Ghetto Proclivities: Race and Class in a Model Minority Memoir

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,

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