that plays a role in these disturbances. The failure of acculturation and ethnic identification to correlate strongly with racial teasing implies that racial teasing is a quite distinct factor in eating and body image disturbance among minority women. The lack of association between acculturation and ethnic identification and our dependent measures contrasts with studies of other ethnic groups (e.g., Pumariega et al., 1994).
This discrepancy probably reflects a cultural difference. African-American female beauty norms are relatively unrestrictive with respect to body size (Abrams, Allen, & Gray, 1993), but South Asian women are subject to more rigid norms, arranged marriage imposing strict demands on appearance and body shape (Jayakar, 1994). Under these conditions, ethnic identification and low acculturation are unlikely to be protective. Risk and protective factors identified for some ethnic minorities may not be applicable to others, each group requiring culturally tailored understandings.
How and why racial teasing is associated with disturbed body image and eating behavior remains unclear. Being teased on account of visible signs of their ethnic difference might lead some girls to be dissatisfied with their appearance and to resort to disturbed eating patterns in an attempt to reshape it (Tee, 1997; B. Thompson, 1990). Alternatively, racial teasing might create or deepen a sense of not belonging in the majority culture that manifests itself in pathological ways.I bet men of ethnic minorities are probably having similar problems, but they weren’t included in the sample.
