Nitasha Tamar Sharma is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University.

Hip Hop Desis

South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race ConsciousnessBy Nitasha Tamar Sharma

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4741-5

Contents

Preface………………………………………………………………………………………………ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………….xiiiIntroduction: Claiming Space, Making Race………………………………………………………………..11 Alternative Ethnics: Rotten Coconuts and Ethnic Hip Hop………………………………………………….372 Making Race: Desi Racial Identities, South Asian and Black Relations, and Racialized Hip Hop…………………883 Flipping the Gender Script: Gender and Sexuality in South Asian and Hip Hop America…………………………1384 The Appeal of Hip Hop, Ownership, and the Politics of Location……………………………………………1905 Sampling South Asians: Dual Flows of Appropriation and the Possibilities of Authenticity…………………….234Conclusion: Turning Thoughts into Action through the Politics of Identification………………………………283Notes………………………………………………………………………………………………..301References……………………………………………………………………………………………315Index………………………………………………………………………………………………..335

Chapter One

Alternative Ethnics

Rotten Coconuts and Ethnic Hip Hop

In my freshman year of college I decided to go to the first Indus dance of the year. I hung out for a while and then went to my dorm room early. Two Indian guys (already two more Indian people than I had ever really known and hung out with) came to my dorm room after the dance.

They said, “Hey, everybody’s talking about you. Yeah, they even have a nickname for you. They’re calling you ‘the rotten coconut.'”

I didn’t get it. I said, “Rotten coconut? What does that mean?”

“They’re saying that you’re Brown on the outside, Black on the inside.” -KB, Indian American MC

Race, not ethnicity, is the explanatory and hermeneutic concept needed to describe the heterogeneous terrain of conflicting culture in the United States. Race, not ethnicity, articulates with class and gender to generate the effects of power in all its multiple protean forms. Ethnicity theory elides power relations, conjuring an illusory state of parity among bargaining agents. It serves chiefly to underwrite a functionalist mode of sanctioning a given social order. It tends to legitimize a pluralist but hierarchical status quo. -E. San Juan Jr., Racial Formation/Critical Transformations

The South Indian American KB was born in the 1970s and grew up in the majority-Black city of Richmond, California, which is known for its own brand of hip hop and was once voted the “most dangerous city in the United States.” He began rapping at a young age and by the time he graduated from high school KB was managing the rapping careers of several of his Black friends. More attuned to the lives and tastes of these peers than to those of Indians, he contributed to the culture of their generation’s namesake: hip hop. In the 1990s he attended college in Berkeley, and although its location is just a few miles south of Richmond it may have seemed a world away with its hippies, progressive politics, and racial mixing. In college KB continued with what he knew: he rhymed, expanded his mind, and wrote his BA thesis on the impact of popular media depictions of South Asians. At this time, KB met three other desi men and together they formed a hip hop group, Karmacy. The college environment contrasted with both his urban childhood and his later experience in the suburban private and mostly White high school he attended once his family could afford to send him there. At Berkeley he came across a community quite different from the one he claimed-he found desi youth culture just as it was beginning to form among the second-generation children of Indian professionals.

Having grown up without desi peers, KB decided to attend the first Indus dance in order to explore what this clique found so intriguing about socializing strictly among co-ethnics. His disillusionment with their insularity coupled with the “rotten coconut” incident related in the epigraph above was an experience encountered by other artists, and it heightened their ambivalence toward other young South Asians. The artists were also seeking a community but did not find it by retreating into a closely defined ethnic social group. Ethnicity was an ill-fitting cloak that neither protected them against negative experiences nor sufficiently expressed the totality of their beings.

The artists’ interactions with co-ethnics reveal the benefits and limitations of both analyzing and building community in immigrant America around ethnicity. By ethnicity I refer to the sense of belonging that emerges from the combination of shared cultural practices and shared ancestry. My definition highlights the diasporic and transnational material and emotional ties among members of Indian, Sri Lankan, or Pakistani communities, for instance, and the fresh and prevalent impacts of immigration upon them. Of course, individuals experience ethnicity and race (the topic of the next chapter) simultaneously, and the dynamics internal to South Asian American ethnic communities, including hegemonic notions of desiness, develop through interracial relations. However, I pull the concepts of race and ethnicity apart for two reasons. First, I analyze the distinct impacts of desis and nondesis upon the artists, who generally socialize with members of these groups separately. Second, I theorize race and ethnicity differently, whereby ethnicity describes the pull and obligations toward a group defined by culture and ancestry while race refers both to imposed categories as well as to emergent identifications across existing categories. Race and ethnicity cannot be wholly disentangled and their impacts and definitions overlap at times; nonetheless, theirs is a tension that generates new theories to understand life. Analyzing these concepts in this way illustrates the separate and overlapping influences of co-ethnics and of Blacks upon desi artists who work within this nexus to rearticulate alternative forms of desiness by identifying with Blacks. A race-centered and critical approach to the limits of ethnicity yields theoretical clarity on the salience and incompleteness of analyzing Asian Americans as ethnics only.

Ethnicity is neither the only nor even the primary identity for all Asian American youth. And although many desis describe their peers as “White identified,” Whiteness is not their only racial option. This chapter addresses the shortcomings of theorists who assert that ethnicity is an internally cohesive identity and a positive reaction to immigrants’ exclusion from mainstream America. South Asian American hip hop artists defy expectations of the new second generation by turning away from both an ethno-national identity (as “Sri Lankans,” for instance) and from an assimilated mainstream White identity (Portes and Zhou 1993; Rumbaut 1994). Instead, I address why some second-generation immigrants choose to identify with Blacks (not all of whom represent “the underclass”) when they do not have to. This phenomenon also begs a reconsideration of just how optional and flexible ethnicity is for South Asians (Leonard 1992; Kibria 2000), particularly when gatekeepers rigidify the “choices” of co-ethnics. Without recourse to Whiteness because of their racial otherness, they cannot voluntarily or symbolically choose whether, how, and when to “be ethnic” (Barth 1969; Glazer and Moynihan 1975; Gans 1996). Finally, ethnic identity is also not the only available reaction to racism, as predicted by reactive ethnicity. We see this in the reformulations of desiness into panethnicity by these hip hoppers as they attempt to create expansive and inclusive communities.

Desi performers learn important lessons from their respective ethnic communities that cultivate diasporic sensibilities and membership in transnational communities with distinctive cultural practices that impact their music. Identifying strongly as “Indian” or “Nepali,” they nonetheless feel constrained by their elders who define “real” or authentic ethnic expressions and norms. Part of the critical distance of hip hop desis stems from not fitting into such hegemonic conceptions; yet even those artists who do fit the parameters-who are North Indian, middle class, and upper caste-are sometimes critical of ethnic parochialism and chauvinism.

This chapter illuminates South Asian Americans’ heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity (Lowe 1996). Many studies reaffirm the dominant image of South Asians as Hindu Indians who have achieved upward mobility, maintain close family ties, and live the American dream. My work aligns with scholars who analyze the unequal heterogeneity within South Asian America-the maltreatment, disownment, and silencing of desis who are not heterosexual, Hindu, and middle class, for instance (Prashad 2000; Gopinath 2005; Das Gupta 2006). Dominant conceptions of proper desiness can push those who are marginalized and who disagree with such practices to disidentify with their ethnic communities. Hip hop desis are among a new generation of progressive youth who reconfigure themselves as members of groups outside the bounds of ethnicity.

Over the course of their childhood and college years, desi performers also reveal the kinds of progressive work that ethnicity, reconfigured, can take on to nourish alliances. Like other activist-oriented desi youths, these artists tussle with desi conservatism. Ethnographies have detailed how other Brown youths like those in this project “negotiate ethnicity” (Purkayastha 2005) as they contend with ethnic immersion, rejection, and reformulation. However, hip hoppers are unique desis for embracing Blackness and Black people and for their emphasis upon the role of Black popular culture in remixing ethnicity. Artists in this group create “ethnic hip hop” to articulate alternative iterations of desiness by working out contentious rather than essentialized or naturalized connections to ethnicity (Sharma 2008). Using their words, beats, and samples, they criticize parochial and conservative renditions of desiness that delimit “proper” ethnicity. Some create ethnic hip hop as their expression of ethnic allegiances and commitments to inclusiveness and commonality across differences. The artists take a role in shaping, through performance and lyrics, how desis present themselves to America, thereby impacting people’s conceptions of South Asian Americans.

South Asian American rappers and DJs perform alternative identities that reject the assumed link between blood ties and belonging and look to history and power relations within ethnic communities. Desi youths who identify with Blacks reveal complex interactions that suggest nothing less than a reconfiguration of our notions about the role of ethnicity in the lives of Asian Americans. In fact, desi artists reveal how ethnicity also enacts racism upon others through conservative notions of authenticity that dovetail with mainstream racial politics. The conservative racial politics of hegemonic desiness becomes a motivating factor, in collusion with White racism and mainstream discourses that obfuscate its operations, to foster ambivalent feelings about ethnicity. This group reveals a willingness to trade the privileges of their ethnic and class status, indeed their very status of being non-Black. In turn, they embrace self-conceptions geared toward disenfranchised populations and open to social change. Ultimately, some individuals employ hip hop to express the alternative desiness that emerges from their critiques and embrace of particular aspects of South Asian cultures. This rearticulation opens up the very possibilities of community formation outside the bonds of ethnic identity, which I discuss in chapter 2.

Exceptional Desis? Locating Hip Hoppers within South Asian America

The family biographies of South Asian hip hop artists in the United States are part of the overall story of the second wave of Asian immigrants who arrived following the Immigration Act of 1965. Desis who perform hip hop reflect the enormous ethnic, regional, linguistic, religious, caste, gender, sexual, and class diversity of South Asians. Their parents, in partial response to their new status as “minorities,” want their cultures to flourish within this adopted country in particularly crafted ways. First-generation ideas and family practices couple with class status and family structure to influence second-generation notions of ethnic authenticity that lead some desis to hip hop.

South Asians in America create a particular “hegemonic” form of ethnic identity, which Biju Mathew and Vijay Prashad (2000) call “Yankee Hindutva” due to the nexus of factors impacting their arrival. Global and historical forces (the British colonization of India and the Second World War) and economic and political policies (a postwar economic boom, the need for professionals in the United States, civil rights gains, and the opening up of immigration quotas in the 1960s) intersect with changing discourses of race that continue to justify White supremacy in the face of changing demographics. Skilled postcolonials arrived in 1960s civil rights America as the nation was reevaluating its approach to race from biological discourses to similarly problematic cultural understandings of difference. This shift led to the idea that these new immigrants were the “model minority,” a culturalist ideology that “praised” Asians and disciplined Blacks with the corresponding theory of Black cultural pathology.

South Asian immigrants, eager to enculturate their youth, reinvented conservative elements of their cultures and explained group inequality in the United States through culturalist explanations. According to Vijay Prashad, “U.S. multiculturalism joins with desi conservatism to invoke certain aspects of desi culture as desi culture tout courte” (2000: 113). As the status of many professional Asians grew in the hourglass economy of the 1980s, so too did their distance from working-class communities, including third-wave South Asians and many Blacks and Latinos. South Asians generally adopted the idea that their success was due to strong cultural and family values and they encouraged their children with the notion that success was earned through hard work and persistence. This bootstraps theory coincided with governmental neoliberal economic policies that cut and privatized services (Dolhinow 2010). The professional status of some of the artists’ families protected them from these changes, thereby enabling their parents to provide them with private schools and stable homes in predominantly White neighborhoods. But growing economic disparities hid the existence of those who did not fare as well. Those desi artists in less financially secure families, particularly those whose parents were separated, grew up in class-diverse minority neighborhoods and attended school systems with Black peers who were directly affected by changing economic conditions.

Hegemonic desiness emerged within this context among wealthier Indians who praised their financial and educational exceptionalism. The aims of these ethnic gatekeepers coincided with those of the American politicians and decision makers who advanced the idea that individuals are responsible for their own station in life. They used Asians to illustrate the end of institutional racism, and as long as these “models” supported the doctrine of progress, they would not pose a problem. Some Asian Americans, however, became troublemakers and crafted their own definitions of success.

Second-generation desis across all classes who were born in the 1970s and grew up in the Bay Area were particularly affected by the identity-based racial movements of the previous decade. The Black Panthers started in Oakland, California, and the Black Power movement influenced the Asian American, American Indian, and Chicano movements. The heightened race consciousness of Bay Area residents is in no small part due to the efforts of members of the Black Students Union and the pan-racial Third World Liberation Front who held the longest student strike in history at San Francisco State University, thereby creating the nation’s first and second (at Berkeley) ethnic studies departments. Some of the artists attended these schools and were undeniably influenced by the logic and goals of these social movements well into the 1990s, despite the national sentiment that America had moved on. The pursuit of elite educations and economic advancement by South Asians and their closed ethnic circles make it difficult to ascertain the impact of these global and race-conscious politics upon desis. Indeed, as Glenn Omatsu (2000) describes, many desi youths illustrate the shift taken by Asian Americans from broad-based radical political and anti-war activism in the 1960s to a conservative and apolitical stance with the rise of second-generation professionals in the 1990s. However, some individuals, like these desis, continue with the spirit of anti-racist and consciousness-raising movements, which infuse their music.

In this section I analyze the expectations, including ethnic insularity, cultural distinctiveness, and material success, within the artists’ various South Asian communities that limited competing possibilities. The childhood experiences of artists from wealthier White neighborhoods and those from urban, racially mixed cities explain their ethnic ambivalence rooted in their critique of rigid expectations and conservatism. Hegemonic desiness opens them to other “families of resemblance” beyond the bounds of ethnicity (Lipsitz 1994).

Ethnic Insularity: Middle-Class South Asians from Predominantly White Areas

Most of the desi artists’ parents came from urban regions throughout South Asia; a smaller number came from Fiji, Eng land, and the West Indies. Their fathers came to the United States as English-speaking doctors, engineers, and graduate students in science and medicine and their mothers worked as office managers, doctors’ assistants, and homemakers. Many of these families faced occupational downgrading in a gender-and race-segregated market. The shifts in family status from South Asia to the United States became a source of frustration for some artists, especially for those whose lives then became economically unstable. Nonetheless, despite the high cost of living in California and New York where most of the artists grew up, none of them came from poor families; rather, they represented a range of middle-class statuses. Nearly half of them were middle-and upper-middle-class members of nuclear families that lived in mostly White suburban-type neighborhoods in medium-sized cities like Fremont, California, home to hi-tech and other professionals.

Along with “Indianness,” wealthier South Asian families sought to maintain mainstream American markers of success: a suburban-type solid middle-class status, two-parent household, and access to White neighborhoods and schools. Members of the first generation drew strength from their cultural traditions, including filial piety, hard work, and the importance of secure futures and endogamous marriages. These expectations worked well with mainstream American ideas of how to integrate newcomers in ways that allow them their practices, given they cannot-or will not-be granted equal status.

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