India’s top court is urging that the government make male new hires who are married disclose whether they accepted dowry and threaten gaol time if they did:

… a candidate aspiring for a government job, and those already in service, would have to provide information about any dowry taken by them. Under the anti-dowry law, the custom is punishable by a jail term.

This is another example of governments influencing markets through their own purchasing power, e.g. 55 mph speed limits, education testing, minority set-asides, open source software and so on. The public University of California system even forced a rewrite of the venerable SAT test. To the poor kids struggling through the new essay section this spring, y’all can thank Berkeley and UCLA for that.

It’s not clear to me how the anti-dowry plan would be enforceable. Ideally, it would work better than mandatory drug testing, which created a cottage industry in fake urine samples. At its best, it could save future Nisha Sharmas from dowry plight by changing what’s socially acceptable and giving grooms a legitimate excuse to turn aside demands by their families.

I approve of government using market incentives in addition to blunt, sometimes ineffective legislation. Maybe they can issue tax credits for Bollywood Costume Design That’s Not Blindingly Tacky. Or the Padmashree for Novels Without Saris or Mehndi on the Cover.

Now that’s government to be proud of.

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I’ve been reading this interesting new blog the last few days. Its called Discrimination & National Security Initiative (which in my opinion is a very un-bloggy name). One of the bloggers, Dave Sidhu, writes,

The focus of the research is the mistreatment of minority communities during times of war (e.g., the post-9/11 backlash against Sikhs, South Asians, Arabs, and Muslims). The project will gather information (like cases, articles, statutes, reports, etc.) and also perform original research on the human consequences of this mistreatment (like Muslim families not traveling or flying, Sikh males cutting their hair, etc.).

One story that they reported on last week was this one on CNN about discrimination at Denny’s:

Seven Arab American men filed a $28 million lawsuit against a Denny’s restaurant in Florida saying the manager kicked them out and told them, “We don’t serve bin Ladens here,” their lawyer said on Thursday.

They sued the restaurant owner, Restaurant Collection Inc., and former manager, Eduardo Ascano, saying they were harassed, humiliated and refused service at the Denny’s in Florida City, southwest of Miami, in January 2004.

Lawyer Rod Hannah said the men had not ruled out an additional lawsuit against the Denny’s chain, which paid about $54 million in 1994 to settle a discrimination suit filed by black customers.

The Florida lawsuit said the men visited the restaurant early in the morning of January 11, 2004, and, after long delays, were seated, given menus and served drinks.

After waiting more than an hour for their food while later customers were served, they asked twice about their order. The lawsuit said Ascano told them “Bin Laden is in charge of the kitchen.” Asked about the reference to the al Qaeda leader, he swore and told them, “We don’t serve bin Ladens here” and ordered them to leave, the lawsuit said.

This morning a Sepia Mutiny reader, who I will call “S,” sent us an email asking us for a sanity check. We get tips all the time but nobody asks us for advice. Suddenly I felt the need to step into a phone booth, transform, and fly forth from our North Dakota headquarters and into the “real world.”

How do you KNOW that you have been the victim of discrimination and that it’s not just your “overly-sensitive” perspective skewing things, was her general query? I think most of us who grew up in the U.S. tend see the glass half full in instances of possible discrimination. I know I do. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt even in instances where a neutral third party would clearly label it as bigotry. Let’s look at her situation and see what we think.

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Consider if you will some of the following quotes:

“There are Koreans, Chinese, and Hindoos numbering over one billion. Allow them to secure a foothold in the United States, and they will, within a few generations, sweep like an avalanche of death from the Himalayas around the globe”

or

“It is essential that the blood of the American-Europeans of this country, who together with their ancestors developed civilization to its present state, should be kept pure and free from the taint of the decadent Orientalism of China, Japan and India. We have no quarrel with those people. We wish them well in their own countries, but we do not want them in ours.”

or

“[Indian religions are] debauched with deeds of lust and blood…Many of the Indian deities, given to lustful amours, are especially worshipped by the people….It is not surprising that religion in India is not only divorced from morality but married to vice…much indecency exists in India under the guise of religion, many of the temple dancing girls are merely consecrated prostitutes, and in many cases respectable women are led to lives of shame.”

Do you get angry when you read this? Or perhaps it sounds vaguely familiar to you? When compared to the transcript of the Jersey Guys radio show that I posted a few days ago the above quotes aren’t that radically different. Well what if I told you the quotes above are all about a century old? Indolink.com has a very educational article titled, Fear and Loathing: Hinduphobia in America .

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Honestly I’m soooo tired of the following topic. I know that I should be completely jaded by such things already, but I like to think that they can still bring out the fight in me. The same mob mentality over the radiowaves that we have seen in the past has happened once again. SM tipster “Ayyner” alerts us to yet another racist outburst by some East Coast on-air personalities. The following is a partial transcript (a longer transcript here) of the Jersey Guys Radio Show on NJ 105.1 FM. The Jersey Guys are Craig Carton and Ray Rossi.

[Caller]: You just said it all, the last couple of Â… callers, I guess they donÂ’t know that they live in America and weÂ’re being overrun. I had just moved out of Edison because of what has happened in the past 10 yearsÂ… Orientals are all along, the whole complete route 27. And Indians have taken over Edison in north and all over.

[Carton]: Damn Orientals and Indians.

[Caller]: I..i moved out..36 years IÂ’ve lived in Edison

[Carton]: And what was the biggest problem you had with the Orientals and the Indians ?

[Caller]: I canÂ’t handle them! ThereÂ’s no American people anymore.

[Carton]: Eh..

[Caller]: There shoving us the hell out!

[Carton]: ItÂ’s like youÂ’re a foreigner in your own country isnÂ’t it?

In my opinion the above excerpt is rather tame compared to the rest. Their ignorant invective seems to be particularly focused on East Asians. Unlike previous on-air incidents, this seems to have occurred in the middle of a “political discussion” instead of one meant to be funny. Specifically, the conversation centered around the upcoming race for mayor of Edison, NJ. The discussion basically degenerated into Carton bashing liberals who he thinks care too much about getting minority votes. You should be concerned with the majority (“me”) to paraphrase Carton. According to an article from a few weeks ago this duo has a large audience.

Touted as the most listened to FM talk show, the afternoon program commands nearly 1 million listeners a week, said Ray Handel, director of marketing and promotions for the station.

Of course this is really nothing new. Limbaugh gets away with this kind of crap all the time but is clever enough to not be so blatant. If you can’t even be clever enough to veil your racism [sarcasm] you deserve to be smacked off the airways. In any case, we’ve been informed that “South Asian legal organizations are coming together again to craft a concerted response.”

Update (4/27/05): The reaction. Continue reading →

Whoever holds the pen, that’s who. As we’ve all heard, there have been lots of protests (some turning violent) in China, over the version of history found in some Japanese school textbooks. As anyone who, like me is a fan of Zinn’s “A People’s History” knows, you must always remain vigilant against inaccuracies in history and social studies. Some desis in the D.C. suburbs have been doing just that. As reported in the Washington Post:

Fairfax County businesswoman Sandhya Kumar teaches her three daughters about other countries, cultures and religions. She wants them to take pride in their Indian heritage and Hindu faith — and to respect and understand other views.

But when Kumar of Lorton scanned several world history textbooks recommended for Fairfax County schools, she worried that students would come away with a distorted and negative impression of her homeland’s culture.

“I thought the American children will think India is some Third World country with pagan beliefs and backward thinking, not a forward-thinking country,” Kumar said.

She and dozens of other Indian American parents launched a campaign to change the way their history is taught in Fairfax, the nation’s 12th-largest school system. Their lobbying has prompted school officials to rethink presentations of India and Hinduism in classrooms and has sparked efforts to develop a more sophisticated and thoughtful curriculum.

So what in particular was inaccurate in the textbooks?

Balaji Hebbar, a George Washington University religion professor who was one of three scholars hired by Fairfax County to review the books cited by the group of Indian parents, said he and his colleagues found few factual errors. But he said the lessons boiled down a complex culture to “karma, cows and caste.”

“It’s as if I were making a picture book of the United States, and I took pictures of the bad parts of D.C., the run-down parts of New York City and the smoke stacks of Cleveland and left out the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty,” Hebbar said. “I would be telling the truth, but I would only be telling half the truth.”

The very open and gracious way in which the school district responded to the parent’s concerns is quite encouraging to me, especially in light of all the craziness that usually seems to undo the educational system in this country instead of helping it become better.

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Although some of you may not realize it, one of the most popular brown “Mom & Pop” websites out there is alt.muslim.com, which was founded by a married Indian-American business student who grew up in California. From the Information Warfare Site:

“My name is Shahed Amanullah, and I created the Website altmuslim.com. I started the site because I wanted to see some more open dialogue and discussion and debate about things that are happening in the Muslim world.

“Before the Internet came around, Muslims lived in relative isolation and obscurity from each other. They never had to deal with Muslims of different colors, of different schools of thought, of different political persuasions. And when the Internet came about and these people had to find each other and see each other for the first time, it was really jarring. I mean, Muslim discourse on the Internet for the first several years was nothing but fiery debates and insults and things like that. Muslims need to learn together in cyberspace in a way that’s civil and respectful.

“Only now are people starting to get together as Sunni, Sufi, Shia, without it automatically meaning, ‘let’s have a theological argument.’ And that change has been happening slowly over time. Friendships have been happening between these different people, between Muslims in the West and in the Muslim world, between Shia, Sunni, Sufi, even between Salafis and progressives.

“I think one person put it that the Muslim community has an ‘irony deficiency.’ Because of that, we wanted to interject humor and wit into all the work we did, because we felt that it was a really good way to defuse tension and make the pill easier to swallow, so to speak. So one of the things we do, at the top of our Website, is we have little taglines that describe who we are, ‘cleared by Homeland Security,’ ‘no assets to freeze,’ ‘all the news that’s not fit to print.’

Ahhh. That’s just the type of humor that hopefully turns SM readers on (well most of them).

Going over to alt.mulsim.com we see that in addition to running the site, Amanullah and his wife are bloggers. His wife Hina, blogs about her recent experience with motherhood.

Go check out the main news site. There are lots of good and often controversial articles posted. Great brain food.

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“Did you read the Post yesterday?”, SM-loyalist Deepa asked me over AIM. I replied negatively and she sent me the link to a love story…

The two were as opposite as could be. Saqib is tall, olive-skinned and athletic. Susan is tiny, fair-skinned and delicate. Saqib is Muslim, the son of immigrants born in India. Susan was raised in a conservative Christian family from a small town in Pennsylvania. He’s a door-knocking community activist who hopes to run for public office someday; she’s soft-spoken and cherishes her privacy. He’s a perpetual pessimist, always managing expectations and planning for the worst; she’s an eternal optimist who’s always smiling.

Though both of their families initially balked at a desire to be with someone so “opposite”, eventually, all the in-laws came around.

After a few years together, Saqib and Susan wanted to become parents. Surely they might have thought that after the considerable struggle they survived just to get married, this next phase of their lives would be less fraught with turmoil. One would have hoped.

“It’s a girl!” the technician announced, to a round of cheers. Susan squeezed Saqib’s hand. The couple had already settled on a girl’s name: Leila. Her middle name would be Daine, a tribute to Susan’s mother, Diane, who had died suddenly a year earlier, two weeks after learning she had a brain tumor.

Leila Daine Ali. It was a name that Saqib knew he’d never tire of saying — introducing her to the world, chastising her for trying to poke her pudgy toddler fingers into wall sockets, exclaiming over her good grades in school. It was a name he knew he would scrawl countless times on the “memo” line of his checkbook. “For clown at Leila’s party.” “For Leila’s tuition.” “For Leila’s wedding dress.”

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I become so disturbed when marriage ads in Indian papers specify skin color (not that I often look through marriage ads :). Several dating sites do it to. If I catch one of my parents make a comment about fair skin being desirable in a mate I chastise them vociferously. There are very few things that make my blood boil as much as this issue. All the more so because I know that despite my best intentions, society has shaped my thoughts in the same way. Asians in Media reports on the obvious bias on Asian fashion magazine covers.

It’s an open secret that the majority of Asian parents have a bias towards fairer skin. Is the same true for Asian fashion magazines in Britain?

Aside from the horror stories of girls applying dangerous chemicals to their skins, the image of a beautiful Asian girl as fair with coloured contact lenses and dark brown hair is constantly thrown at us. Surely Asian fashion publications are partly to blame for this?

AiM asked two writers who have been in the industry for years, and both say the problem lies with wider culture and society, coupled with a lack of professional Asian models.

Nilpa Bharadia is former acting editor of Asian Woman/Bride magazine and recently launched the Asian Bridal Look Book with her business partner Kiren. She says the decision to use European and Brazillian models for fashion shoots is never made lightly.

“The simple fact of the matter is that if we had a choice of an agency standard Asian model, i.e 5’10” plus, and a size 8 and with beautiful features, and a white model – we would cast the Asian girl everytime,” shes says.

“It’s not that the Asian girls that used to come through the door weren’t beautiful, many were, and we made numerous exceptions on height etc. where possible. But unfortunately they were the exception to the rule.”

I’m not buying this last argument. If you stand in any supermarket line you will note that fair skin dominates regardless of the ethnicity being targeted. Do all those ethnicities lack enough model material? The editors being interviewed pointed out one Brit magazine (i-D) they claim uses “extremely black-skinned” models WHEN they hire black. I flipped through several of their mag covers and didn’t see any black models at all. Later in the article the writer presses the editors and gets to the more “logical” reasons for this bias. Continue reading →

MD writes in with this article in the Weekly Standard about recent developments in US-India policy –

WITH THE NEWS from Iraq relegated to the back pages recently, last Friday’s State Department briefing–especially since it was not devoted to Condoleezza Rice’s latest fashion statements–attracted little attention. The subject: the evolving strategic partnership between the United States and India. The news? It is the “goal” of the Bush administration “to help India become a major world power in the 21st century.” …A U.S.-India strategic partnership, if fully developed, would be the single most important step toward an alliance capable of meeting the 21st century’s principal challenges: radical Islam and rising China. Unlike our almost erstwhile allies in western Europe, India shares an equal strategic concern with both these challenges. Perhaps even more important, India shares a commitment to democracy that transcends ethnic nationalism–Hindu nationalism, in this case, will not suffice to govern a state that includes 120 million Muslims–and an understanding of the necessity for armed strength. India’s position in South Asia puts it in an essential geostrategic location from both a continental and maritime perspective. In sum, the United States could hardly dream up a more ideal strategic partner.

The article dismisses the sale of F-16s to Pakistan as a symbolic gesture relative to the far larger balance of power issues (truth be told, I hold the minority opinion on the Sepia Mutiny editorial staff – I actually tend to agree with folks like Blank/Weapon Nerd about their lack of real import). Continue reading →

Naeem Mohaiemen, one of the organizers behind Disappeared in America, wrote an interesting essay last summer about how some British Asians are flipping around the ethnic slur ‘Paki’:

About a decade back, Bangladeshi and Pakistani teenagers in England began re-appropriating the dreaded “Paki” word. Once a vicious epithet flung on London streets by white skinheads, the word was now a symbol of an assertive brown community. “Paki Power” graffiti appeared, a clothing label called “Pak1” did the rounds… and Aki Nawaz of punk-asian band Fun^Da^Men^Tal told the press, “We’re not Pacifists, we’re Pakifists!”

“Taking back” racist epithets has long been a cultural touchstone, and a touchy one at that. I took to greeting my British Asian friends with “Paki”, but only when we were alone, never in front of white Brits. One day, I called my friend Usman and his father answered the phone. Mistaking his voice for his son, I launched into “Oii Paki, it’s Naeem!” The long, pained silence on the other end spoke volumes about how the older generation viewed this act of re-appropriation. He was horrified and disappointed in our lack of “historical context…”

Besides the use of “Paki” by British South Asian youth, Australian immigrants have started a gleeful website called “WogLife” and for the Jewish community there’s the in-your-face magazine “Heeb.”

Earlier, Abhi posted about the N word. Mohaiemen riffed:

… Chris Rock explains the ongoing fascination: “This word, it’s . . . the only thing white people can’t do. That’s the only reason . . . anybody writes about it. It’s like white people can’t believe there’s a thing that exists (that) they can’t do…”

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