April 20, 2007
Be bold if you want to succeedHumor
You may have heard that recently a desi furniture retailer in Toronto got into a bit of hot water for selling a sofa with the tag shown below to a black family (Candians of Ghanaian origin). As paragons of racial sensitivity and spin, we thought Sepia Mutiny should offer some public relations advice to our Canadian brethren. 
1. Respond to the customer’s complaints right away
The day after the discovery was made, Moore says that she called Vanaik Furniture and Mattress store, where the purchase was made, to address the issue. But her phone call was unreturned. At least three other calls were made to the store. Those were unreturned as well. [Link]
Don’t make the customer chase you, it looks bad. And don’t leave the sofa with a customer who is offended by it. Instead, offer to take the sofa back right away. Remember, this is one of your best selling pieces of furniture and you can charge a notoriety premium if you auction it on eBay. Put the tag proudly on display and sell it to the highest bidder. The only color that matters is green.
2. The best defense is a good offense
Your response thus far has been to pass the buck, which is OK for a start. So Romesh Vanaik, owner of Vanaik Furniture, blamed his supplier, Paul Kumar of Cosmos Furniture, who blamed the Chinese manufacturer, who blamed the company that made the auto-translation software, which blamed the out of date dictionary it was using [Link].
You really should go a lot further, though, and seize the initiative. Mount a press conference, stating that you are gravely offended that the Chinese have wrongly appropriated this term when they should have used “Macaca Brown” or “In need of Fair-and-Lovely Brown” instead. Use this press conference as an opportunity to announce your new dining sets, offered in Chinky Yellow, Redneck Pink and Lazy Injun Red.
3. Never plead ignorance, it makes you look weak.
Romesh Vanaik, owner of Vanaik Furniture … added that he had not known the meaning of the N-word. “It’s amazing. I’ve been here since 1972 and I never knew the meaning of this word,” said Vanaik, a native of India. [Link]
Big mistake. Ignorance is no excuse and who will ever believe you’ve been in Canada for 30 years without knowing what that word means? Instead, advertise your racial behavior proudly. Tell them that it doesn’t matter when a macaca does it, since we’re not white we can’t be racist! Furthermore, point out that this is proud part of Indian culture. Then announce a “West Indian week” where all the workers show up in blackface, just like in this Indian TV show [via UB]:
Remember, using racial terms will never backfire amongst your desi clients, and there are enough of those in Toronto to keep your business rich as a Gujju.
[UPDATE] In case my intent is unclear, this post is meant as satire. The post is meant to mock the store owner who avoided his customer’s phone calls, doesn’t seem to have offered to take the offending sofa back, is passing blame rather than taking responsibility, and is now claiming that he has never heard the “N-word” in 35 years.
ennis on April 20, 2007 03:55 PM in Humor · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post
Wow.
Ennis, you Foucault and Derrida reading liberals will never understand the law of averages. Glorious Indian cultural representations of the West Indies requires blackface to compensate for the pigmentless women of loose morals whose legs are bared to show the decadence of the West, even in a cricketing show. Besides, the subtle jokes that the person makes are an indication of the level of Indian intellectual achievement. That weight of achievement is present even in the sofa if you notice: 75.4 - 67 = 8.4 kilograms of Indian intelligence comes with the table. Your Baudrillard would merely call it simulacra, but your children would grow smarter if they just sat on that sofa and watched enlightening television.
Unbelievable - The actions of the store owner are dispicable and disgusting.
Do update us on his fate.
Terribly off-topic: Abhi how are you??
Please someone write in and let us know.
WTF is wrong with this f*cking country.
Yup, I read the news too. Mr. Spaceman?
This isn't funny.
I dont know if it is 4/20 talking or if I really am seeing what I am seeing?
What are you seeing and how much have you been toking?
I happen to think this is no big deal. Has Shaquille O'Neal been fired yet? Has Al Sharpton been banned from NBC and CBS for using racial slurs describing asians (look it up)?
But very clever post, Ennis!
Good post, but I thought this bit was in poor taste.
Abhi's fine folks. He is on neither side of a bullet.
What a lame ass excuse, "he had not known the meaning of the N-word." Let's get real. Maybe this guy was enjoying 420 a bit early to the point where his brain was no longer functioning.** Or maybe he's just an idiot.
**No offense to any pot smokers. No intention of putting pot smokers in the same category as this store-owner-fool.
Thanks.
The incident is over - sadly there are two dead, the shooter (self-inflicted) and one of the two hostages.
It's like a Chappelle's Show skit gone horribly wrong, but the blatancy of the tag is just a bit funny. The man shows no shame whatsoever. Omgwtf noob.
As for that video...it just strengthens my distaste for cricket. =]
This is quite sad. I don't believe this guy did not know the meaning of the N-word. Didn't some British call Indians the N-word during colonial days in India?
Is this 'Yo Maan' show actually popular in India? My God! Thank God such trash would not be tolerated on national TV in the U.S.
How could he not know the meaning of the n word. So many desi kids in Canada who think they black use the n world all the time, when talking to each other.
lol.. i'm from toronto and everyone has been laughing at this news since day 1. Black and desis alike, especially the fact the family never returned the sofa and they sat on the bloody thing and gave the entire interview to the news station. I guarntee you some dude working in the punjabi furniture factory over here put that sh!t on purpose LOL. The "N-word" is thrown around like the word "the" by the punjabi youths here. I'm hundred percent sure someone did this as a joke but didn't know how far it would go.
The chinese translation software people have taken the blame in the end. They claim they were using an out dated dictionary for their software.
Thanks for the updates:)
Kalli billi ( # 17) ,
No,the british preferred to call us Indians "coolies" ,"blackies" ,"natives" or "Gunga Din"
The fact that we have faced racism and still choose to turn around and inflict discriminatory, hostility, offensive bheavior or overt racism on other minorty communities as in the incident described above or even majority communities like here never ceases to amaze me
Actually, the British did call Indians niggers when they were in India. I first encountered this when reading EM Forsters A Passage to India and some of the characters in the British clubs use the word.
Thanks for the concern folks! Luckily, slacker that I am, I took the afternoon off and left before the lockdown.
Nice to hear from you. Yo Dad's phone is going to be ringing off the hook tonight.
Thanks for the concern folks! Luckily, slacker that I am, I took the afternoon off and left before the lockdown
I wasn't worried...I knew all the right instincts would kick in.
I wasn't aware of blackface existing in India. I've seen it in other parts of Asia and Europe. It's as if some people are in some sort of insane selective time warp when it comes to the cultures of others.
Damn, Abhi, you shoulda swung by and hung out in true Kumar &...well, Kumar style. It was a good 4.20 by my self, but nothing like havin' a puff while avoiding a hostage situation.
That's good times, fo' shizzle.
Indians were also called aborigines by the brits for a while. The N-word or the sand-N word is still used against desis when hostility overrules political correctness.
Indians painting faces black to show contempt is a pathetic example of the enslavement of the Indian mind. Just imagine folks, hindus (often hindu fundamentalists) insulting someone, usually each other, by painting his face the color of the most beloved hindu god, Krishna!
Some investigative reporter should try to find if sofas sent to non-desi run furniture stores also had "nigger-brown" written on them.
well, indians are very stupid when it comes to complexion. no doubt about that. it is however, very wrong to conclude that (i) painting the face was to show contempt in the show or (ii) there is some sort of the "blackface" phenomenon in the racist sense you mention in europe (don't know abt asia).
Remember this Dave two wrongs don't make a right and Shaq apologized for that. So that family was not suppose to complain because somebody else said something ignorant,come on man gt off it.
what i mean of course is
ii) there is the "blackface" phenomenon in india with racist undertones as you mention in europe (don't know abt asia).
I was with an American friend in India over spring break and flipping between MTV India and Zoom we'd run into that little clip. It was bizarre.
So bytewords, what do you think is the reason the Shiv Sena goons go around painting black the faces of those they despise? Such as westernized indians celebrating "white" western Valentine's Day. There is something very rotten and very stupid in the minds of such folks.
By the way, another word for desis used by the brits in India was "wog". The word is supposed to have originated in India among british colonials as a reference to the black Golliwog doll, designed as an offensive caricature of africans, that was popular in England at that time.
I wish that guy would come here wearing black face, I would have something for his ass.
No. Wog stand for Westernised Oriental Gentleman. The word 'wog' came before Noddy, and the Golliwogs. As a matter of fact, the wog in Golliwog comes means Westernised Oriental Gentleman.
@prema,
ok, first, i wasn't one of the shiv sena guys---you should be asking them why they did so.
but more importantly, shiv sena is quite a lot but i doubt they have thought of racism as one of their planks. why on earth would they care about hitting at africans/blacks when they have muslims? and before you bring up caste as a form of racism---it is a nice story, but it is also a gross oversimplification. casteism is not the same beast as racism in the west, it is quite a different evil. but anyways, today shivsena even professes to be caste-blind, it suits them for now. and you think they have *any* f&^%ing ideology? not the right approach if you need to understand them. and this was to preempt a very obvious direction this would have gone on.
my guess would be that they aren't aware of all the subtle ways to be racist that you know of. really, many of you are too eurocentric---get this: (i) a huge majority in india haven't heard of kkk (ii) a huger majority wouldn't even be aware of what all blackface means to you (iii) you seem to know how the british had racist undertones for this, but the shiv sena idiots are just copycats for all you know.
like they say, don't attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity.
and remember the hitler restaurant? do you think indians are antisemetic as well? i doubt if most even know what antisemetic, or even what jewish means in the first place. again the hitler example was stupidity not malice. and before you get started on "oh they *should* have known that", how many of you know about nanking? how many of non-indians, non-abds know about partition?
imo if you want to understand what is going on here, i don't think answers are often very simple. and please not the video, i would think hardly anyone in india even sees it as blackface or whatever. west indians are cool the last i checked. and do you know the fan following lots of windies stars have in india?
and please don't start asking me about shiv sena---20 years back they would have wanted me out of bombay, today it is someone else. the point about shiv sena is this: while you want to neatly compartmentalize this as the racism you know, it is not so, it is a different kind of bigotry. i am *not* comparing different forms of bigotry. i was sidetracked into this discussion.
going back to my point before i was dragged into this topic---no i seriously doubt the video was meant to make a racist statement. a more pertinent question is this: should they have thought of what it might have meant? from your pov, should american media research the different ways they can trip up, even when no one in the US would recognize any accidental bigotry?
Isn't that obvious? The british, who are probably the whitest of all people barring albinos, painted black the faces of their traitors etc to highlight how they saw them as the enemy. What reason do hindu fundamentalists have to do the same other than blind imitation of their erstwhile masters?
Its obviously stupid and malicious. Do you really think the goons are painting black the faces of those they disapprove of out of love???
and again: while the posted video is with high probability *not* an expression of racism, it does not mean there is no racism. ask any african american who visits india---there you will see real racism among his experiences. but the guy in the video, or the one who produced the show---they may be the ones who are not so. put blame where it belongs.
my point is, it doesn't imply they are racist in the way you see it. it does not have the meaning that would be there if someone from kkk did so. far be it from me trying to actually say something on behalf of these idiots. like i said, blame real racists actions (which most of these goons probably will do). there will be no dearth of them. but don't extrapolate a different history and different semantics to india and shout racism.
i don't mean the goons will speak against racism. i mean the goons will be racist as well.
i need to sleep.
To get a taste of Indian racism, just factor that every yellow skinned person from the north-east is referred to as 'Nepali' and 'Chinese' in the most derogatory way, though I can wager the Nepalese are a prouder and an unconquered people, unlike you desis. And the Chinese, let them get air of what you think of them
Oh man! Prema,
Your opinion of what it means for the guy to do 'blackface', and your co-relation of it to shiv sena painting people's faces black on valentines is so COMPLETELY off.
That caricature does not have racial under or overtones. Its like an SNL skit where people dressup/makeup to look like other people. And the thing with Shiv sena doing black? I don't know if you've grown up in India and familiar with hindi idiom 'Muh kala karna' (to shame someone, to be involved in a shameful act etc.) This has nothing to do with racial whatever - it's the shiv sena publicly shaming the person for doing whatever on valentines they think is inappropriate in Indian culture.
Please do not look at stuff created for consumption outside your cultural context without considering the context it was created for - you are bound to draw inaccurate conclusions. Its like saying people lack civility or respect when they ask strangers whether they are married in an Indian train, or that even a merry-maid cleaning a house in USA is rich because she drives a car.
I wonder if the skit would have drawn criticism as harsh had the guy been trying to look like a white person.
Of course the people selling couches with that terminology are being callous and probably lying for claiming to be ignorant of the term.
In case I still haven't convinced you of the 'racelessness' of shiv sena's face blackening, let me add further that the more 'appropriate' way of vigilante justice on the street is to paint the face black, donn him/her a garland of shoes, and parade him/her around the community sitting on a donkey facing backwards. The shortened humiliation ritual is indicative of the same pressures of time and space on these SS perps that make a leisurely 5-day wedding in the heartland into a barely-one-day affair in urban areas.
Disgusting as the image may be, I would be hard pressed to attribute all this to some colonial hangover or to consider it evidence of Indian racism. It exists for sure, yet this is not it.
whoa. just...whoa. i'm an african american woman, and i'd missed this story (of course our press is so bad they'd never get to it). the comments here are enlightening.
Tangentially, I think the narrative "whites have the power, and blacks are the most oppressed" is crafted in part to subordinate brown people. So I think it's good for desis and others to innovate counter-narratives that give strength and positive visibility to non-white, non-black communities. And I think Sepia Mutiny (and many of the anonymous comments section posters) is a leading innovator of that good stuff. :)
On that same power/oppressed dynamic-check out this out. Two free market economist Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati [Columbia] -and Princeton's Alan Blinder speak about Globalization &the American body politic- and the possibility of a protectionist backlash that could be on the horizon.
It will be interesting to see how the power dialectic vis a vis counter-narratives that give strength and positive visibility to non-white, non-black communities evolve.
Both posts are from me. As a morning person, I'm probably mentally a little fresher at 10am than 6pm. So this post may read as being intermediately savvy. ;)
UNpatronized dilettante, I'll try to check out the link you recommend. BTW, I'm very against non-registered comment names on blogs, because of the possibility it allows for poster fraud. This has been a problem I've seen in comment sections of other blogs, including fraud using people's IRL names.
While it is absolutely ridiculous to claim that "I dont know what that word means", I think that the merchant in Canada may not have meant to offend. Just because it is stupid in terms of business.
I could not say that for that offensive TV program. This type of racial stereotypes are in-excusible. Besides as opposed to the Merchant in Canada, the TV producers are people with considerable power and are putting out material for public consumption.
The TV bit was disgusting. Shame on them. People in India watch cricket and play cricket as opposed to say "kabaddi" or "Kushti" because Cricket is associated with the British. The terms of Cricket are in English and they have to be "explained" (with a racial caricature sometimes), WTF?
I saw this on the news a few days ago and shook my head. I wanted to smack the owner of the furniture store before I even got to the Chinese supplier.
However this is a general question for anyone that might know. When I was in India recently someone casually used the N word to inquire about the general population of the area I live in NY. There wasn't even a hint or racism and this person is educated however it was said so matter of fact I couldn't help but think that he really thought it was a normal word and had no clue about the oppression behind it. I didn't even know how to respond because I was the only one that was offended.
I've in the past heard this word randomly used in a very matter of fact way in the fat east and while I'm flabbergasted I really didn't know how to address it with someone that most probably would never encounter someone African American or turn it into a huge sidebar discussion especially with older relatives (that's who asked me about that in India) Any thoughts?
JOAT.. I totally hear you, have had the same experience myself when I heard my convent-educated, metro-living, mom-in-law (who was visiting me from India) sing the nursery rhyme "Eeny Meeny Mynie Moe" except with the "n" word in place of the "Tiger"...I was appalled and asked her to never say that word and explained that it was a very offensive term..she had no idea!! of course, my kid picked it up and it took numerous time outs and loooots of cajoling to get him to drop the word..yikes!!
RC,
Please see Bytewords and my comments on it.
And btw, cricket is NOT popular because its associated with the british. Field hockey used to rule the day 40 yrs ago, much like cricket does in the side-streets and playgrounds of India today. India's won 8 Olympic golds in Field hockey, six in a row from 1928-56. I'm not clear on the reasons for cricket's ascension and hockey's decline, but if they had to do with british association, cricket would have been popular since ever. Kabaddi or kushti indeed have always been considered too vernacular to be cool, probably due to colonial influence.
There is no doubt that cricket era in India came full-on when India won the world cup in '83. The significance of winning the game of India's former masters in their face, on a ground that's described as the mecca of cricket, was not lost on a country still trying to define its identity. However, it would be inaccurate to ascribe cricket's popularity in India due to desi attempts to ape the gora sahib. The win of 83 made more cricket converts because of its symbolism and the game's innate excitement (yes, I know - there's the one-day, and then there's the five day), not because by playing it desi's felt more angrez.
You must really think that the producers of that video, and the Shiv Sena goons who paint faces black, are such stupid, ignorant buffoons that they are aping westerners without even realizing the offensive racist nature of what they are aping. I dont buy that at all. No one is that stupid.
That urdu "idiom" is also racist. It originated with the central asian muslim conquerors and rulers of India who, like the brits after them, saw indians as black/dark and contemptible. But the practice of painting faces black is of british not mughal origin. It is certainly not an indigenous hindu practice, for the hindu Puranas paint their epic heroes and heroines as black/dark.
Why on earth would a brown-skinned desi use the words "nigger-brown" as an insult? Why is everyone assuming that the desi store owners are the guilty party here? They could be guilty of letting their greed overrule their pride perhaps, but the racism is coming from the people who sent these sofas to that store with those offensive words on them. And that racism was directed towards desis. What it emphasizes is that to yellows and whites, desi browns are also "niggers"
Prema,
Amazing! You're claiming that the producers of that video MUST realize they are producing offensive racist content, and that everyone in world is automatically equally sensitive to a certain standard regarding racism!! From your comments it appears to me that you haven't grown up in India, and don't really understand day-to-day behavior of common Indian persons in India. As such you are examining desi artifacts from a 'foreign' POV, and applying an outsider's standards of racism/colonialism/oppression etc. to a context not native to you.
It is not an Urdu idiom, and it IS an idiom, no need to place it in quotes. I have never read anything about the British painting desi faces anything, so if you can back up your claim with some respectable research, I'm really interested in learning more about it. Otherwise allow me to say that this 'everything is racism' theory of yours is hogwash.
Even supposing per your argument the origin of the practice is racist, I doubt you can call it racist behavior on part of someone who practices it without realizing its racist origins. Maybe you do, I won't.
The store-owner is making money off it; he is responsible. And so I don't get it - you are contradicting yourself. In one instance you argue that Shiv Sena's actions MUST be racist because that action has racist roots (and you won't give them benefit of the doubt about perhaps being ignorant), while the store-owners actions are not racist even when the term clearly has racist roots (and you readily give them benefit of the doubt about perhaps being ignorant). Why wouldn't you apply the same standard to both situations?
At any rate, I think I've nothing more to add to this racist-or-not back & forth. I would be interested in being pointed to some literature to reduce my ignorance regarding racist origins of face-painting though!
I rest my case.
How would that be "significant"?? US was a British colony too, they never felt the need to win "their master's game". Trying to "prove" to the British is still in Indian pysche, which is known as slave mentality in other words.
And dor all you people talking about what Indians were called under te British, Narain Karthikeyan was called the first black driver in Formula 1. I have a post about it on UD. This happened last week.
and sorry about the spelling mistakes. These are from my cellphone.