Recently Jeff Yang of the San Francisco Chronicle sent me an article he had just published in that newspaper. He wrote:
I wanted to share with you guys the most recent installment of “Asian Pop”—which some of you may be aware now appears in both the online and the reconstituted wood pulp edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. The response to it has been quite interesting and, er, high-volume, from black, white and Asian American readers alike. Anyway, if you’re getting this then you’re someone whose opinion I value and whom I think might be interested in the issues involved here, and I’m curious about your thoughts.
Here are some excerpts from Jeff’s article:
“White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, he displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas…”With these words in the New Yorker in 1998, Toni Morrison granted our 42nd president, William Jefferson Clinton, a kind of cadet membership in the grand cultural narrative of black America…
…reading Obama’s absorbing 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” it strikes me that the tropes that surround and define Obama can just as easily be read as those of another community entirely. Which raises the question: Could it be that our true first black president might also be our first Asian American president? [Link]
I will reserve my opinion of what I think of Jeff’s partially rhetorical question. Instead, I’d like to take you now to a fundraiser that happened Sunday in San Francisco (also reported in the SFChronicle):
The Illinois senator said it is “a testament to the American spirit that I’m even standing here before you” as the Democratic Party’s presumed nominee, because some Americans are “still getting past the name,” which he said some consider “funny.”
“Change is always tough, and electing me is change … and it means that people are going to hesitate a little bit,” Obama told a crowd of about 200 deep-pocketed supporters at a VIP reception for South Asian and Pacific Islander supporters at the Fairmont Hotel.
“Barack Obama - they’re still getting past that name,” he said. “…Obama told the group - many of them Indian and Pakistani immigrants - that he is not only familiar with their cultures - but also proud of his lifelong associations with them. [Link]
And now for the money shot:
“Not only do I think I’m a desi, but I’m a desi,” he said, using a colloquial term that describes South Asian immigrants. The remark was greeted with laughs. “I’m a homeboy…” [Link]
Oh but there was more (in front of an audience that included Kamala Harris):
He said that when he went to Occidental College, his first roommate was Pakistani. And in his dorm, he said with a laugh, “Indians and Pakistanis came together under one roof … to cause havoc in the university.”
To applause, he said he became an expert “at cooking dal” and other ethnic dishes, though “somebody else made the naan,” the trademark Indian bread.
“Those are friendships which have lasted me for years, and continue until this day,” he said. “I have an enormous personal affection for the people of South Asia…” [Link]
I’m actually kind of disappointed now that Senator Jim Webb of Virginia has reportedly taken himself out of the running for Obama’s VP spot. With Obama making sambar and Webb making Dosa in the Whitehouse, that ticket had lots of potential! But isn’t it just like a desi man to have “somebody else [make] the naan?”
Word has it that SAFM is trying to get John McCain on the record as being a fan of Pav Bhaji which is less elitist than dal and naan.
Related posts: Is Barack Obama a secret…Hindu?
