Village Voice Favorite Books of 2000 The popular book challenging
the idea of a model minority, now in paperback!"How does it feel to
be a problem?" asked W. E. B. Du Bois of black Americans in his
classic The Souls of Black Folk. A hundred years later, Vijay
Prashad asks South Asians "How does it feel to be a solution?" In
this kaleidoscopic critique, Prashad looks into the complexities
faced by the members of a "model minority"-one, he claims, that is
consistently deployed as "a weapon in the war against black
America." On a vast canvas, The Karma of Brown Folk attacks the two
pillars of the "model minority" image, that South Asians are both
inherently successful and pliant, and analyzes the ways in which
U.S. immigration policy and American Orientalism have perpetuated
these stereotypes. Prashad uses irony, humor, razor-sharp
criticism, personal reflections, and historical research to
challenge the arguments made by Dinesh D'Souza, who heralds South
Asian success in the U.S., and to question the quiet accommodation
to racism made by many South Asians. A look at Deepak Chopra and
others whom Prashad terms "Godmen" shows us how some South Asians
exploit the stereotype of inherent spirituality, much to the
chagrin of other South Asians. Following the long engagement of
American culture with South Asia, Prashad traces India's effect on
thinkers like Cotton Mather and Henry David Thoreau, Ravi Shankar's
influence on John Coltrane, and such essential issues as race
versus caste and the connection between antiracism activism and
anticolonial resistance. The Karma of Brown Folk locates the birth
of the "model minority" myth, placing it firmly in the context of
reaction to the struggle for Black Liberation. Prashad reclaims the
long history of black and South Asian solidarity, discussing joint
struggles in the U.S., the Caribbean, South Africa, and elsewhere,
and exposes how these powerful moments of alliance faded from
historical memory and were replaced by Indian support for antiblack
racism. Ultimately, Prashad writes not just about South Asians in
America but about America itself, in the tradition of Tocqueville,
Du Bois, Richard Wright, and others. He explores the place of
collective struggle and multiracial alliances in the transformation
of self and community-in short, how Americans define themselves.
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