Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
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Das Racist’s Himanshu Suri: Rapper, Jokester, Community Organizer?
03 weeks ago
Queens native Himanshu Suri is getting reacquainted with his borough. Suri, better known as Heems of the globetrotting race-politics-and-silliness rap outfit Das Racist, has joined the board of SEVA NY, a community organization serving the Richmond Hill area’s working-class immigrant community. And while Suri is no stranger to confrontation, having served the last few years as indie music’s smirking racial conscience, the new job title means a new kind of work.
“If you’re on SEVA’s board, that means you’re a community organizer now, and you do the work,” says Gurpal Singh, SEVA’s cofounder and a former ACORN organizer, speaking by phone on Thursday. And right now, that work is a years-long redistricting battle, an uphill fight against a legacy of backroom deals that have cut Richmond Hill into powerless pieces.
“Forty seven perfect of Queens is immigrants, but almost no elected official is an immigrant, and that’s because of the gerrymandering,” says Singh. “Immigrants are the most disenfranchised group in the state, and Richmond Hill is the most gerrymandered neighborhood in the state — we belong to seven different assembly districts, two state senate districts, and three city council districts. And when a constituency is gerrymandered, nobody’s advocating for them.” The results are plain; as an example, Singh says Richmond Hill’s high school’s graduation rate hovers at 50 percent, with 600 percent overcrowding. SEVA’s solution to the root problem is to present an unignorable united front, so that elected officials see that supporting gerrymandering will be bad for their careers.
What does this mean for new recruit Suri? For starters, he’s releasing his first solo mixtape, Nehru Jackets, through SEVA’s website (click through to download). The mixtape, which features verses in Punjabi from some of SEVA’s young members, launched with Heems’ first-ever solo performance, at SEVA’s Art For Justice Community Mehfil last night.
The event also served as a coming-out party. While Heems is famous in the (predominantly white) indie music scene for being a politically astute Indian dude from Queens — and rightly so, as seen in his Alternet op-ed on the ten-year anniversary of Balbir Singh Sodhi’s murder — he’s all but unknown to this political organization for Indian people in Queens. That disconnect, perhaps, is part of what’s drawn him here. “This event is reversed from the usual. It’s more about us introducing Himanshu as a new board member,” says Singh, speaking before the show. “He doesn’t know this yet, but we’ll be playing a video we made about him and his life — oh, he heard me and he’s giving me the worst ‘shut-up-man’ look right now. I’m going to delete it right afterwards.”
And while Singh doesn’t sound too concerned about getting his community organization on the hip music blogs — “talk to us in 2014 and we’ll see how it helps,” he says — Suri is preparing a new mixtape with an all-SEVA lineup through his own trendsetting record label, Greedhead, dovetailing with SEVA’s programs providing creative outlets for their youth. If the contributions of members Pawan and Lovedeep to Nehru Jackets are any indication, the Richmond Hill gang will be taking over the music blogs and the town hall meetings in a year’s time.
Colorlines interviewed Suri by email on Wednesday about his new role, and his thoughts on the South Asian identity in politics and in pop culture.
Most rappers don’t get involved in redistricting battles, but you’re not most rappers. What brought you to SEVA and this fight? And do you see this board membership as a natural progression of your career so far, or are you a little surprised to see yourself here?
Suri: Most rappers may not get involved with redistricting battles, but they certainly talk about their neighborhoods and voice the concerns of their communities. Most rappers paint a vivid picture of what happens when certain communities aren’t offered the same protections of law as others.
Ali Najmi of SEVA and myself grew up together in a community like this: a heavily South Asian neighborhood in Queens. He told me about the community organizing work he was doing, and I immediately offered the time I have outside of Das Racist to help in any way I can. I wouldn’t know what a natural progression of my career would look like. I’m 26, and I’ve both worked on Wall Street and toured the world in an art-rap group.
“Nehru Jackets” is your first proper solo outing, and you’ve talked about how you’re digging into some more life-story-specific subject matter on it. What are you rapping about here that you’ve left off of Das Racist tracks? Was it a struggle to find a rhyme for ‘gerrymandering’?
Suri: I didn’t rhyme anything with ‘gerrymandering.’ Although if I had to, I would rhyme it with ‘petty pandering.’ I began rapping about my experiences as a South Asian American more directly on our last album, Relax, and these new songs are an extension of that. I don’t think people enjoyed it on our last record, and I’m not sure people will on this record, but I’m writing about what I know.
One of the fruits of your involvement with SEVA is that some SEVA members are guesting on Nehru Jackets, rapping and singing in Punjabi, and there’s talk of Greedhead releasing a mixtape of SEVA members. You’ve worked with plenty of bands before through the label, but what’s it like working with these kids? What are they listening to that we should be jumping on?
Suri: I’m not sure what they’re listening to, although I can tell you on my mixtape I did two songs with them and both are about girls. They’re extremely hardworking Punjabi kids from Queens. I’d like to think I fall in that category, although I can’t sing or rap in Punjabi nearly as good as any of them.
For a lot of activists, Queens’ defining political moment of the last ten years came in the wake of 9/11 — mass deportations of fathers through the Special Registration program and the economic collapse in their absence, ICE-deputized police in schools, racial profiling, some really scary shit. But Queens contains multitudes. Was this part of your political awakening? What does Queens’ political legacy look like from where you’re at?
Suri: Having gone to school blocks away from ground zero, 9/11 was definitely part of my political awakening. 9/11 reacquainted me with a certain type of racism. Meeting with the guys at SEVA was also a huge part of my political awakening. I had always been concerned with politics and how they affect myself and my family, but not at the local level. Working with SEVA, I saw how racism is institutionally affecting my community, with Richmond Hill, Ozone Park, and Woodhaven split into 7 assembly districts.
Pop-culturally speaking, it seems like South Asians are doing pretty well in the U.S. in 2012, showing up in all sorts of high-profile, historically white-dominated positions in society: in boardrooms, on TV, on Pitchfork, in the GOP. Identity politics and Outsourced aside, that increasing positive presence is probably a good thing.
But politically and economically, it’s very different. As an Indian rapper from Queens who’s gotten quizzed a lot about his white fanbase and his time at Wesleyan and on Wall Street, and who’s now in an explicitly political battle for the power of South Asians over their own communities — what do you see? Are Nikki Haley and Tom Haverford both just grist in the model minority myth, or can cultural presence make a real difference for community empowerment? In your opinion, what does the path to justice, not whiteness, look like?
Suri: That dissonance has been here since 1965, when they changed immigration laws to allow Indians to enter the US. They almost entirely chose Indian people with graduate degrees in the sciences and refused to let their family members join them until ten years later, with the passing of a law in 1975. The message now is the same as it was then: we want your labor, not your lives.
I think visibility is extremely important. It becomes difficult to dehumanize a group of people when you see them on TV acting ‘just like us.’ At the same time, I think community organizing is the way to make a real difference for community empowerment, and until district lines are redrawn so as not to split South Asian communities into multiple districts under the representation of politicians who serve only constituents that look like them, community organizing is extremely difficult. Nonetheless, that’s what SEVA aims to do, and I hope to help in any way I can.
People I Love: South Asian Women Who Make Change
011 months ago
Last week, when I spoke at the Western Regional LGBTQIA* conference at UC Berkeley, a young South Asian woman said she’d been looking for South Asian women who worked in social justice and was thrilled to find me. Well, sister, I started 25 years ago and in those days we were so few that I was already on the job for five years before I had some South Asian colleagues. It’s exciting to be part of a legacy in the U.S. of women devoted to building power with and for communities of color, poor people, and everybody else the government had no idea would interest us when they opened U.S. borders to South Asian professionals in 1965. We benefit from some distinct privilege — most of us have at least one form of elite education, and our position in the racial hierarchy gets us a pass in some settings as the “model minority” — but we do manage to use all that sometimes just to stick it to The Man.
So here’s my list of awesome South Asian women.
Vanita Gupta is the Deputy Director of the ACLU and leading a modernization of that critical organization’s strategy. Once upon a time she was a young lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where her first case led to the release of 46 black women and men from Tulia, Texas, who had been convicted by an all-white jury on the word of one undercover police officer, who had no any evidence at all. They got out after four years in prison, and then Vanita got them a $5 million financial settlement. She also worked to end the abuse of immigrant families at the Hutto detention center in Texas.
Urvashi Vaid started out fighting domestic and sexual violence, served on the National Prison Project at the ACLU, as Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, as program officer at the Ford Foundation and most recently as President of the Arcus Foundation. Read her book, Virtual Equality: the Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation, and see her thinking at the intersection of race and sexuality in What Can Brown Do For You?
Mallika Dutt is the founder and President of Breakthrough. While she lived in India as a program officer for Ford (no, South Asian women have not taken over that foundation), she decided to produce a song and music video about domestic violence. People made fun of her, but then Mann Ke Manjeere won India’s National Screen Award in 2001 for best music video. Breakthrough also works to restore due process to immigrants here in the States, while continuing to help end gender violence in India, where men appear to commit sexual violence at the super high rates.
Lest you think one must go to law school to contribute, consider these women:
Sarita Gupta is the Director of Jobs with Justice, the leader of community/labor coalitions in this country, operating in 45 cities and working on dozens of workers rights campaigns annually. In a typical year, JwJ affiliates support more than 172,000 workers in 82 organizing and first contract campaigns. Sarita was a principal in building the Student Labor Action Committees, which helped the Coalition of Immokalee Workers get McDonald’s and Taco Bell to pay more the farmworkers who pick their tomatoes.
Pramila Jayapal is the Director of One America in Washington. Over time, they’ve won a comprehensive plan to address the needs of immigrant communities in Seattle, an ordinance preventing any City of Seattle employee from inquiring about immigration status, and numerous city and county resolutions upholding the human rights of immigrants and the need for comprehensive immigration reform. They’ve registered tens of thousands of new citizens to vote, and defended them against countless horrible policy proposals. Against all odds, they just defeated a bill to restrict drivers licenses to immigrants, including a no vote from the original sponsor!
There are so many more. I wrote a whole book about Saru Jayaraman. Monami Maulik organizes immigrants at the Desis Rising Up Movement and Deepa Iyer leads the national South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT). At any rate, if your parents say, as mine once did, that no one does activism as their job, you’ll have a whole list of people who prove them wrong. Feel free to add to it in your comments.
* I know you want to know, so this whole thing is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (or Questioning), Intersex and Asexual (or Allied).
Indian American Candidates’ Influence Slowly Growing
01 year ago
Over at New America Media, Sandip Roy explores the rising tide of Indian-America candidates in this year’s elections:
As Indian Americans grew more affluent, they became involved in politics. But they were dismissed as “photo-op uncles”: come to an event, take a photo, write a check. Sanjay Puri, chairman of the U.S. India Political Action Committee, remembers his frustration at an Indian-American fundraiser for Maryland gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in 2002. “The whole exercise in that two-and-a-half hour event was to get her to wear a sari.”
[snip]
There are now Indian-American lobbyists, fundraisers, campaign consultants. In the days when South Asian candidates for office were few and far between, the Indian American Leadership Initiative (IALI) used to be bipartisan. Now it supports Democratic candidates, and there is an Indian American Republican Council as well.
[snip]
Shekar Narasimhan says even those Indian-American candidates with perfect American accents are deluding themselves if they think ethnicity does not matter. “For heaven’s sake, let’s grow up and understand being brown in a predominantly white culture means we are different,” he says.
And then there are the candidates. Conservatives Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley are perhaps the most profiled, but certainly not alone. There’s Hansen Clarke in Michigan, who Roy describes as the only shoo-in for Congress, and Raj Goyle, who’s in an uphill battle in Kansas.
South Asians Still Shopping for Designer Baby Boys
01 year ago
Over at New America Media, Viji Sundaram reported on a continuing trend in medical tourism, where middle-income South Asian families shop for designer baby boys to help “complete” their families. As Sundaram explains, while some women go through with the procedure on their own accord, many are swayed by other factors:
Especially for those with roots in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, sex selection is often not freely chosen. Women are frequently coerced, overtly or subtly, to guarantee the prize their husbands desire above all else–a son.
[snip]
Of the more than 400 fertility clinics in the United States, nearly three-quarters offer PGD, according to a 2006 survey by the Genetics and Public Policy Center (GPCC), in Washington, D.C. And of those offering PGD, 42 percent do so for gender selection purposes, said Susannah Baruch, the group’s law and policy director.
[snip]
The deep-rooted cultural bias against daughters has noticeably skewed the female-to-male ratio in some states in India, particularly in Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where an estimated 160,000 baby girls are reportedly killed every year. In 2001, males in India outnumbered females by about 35 million.
Read more at New America Media.
ColorLines reported back in 2007 that the trend is a deeply feminist issue.
“It is important to have a critical discussion of the implications of reproductive technologies, especially for women of color,” Sujatha Jesudason of the Center for Genetics and Society said at the time. ”Because if we don’t, then we as a society let the market determine what is acceptable instead of challenging the current and future misuse of technology that is growing increasingly sophisticated. This is a deeply ethical and feminist issue.”
South Asians: Time Magazine’s Sorry You’re Offended
01 year ago
In case you missed it last week, Time printed a piece from humor columnist Joel Stein in which he describes going back to his New Jersey hometown after two decades and finding it with a 7 percent South Asian population. Hilarity ensues, if by ‘hilarity’ we mean “white dude evoking stereotypes that don’t belong to him, in an effort to be funny.”
The reaction was a resounding Bronx cheer.
Kal Penn said, on the Huffington Post: “Growing up a few miles from Edison, NJ, I always thought it was hilarious when I’d get the crap kicked out of me by kids like Stein who would yell ‘go back to India, dothead!’”
Samhita Mukhopadhyay at Feministing: “As a growing population that has been consistently made fun of by mainstream media, policed both before AND after 9/11, ignored, strategically propped up as a model minority and a community that provides so much of the labor, both working class and white collar, at statistically lower income rates than the average American, you would think Stein could do us a solid by noting some of that.”
Tom Scocca at Slate: “This is the plight of secure young upper-middle-class Jewish funnypeople, who have inherited the sharp humor traditions of an oppressed minority without inheriting very much of the oppression.” Anna at Sepia Mutiny just went off on Stein. And the South Asian Bar Association of New York demanded an apology from Time.
Stein initially pushed back on Twitter, saying, “Didn’t meant [sic] to insult Indians with my column this week. Also stupidly assumed their emails would follow that Gandhi non-violence thing.” Bazinga! Later, appended to the article, he apologizes in a more interesting way. He experienced knee-jerk jingoist feelings upon seeing the change in his hometown. He was shocked and discomfited by his reaction, and suddenly understood the kind of unquestioned race-based fear that’s dominated our country’s conversation on race and immigration. He knew that it was important to address what he was feeling, but he didn’t have the tools to talk about it. He knows that he failed, but he tried, because it was important to try. (I’m giving Stein a lot of credit here, but why not.)
And that’s probably the best we can get out of Stein for right now. Time, on the other hand, said:
We sincerely regret that any of our readers were upset by this humor column of Joel Stein’s. It was in no way intended to cause offense.
Isn’t this an incredible bit of syntax? No acknowledgement of content, misdeed, or even complaint, really. Just: We’re sorry you were offended. How useful! We’re sorry your son had a negative reaction to the bullets. Or, Stop hitting yourself.
I’m not that worried about Joel Stein. He’s just one author, and he’s either learned his lesson or he hasn’t. I’m more concerned about Time‘s editorial board, both for letting this get published and for the sidestepping apology and what that means for how communities of color get written about and whose complaints get counted. And as non-establishment publications fold under the stress of the death of journalism, moneyed outlets like Time will increasingly be the only voice out there. Blogs aren’t necessarily better; see Shani Hilton’s excellent response to Joel Johnson’s Gizmodo post titled “Why I Stalk A Sexy Black Woman On Twitter (And Why You Should Too!)”
Ultimately, situations like this come down to privilege — white privilege, establishment privilege, majority privilege. And while Time did apologize, it doesn’t mean much it they tell us in the same breath to stop being offended. Working for a world where words are free of pain is a noble goal, and yes, being able to say whatever one wants would be a side effect of such a utopia. But more often than not, it seems like some of us are content to leave the ‘change the world’ work to others, while we incur some debts on our presumably forthcoming ‘get out of racism free’ cards.
Jay Smooth has a great video that seems to speak directly to incidents like these.
Illustration by John Ueland for TIME