![]() Just see the work of Kumail Nanjiani and Aziz Ansari. ![]() Brown men have literally made a career out of fantasising about dating white women. Women of colour are often fetishised by white guys while simultaneously rejected or looked down upon by guys from their own community. This is not to suggest that brown men have it the worst. We need to question why certain character or cultural traits are defined as “bad” and more importantly why being “bad” in that sense is unwanted. I did think I’d landed myself quite a catch – a white girl. She said these things quite unabashedly and I chose to ignore them maybe because she was right. “Where does your accent disappear when you sing in English?”, “What will your parents think if you brought a white girl home? Will they accept me? Will your community shame you?”, “If and when you tell your friends about us, they’ll think you got quite a catch, wouldn’t they?”, “Hindus seem to be way more chilled out in comparison to Muslims”. I wish I sounded like that”, she would say. For example, a white girl I was briefly seeing made several borderline offensive comments while we were flirting. This has been proven to me multiple times. It didn’t help when a British Indian female friend remarked, in ‘jest,’ that if there were a hierarchy of physical attractiveness amongst men based on race, brown men are at the bottom followed by black men in the middle and obviously, white men at the top. This has taken a severe toll on my self-perception, often to the extent of paranoia. There have been several instances when my politeness was mistaken for an unwarranted advance. It seems that Indian men deserve to be the butt of the joke since they cannot spell “boobs” or “vagina”, unlike white men, who can send a well framed sentence like, “Send nudes,” which I suppose communicates the message of online harassment more succinctly. ![]() I should specify that I’m not seeking to condone online harassment – it’s just that sometimes I need a good, cathartic laugh about the community I represent and belong to. I am well aware of the fact that a brown man initiating a conversation with a woman online has certain implications – but men of every cultural, social, and economic background harass women online, and it seems that Indian men deserve to be the butt of the joke since they cannot spell “boobs” or “vagina”, unlike white men, who can send a well framed sentence like, “Send nudes,” which I suppose communicates the message of online harassment more succinctly. It wasn’t the rejections themselves that hurt the most, but the way they were often delivered to me – it was that white women accidentally forgot to censor their serious racist undertones. My experience of the dating scene here in the UK as a brown man from the subcontinent has mostly been negative, and I think my lack of performative whiteness is the problem. Whiteness, much like gender, is a performance. Hansit explains why he’s changed his dating preferences as an Indian man
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