RACE AND CLASS IN A MODEL MINORITY MEMOIR Alice Sandosharaj, Doctor of Phil

354 Pages·2008·1.26 MB·English

ABSTRACT

TITLE OF DISSERTATION: GHETTO PROCLIVITIES: RACE
AND CLASS IN A MODEL
MINORITY MEMOIR

Alice Sandosharaj, Doctor of Philosophy
2008

DISSERTATION DIRECTED BY: Dr. John Caughey
Department of American Studies

This dissertation explores the relationship between Model Minorities and
Black Americans through the lens of memoir. Drawing on approaches in self-
ethnography and cultural biography, the memoir details my experience growing up
South Asian in Langley Park, a poor “inner ring” suburb of Washington, DC that had,
at the time (1978-1995), a majority Black population. The memoir is supplemented
by an introduction, three interlude essays and a conclusion that consider the social
and cultural contexts in which my experience of shifting identifications took place.
Blackness, both as a construct to define what is American, as well as a
barometer for exclusion from America, is examined alongside the Model Minority
Myth in terms of how each, in competing and often unequal measure, can affect
South Asian identity construction in ways that can complicate conventional ethnic
and class identity. The discourse of the myth, with its reliance on an “invisible”
structurally based lineage, bequeaths entitlements to Asians akin to white privilege.
This “presumptive capital” can manifest in real world byproducts even in the absence
of economic privilege, even when said model minority shares class kinship,
geography and aesthetic with historically disadvantaged Black Americans from low-
income circumstances. This relationship—contested, mercurial and contingent—
reveals the necessity of surveying the racialized American landscape with a
panoramic lens that acknowledges the interrelated, dependent spaces upon which we
all draw and to which we all contribute. This dissertation assesses some of the
complex, multiple ways in which a single life within a specific community can be
influenced by Black American, White American and Asian American racial and
cultural constructions.
Ghetto Proclivities: Race and Class Identity in a Model Minority Memoir

By

Alice Sandosharaj

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2008

Advisory Committee:

Professor Dr. John Caughey, Chair
Professor Dr. Jeffrey McCune
Professor Dr. Sheri Parks
Professor Dr. Mary Sies
Professor David Wyatt
Acknowledgments

I would like to express my deepest thanks to my entire committee, most especially
John Caughey for all his patient guidance. I would also like to thank my “honorary”
committee members, Lee Martin and Michelle Herman, whose thoughtful advice and
occasional handholding have been so crucial.

Finally, I would like to thank my brother, Alfred Sandosharaj, the man responsible for
every success I can claim and anything positive ever attributed to me. “Only the
mistakes have been mine.”
Table of Contents

Introduction……..……………………………………………………………………………..1
Prologue…...………………………………………………………………………………….30
Chapter One…………………………………………………………………………………..32
Chapter Two…...……………………………………………………………………………..56
Chapter Three…...……………………………………………………………………………76
Chapter Four…...……………………………………………………………………………..93
Interlude One: On Inner-ring Suburbs, Langley Park, and Ghetto as an Ideological
Construct……………………………………………………………………………………107
Chapter Five...………………………………………………………………………………136
Chapter Six...………………………………………………………………………………..152
Chapter Seven...……………………………………………………………………………..169
Chapter Eight..………………………………………………………………………………181
Interlude Two: On Dolls and Identification with Blackness
As a Classed Identity..………………………………………………………………………197
Chapter Nine………..……………………………………………………………………….222
Chapter Ten………….……………………………………………………………………...248
Chapter Eleven……….……………………………………………………………………..275
Interlude Three: On Malcolm, Hip Hop, Black as ‘Cool,’
And the Model Minority Myth as ‘Presumptive Capital’…….…………………………….396
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..322
References…………………………………………………………………………………..331

ii
Introduction

In 1988, Reebok Shoes—stuck in a sales stalemate with Nike over specialized
sneakers—launched an unconventional and what would be ultimately a quickly
abandoned ad campaign. The “Let U.B.U.” commercials featured absurdist scenes
like a ballerina vacuuming an oriental rug on a lawn and elderly couples gleefully
promenading in bizarre red costumes, paired with a voiceover pitching disjointed
axioms about the merits of individualism. Although widely dismissed as an expensive
dud—pricey Chiat/Day was responsible for the failure—I found the commercials
magical.
At the time I was a sixth grader with bulky glasses. I memorized the
panegyric, studiously scribbling down what I could decipher each time I saw the
ads—like most American children of that era I spent days in front of the television. It
didn’t entirely make sense, but phrases like “hobgoblin of little minds” enchanted me,
as did the grand proclamation that anything could be resolutely genius. The unnamed
author who fixated me turned out to be the at times grandiloquent but always brilliant
Emerson; over vaudevillian violins the “Let U.B.U.” ads quoted non-sequentially
from his 1832 essay “Self-Reliance.”
Who so would be a man, must be a non-
conformist…A foolish consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds…To be great, is to be
misunderstood…There is a time in every man’s
education when he arrives at the conviction that
envy is ignorance…Insist on yourself, never
imitate…To believe that what is true for you in
your private heart is true for all men—that is
genius.1

1 Youtube.com, “REEKBOK UBU,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgG9AB0YYyo (3/20/06).
1
I wouldn’t discover Emerson until years later, but the whole moment—from the
ironic, ahistorical commercials themselves, to my disconnected fascination by a
disembodied, philosopher anonymous to me—is an example of all things postmodern:
kitsch, random difference, pastiche, an aesthetic aroused by decontextualization and
“integrated into commodity production.”2 A brown kid from working poor
circumstances unknowingly gets turned onto Emerson by Reebok, a company whose
alleged sweatshops in Vietnam and Honduras validate, however anecdotally,
Jameson’s claim that in the era of international postmodernism, “the underside of
culture is blood, torture, death and terror.”3 In the American Century, the largest stage
upon which postmodernism enacts itself is simultaneously “global, yet American,”4
and what is more American than the individualism espoused by transcendentalism?
What is more American than identity construction via a product like a pair of running
shoes? Million dollar technology employed for rescuing, neither trees nor those with
AIDS, but the over-pronating arches of weekend athletes?
This is, of course, a cheap and incomplete analysis, if it can be said to be an
analysis at all. My purpose here is neither to reiterate nor impeach any particular
theoretical assertion about postmodernism, consumerism or even the relevance of
inane advertising; rather it is to make a case for the potentiality of individual
experiences to illuminate theoretical claims and spark new questions about the
interplay of cultural forces. How postmodern that I stumbled upon transcendentalism

2 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or the Culture Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991), 2 (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/JAMESON/jameson.html (1/28/07).
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
2
in a campy commercial for exorbitantly priced shoes likely produced in sweatshops
across the planet without even knowing or needing to know what was happening as I
enjoyed the commercials. American Studies relies upon numerous, often intersecting
lenses to reveal the American landscape: histories, surveys, qualitative research,
ethnography and literature to name only a handful. My angle—personal narrative—
draws upon (self)ethnography and literature as its main modes of cultural inquiry.
Considering the uniqueness of my perspective, demographically speaking and also in
terms of what has been published thus far, I posit my this culturally oriented memoir
as a novel contribution to the study of American society.
Thus, in addition to sharing and departing from thematic narratives in
canonical memoirs of poverty, it is my hope that my memoir provides—in ways that
most South Asian writing has yet to do—some insights into how race, ethnicity and
class overlap and elide one another in individual experience on the polycultural
American landscape. Specifically, what is the cultural relationship between minorities
who reside in proximity with one another? What is the socio-economic connection
between members of minority groups who share class identity or just geographic
location? How does structural and individual racism impact related individuals of
groups differently? What elements of class manifest in racial/ethnic identity? How is
class identity infused with racial/ethnic identity? On what occasions might the two
supplant each other? Be used interchangeably? In what ways are constructions of
racial/ethnic identity, as well as notions of Americanness for immigrants, colored by
the metaphor of Blackness?
3
Moreover how is Blackness, a botched “common sense” essentialism,
nevertheless a metaphor for exclusion and American “cool,” central to certain
American stories, most especially those of some modern immigrants newly
negotiating the American landscape? After all, whether through the Tupac t-shirt sold
in Ghanaian villages or the Billie Holliday sung in high-end jazz bars in Japan,
Blackness is America’s main aesthetic export. In exploring cross-cultural, inter-
ethnic, class-related subjects through the cultural intersections in my life, I hope to
contribute to both the much-acclaimed body of South Asian creative writing as well
as to the subgenre of poverty memoirs by involving American Blackness in
interrogating my own American identity. This is a practice each of us enacts in
varying increments, though it is much under-excavated process.
Diasporic studies, poverty studies and critical race theory usually find their
home in scholarly writing and although I have conducted some conventional research
on these subjects—the most colorful being an ethnographic study of the usage of the
n-word by youngish second generation South Asian men—I wanted to explore the
interplay of race, class and ethnicity in a longitudinal format that might allow for
some unexpected conclusions that match and challenge in the concrete what others
stipulate in more theoretical writing. Although there is no shortage of South Asian
writers who anatomize the immigrant experience—the bulk of whom tend to be
women—I am demographically rare: my parents did not arrive in the US armed with
graduate degrees and our family’s trajectory during its first two decades does not trail
the route of in, up and out social mobility that is common to most post-1965 “model
minority” immigrants.
4
Sometime unforgivably late in my progress as a deliberate reader, and
consequently as a writer, I decided to look for my own experience in the pages I was
so voraciously reading. Like the young black girl Richard Rodriguez conjures—the
one who “notices her absence” in her favorite Austen, I too wondered where I could
find stories more similar to mine.5 I would, however briefly, put aside the working
class lullabies of Steinbeck and the cantankerous James Baldwin for contemporary
writers writing from a South Asian immigrant point of view. I wasn’t naïve enough to
expect my precise demographic or political temperament; I knew South Asian women
from working poor neighborhoods would be anomalies if we were represented at all
in the literature easily available to me. I write easily available because of course the
dearth wasn’t nearly as absolute as I perceived it; non-canonical books and short
stories could be found in small, independent presses or databases of unpublished
work. Yet the madly popular South Asian-American authors elbowing for space on
bookstore bookshelves, were written from a largely homogenous point of view in
terms of class and ethnic identity construction: middle to upper middle class
immigrants wrestled most often with whiteness—at least explicitly.
Like the literature written by Chicana authors such as Gloria Anzaldua who
raged against white America with vitriolic talk about barbed wire and tongues that
had to cut or the sweetly stinging invectives of Puerto Rican Judith Ortiz Cofer or the
biting humor of Native American Sherman Alexie or the unfiltered, delirious outrage
of islander Jamaica Kincaid, canonical South Asian immigrant novels and short
stories discussed race. And to an equal extent as other “ethnic” authors, South Asian

5 Richard Rodriguez, Brown (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 13.
5