Right after 9/11 "The Onion" took on the task of finding humor in those terrible events, and they did a great job. I remember though that one headline they had on the page jumped out at me: "Tavis Smiley Announces 'There's a New Nigger In Town'". I'm immediately conditioned to not type that word, much less say it out loud, which is why I guess it was so funny. Part of humor is the shocking of the audience with the unexpected.
But as the saying goes "Many a truth is spoken in jest". Given the recent spat of slurs against South Asians, and people freaking out about South Asians on planes, it would seem that the Onion's joke was just another example of truth in jest. What slurs? Well, Hillary Clinton's joke about Mahatma Ghandi owning a gas station in St. Louis, or Joseph Biden's joke about needing an Indian accent to walk into a Dunkin Donuts or 7/11, George Allen's calling a staffer from his opponent's campaign a macaca (monkey) because the staffer's of South Indian descent, or now Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana stating that terrorists "drive taxis by day and kill at night".
I'm certainly not claiming that Indians in this country face the kind of endemic racism that blacks did during the Jim Crow era, but then, I'm not going to claim any amount of information about how much racism they're subjected to, since I'm whitey the blue-eyed devil son of Yacub.
But when I say there's a new nigger ( I feel creepy writing it ) in town, I mean how socially acceptable it's becoming to discriminate against South Asians, so much so that politicans who would never dream of standing up and saying "Barack Obama, didn't he run a soul food stand in Georgia?" or "Who is this fellow over here from my opponent's campaign...what's his name? Kunta Kinte? Welcome to America boy!" will routinely put their foot in their mouths about South Asians. Imagine the shitstorm that would blow up if Dennis Hastert went out and pulled at the corners of his eyes and said "You have to look like this to get around San Francisco these days".
But it isn't just the politicians who voice these sentimanets. Lots of people I know will say "All Indians are terroriststs" or "This software project's screwed up because it was done by a bunch of those Indians". Witness my friend Scott Manning who wants to fault Raed Jarrar as the guilty party because he wanted to wear a shirt with Arabic script on it onto a plane. Per Scott's reasoning, his act of merely wearing the shirt puts him in the wrong.
Even before 9/11 it was common for my friends to make fun of the Sikh guys who ran the 7/11 down the street from our house, but since 9/11, it seems like it's become culturally acceptable, almost...expected...
"The Onion" ended up being more right than they probably expected. Which is a shame. No group deserves to be mocked, derided, or singled out as has happened, be them South Asian, Chinese, Latino, etc.
