Earlier this week, “unfunnyman” Joel Stein wrote a racist piece about how his hometown of Edison, New Jersey – a town that has become home to a flourishing Asian Indian immigrant population. Stein’s commentary, ostensibly about the nostalgia he feels about “pre-Indian” Edison, crams virtually every anti-Asian Indian stereotype he can think of into a single page of text. Here’s an excerpt:
My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime.
I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didn’t want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai?
Stein has understably raised the hackles in many in the Asian American blogosphere. Immediately after the piece was published, Sepia Mutiny wrote a scathing response piece. And, this afternoon, Kal Penn responded to Stein on Huffington Post with well-placed sarcasm:
Were it not for the intelligent, fresh sense of humor of individuals like Mr. Stein, the world may never know about Americans who happen to be of Indian descent. Gags about impossibly spicy food? I’d never heard those before! Multiple Gods with multiple arms? Multiple laughs! Recounting racial slurs like “dot-head”? Oh, Mr. Stein, is too good! I don’t know how he comes up with such unique bits. (I was worried that he’d missed an opportunity to joke about Dr. King’s predecessor, Gandhi, but I see that he got to that hilarity on Twitter. More never-before-heard satire!)
Growing up a few miles from Edison, NJ, I always thought it was hilarious when I’d get the crap kicked out of me by kids like Stein who would yell “go back to India, dothead!” I was always ROTFLMAO when people would assume that I wasn’t American. He really captured the brilliant humor in that one too!
I hadn’t noticed earlier this week, but Time’s editors have updated Stein’s original post with a boilerplate non-apology: it doesn’t apologize for publishing Stein’s column, but apologizes that readers were offended by the column. Way to skirt the blame, Time.
Joel Stein also writes this “apology”:
Joel Stein responds: I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I was trying to explain how, as someone who believes that immigration has enriched American life and my hometown in particular, I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it. If we could understand that reaction, we’d be better equipped to debate people on the other side of the immigration issue.
It’s one thing to reminisce about childhood days, and another thing to get pissy about unavoidable change. Change is life. You want to live in an unchanging town, let me show you some small towns in the Midwest, slowly withering away. Fool. He doesn’t want to expand his horizons, even in trivial ways.
At least one of the regional styles of cuisine ought to appeal to people not familiar with “Indian food”. There’s something for every taste.
Foodies cooking in other styles still can shop at Indian groceries for fresher and cheaper spices and fresh herbs than available in regular groceries. I make Swedish cardamom rolls – you just can’t get decent cardamom elsewhere.
Music – some Westerners take to either classical or Bollywood/dance music, some don’t. I happen to like, though not understand, classical instrumental music. Other people find sitting through a three hour concert of an unfamiliar and complex format of music too much. Even if a person hates the music, they have learned something from a brief exposure.
Sepia Mutiny’s response post is brilliant. As for TIME and Stein’s “apologies”… I don’t know why people even bother with fake “apologies” that do nothing more than show what an ignorant, hateful jerk the person who committed the original offense continues to be.
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Why did Time magazine even publish the badly written, racist article in the first place? Even if the editors shared the bigotry, surely they are not such fools as to imagine that the piece would not offend? Maybe it is time the magazine went out of business and made way for something more enlightened.