Can the media not do more to deal with racism surrounding One Direction and generic racism against South Indians?
I've been trying to make a list of celebs who are racially South Indian, but I genuinely can't find any in Hollywood or India (the South Indians in India tend to dislike their own skin colour). I also noticed that a lot of people who identified as "South Indian" were in fact mixed ethnicity (think about how Obama is black) and hence naturally had light skin and often had different face shapes (face shapes are a lottery). I would presume that mixed ethnicity people were also less likely to understand either of the cultures they came from.
Concurrently, there's a lot of racism running around my age group (late teens and early twenties) against South Indians and I'm not really seeing any concerted effort to fight it, especially with the valour that people have been fighting Islamophobia with.
The points I am trying to make are:
There's a lot of racism [being] spurred up by One Direction that western media has almost universally overlooked, and nearly every instance I come across of media discussing the racism is passive aggressive.
- Malik has a Middle Eastern face shape and he's culturally more closer to Persians than they are to South Indians - so I don't think it's right that he's considered to be South Asian. The racial status of Pakistanis is already dubious.
- I can't find any media outlet discussing common tropes from the South Indian community. North Indian and Middle Eastern men aren't considered sexually desirable by most South Indians in the West. I've personally never even heard about colourism until I was 17/18 (yes we're that sheltered here) and I couldn't give two ****s about someone having white skin. I don't mind skin whitening products in that they are fun to use (even if they never work), but we shouldn't feel pressured into whitening my skin.
- Islamophobia is very common outside the United States. Current opinion polls, from Canada/NZ/Europe/Australia/UK suggest that Islamophobia hovers around 50% among the 'liberal' youth demographics, and this is going to be higher for the South Asian diaspora and older age groups. There is a lot of rivalry between Paksitanis and South Asians in the West, and Pakistanis tend to be far more racist towards South Indians than most Hindu North Indians. I don't think it's right to support just one side in this argument - US media should be supporting both sides.
The second point is that Hollywood basically owns the Indian movie industries, but it's mostly been using that platform to fight Islamophobia in favour of left-wing politics (before you as I am gay), whilst effectively encouraging racism/colourism against South Indians. I would prefer that the cinema industry didn't get too involved in the religious politics of India, and also I would like for it to do more to hire racially (brown skinned) South Indian actors/actresses in the media outlets of the South Indian states. There genuinely needs to be far more celebs and activists who are racially South Indian and naturally brown skinned.
I'll add that I consider North Indians and South Indians to be sort of two sub-races, almost like North-East Asian and South-East Asian. I do not consider people from the north-western and north-eastern extremities of South Asia (Pakistan and Burma) to be racially Indian.
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