I don’t know if you guys have read Joel Stein’s recent
satirist piece on his hometown, Edison, New Jersey, and the burgeoning Indian population there. The article has been put into the public spotlight, at least in the Indian-American community, and journalists, such as CNN’s Rahul Parikh, have
vilified Stein for the piece, calling it racist and insulting. This response has forced Stein to add a note to the end of his article claiming that he meant the article as a piece of humor and that he wanted to raise the issue of immigration.
If the article reveals one thing, it is that we are still hypersensitive on issues of race. We see comedians talking about
their race and lambasting stereotypes about
their people and
their culture, and everyone laughs. As soon as someone else makes comments about their race and their culture, it’s not funny. People become defensive.
My dad watches Russell Peters, a comic, whose material relies heavily on exploiting Indian stereotypes. He loves it. However, as soon as someone else makes a joke about him or Indian people, he gets defensive. Heck, even I have made a joke about him or Indian people, and he has lectured me about it. This to me is symptomatic of how people of different races and cultures feel in general. People assume that jokes that involve
their race are meant to be insulting.
Then, how is it okay to laugh at comics who are making jokes about their race and their experiences with race? To use my dad again, he often watches Chris Rock specials. He laughs hysterically. To me, his stance on this issue is hypocritical. How is it okay to laugh at someone else, if someone can’t laugh at you? This, to me, is the main issue in this article.
Joel Stein is not only someone who is making light of the presence of a large Indian population in India, he is also not Indian. As a result, many of his observations are being taken as having racially charged motivation. He may have meant to raise an issue such as immigration, but he did not express this sentiment in the right way. I am aware that he was trying to infuse humor into the piece, but it lacked the tact to raise an issue.
Personally, I saw the humor in his article. I found it funny. However, I did not see how it would raise questions about immigration on its own. Perhaps, if he had added his note before the critical response or better written his piece, the article could have led conversations in that direction, but given that he has already received a hostile response, it will head towards issues of race.
In all likelihood, not much will be made of this article. It will not become an issue pushed more than it already has been. Perhaps, it should be though. Perhaps, we should push the issue of race back in the national spotlight. Perhaps, something like this would help shape people’s perceptions about race. In the last couple weeks, the issue of race has been put into the public spotlight. We’ve seen it rear its head in the Lebron James free agency, the Tea Party movement, and now this article.
The issue of race was not solved in the Civil Rights movement. We do not live in a cosmopolitan society. Racism is still prevalent, and many policies, ideologies, and actions are shaped heavily by racist thought and perception. It doesn’t help that we live in a society that is hell-bent on being politically correct. By masking our real feelings on issues such as race, we are keeping them in our subconscious rather than in the open. Only by discussing these sentiments can we move towards a peaceful society.
