4 — Wednesday, November 10, 2021
Michigan in Color
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Every time I think society may be making
progress when it comes to protecting, respect-
ing and standing in solidarity with women
as we fight systemic abuse, I am gravely mis-
taken once again. As a Drake fan, it pains me to
write this article, but we must talk about this
issue. In his highly anticipated album, Certi-
fied Lover Boy (CLB), Drake credits R. Kelly
as a writer on his song “TSU.” The track opens
with a clip of DJ OG Ron C asking women
“what’s going down” in a drawling voice as R.
Kelly’s “Half On a Baby” gradually builds in
the background. Drake did not work with R.
Kelly on this song, nor is R. Kelly’s voice in the
song, yet CLB producers credited R. Kelly with
co-writing because they used some of his song
in the production.
This credit is problematic because it pro-
vides R. Kelly, an accused and convicted rapist
and child molester, access to monetary royal-
ties that could help fund his court trials for
sex trafficking and sexual abuse. Drake has
chosen to associate himself with this man and
completely disregard how this may harm his
fans who are Black women. This proves, yet
again, that America couldn’t care less about
the treatment of Black women, and will con-
tinue to find ways to show it.
Not only has Drake created space for a cele-
bration of R. Kelly’s music, but he has also rein-
troduced potential trauma for the women who
have fought against R. Kelly’s power in the past
years. Numerous women, many of whom are
Black, have shared their stories about R. Kelly,
opening up about being sexually assaulted by
the singer. He married Aaliyah when she was
only 15 years old, and yet he was continuously
embraced in the entertainment industry and
by Americans at large. The 2019 documentary,
“Surviving R. Kelly,” centers the women who
came forward as they describe their abusive
relationships with him. These women have
had to continuously relive their trauma in
private and public, and people continue to
deny and gaslight their truth at the hands of R.
Kelly. His maintained power, despite endless
claims against his humanity, is a testament
to the social influence of success and the dis-
advantage that victims of sexual assault have
when their abuser is someone with significant
social wealth. Drake is considered one of the
greatest musicians of all time and is the epit-
ome of social influence and power. Once this
power imbalance and influence is addressed, it
becomes unbearably clear what kind of harm
can come from Drake’s crediting R. Kelly on
his highly anticipated album.
Drake’s producer, Noah “40” Shebib was
somehow baffled by the fact that people would
believe he and Drake — someone who has also
been accused of having inappropriate rela-
tionships with minors — would work with R.
Kelly based on R. Kelly’s past. Although Drake
and Shebib claim they do not support R. Kelly,
their choice to sample OG Ron C suggests
otherwise. Simply, they have failed to take
accountability for the harm they have caused.
If they knew they would have to give R. Kelly
credit, and how that credit would benefit him,
why use the sample? Regardless of their inten-
tions, the impact of their decision has major
consequences for the women who are fight-
ing R. Kelly, his wealth and his power, in this
legal battle. It was recently revealed that R.
Kelly has been struggling financially and has
obtained a lot of debt, so Drake’s credit has
provided R. Kelly with financial capital that he
could use to back his court trials. Aside from
simply financial capital, Drake’s cultural influ-
ence often guides social trends, so this credit
has validated his fans’ support for R. Kelly’s,
whether intentional or not.
CLB’s theme is to embrace “toxic mascu-
linity and acceptance of truth,” and in its first
few weeks, it tied the record for most top ten
hits off a single album. It has also held a top
two spot on the Billboard Top 200 (albums)
list for five weeks in a row. This album was all
but guaranteed to reach millions of ears and
make millions of dollars, and as a result, so did
R. Kelly.
R. Kelly was recently convicted of racketeer-
ing, sex trafficking, acts of bribery and exploita-
tion of a child in New York. He also faces similar
charges in other states, including Illinois and
Minnesota. Drake’s blatant negligence for this
writing credit’s impact is disgusting and is a
perfect example of how men have the privilege
to ignore the struggles women endure while
still being able to succeed. Granted, it is similarly
disturbing how accepting society is of such deg-
radation for the sake of quality entertainment.
While women continue to fight the treacherous
battles towards gender equality, men are able to
ignore our pain and continue to contribute to
the root of the inequity and society lets it hap-
pen.
Drake’s choice is especially difficult for me,
as a Black woman, because it always feels like
no one is fighting for us when we say we are
struggling and need help. Even the Black men
we expect to fight for us ignore our pain with
ease. It is extremely difficult to see yet another
artist, who I have been supporting for years,
who creates art that I love and consume on a
daily basis, prove to be yet another individual
who couldn’t care less about the very people
who love and support them. It feels like all the
advocating and boycotting that I do is point-
less because society seems to be flooded with
people who simply don’t care about the strug-
gles Black women around them endure. I don’t
know how much more disappointment I can
take. I don’t understand why I constantly have
to choose between consuming what makes
me happy and fighting for what I believe in.
Will Black women ever receive the respect we
deserve? Or will we continue fighting for our-
selves with no end in sight?
I am my bedroom: neat, colorful and
diverse. There, my two cultures collide. Cov-
ering my bed lies a 49ers blanket overlaid by
an Indian shawl. Painted on the walls are my
favorite sports teams’ colors amidst a portrait
of Hindu idols, like Sai Baba and Ganesh. My
closet is the same. On one side hangs a tradi-
tional kurta and on the other, a simple suit:
both tailored for the appropriate occasion.
Raised in America, I did my best to connect
with my Indian side; I loved visiting the temple,
celebrating Diwali, attending Garba and other
Indian functions. Even though I had never been
to India, I never felt lost. I always felt connected
to both my heritage and my place of birth.
When I first settled in Ann Arbor this past
semester, I was delightfully shocked by the
amount of Indians here, which I thought would
be few based on my misconceptions of the Mid-
west. I was excited to join organizations like the
Indian American Student Association and meet
new people who share my heritage. In many of
my conversations with students in the organi-
zation, we discussed what traditions or customs
we grew up participating in and what it was like
growing up Brown in different parts of Amer-
ica. Whenever the question about what part of
India we were from arose, I would enthusiasti-
cally answer that my family was from Gujarat,
but hesitantly add that I had actually never been
to India.
Typically, when I tell people that I’ve never
visited India, I receive comments like “So
you’re whitewashed,” or “You’re basically
white.” I would uncomfortably laugh off the
joke, not knowing how to respond. However,
this time, after telling my new friend at the
University of Michigan that I had never been
to India, I got a new response: “So you’re a
coconut.” I was confused. I’d never heard that
term before. I paused for a second, and before
I could answer, my friend replied, “You know,
white on the inside, Brown on the outside.”
That phrasing seemed familiar. It then hit me;
I recalled numerous instances when people
throughout high school would use different
colored foods interchangeably to describe
people of color.
Coconuts. Apples. Twinkies. Bananas.
Oreos. What do these foods have in com-
mon? While these items are all just harmless
foods, when used in the context of race, they
become insults used to demean people of color
who don’t conform to conventional or model
minority stereotypes.
Now, I have heard all sorts of interactions in
which people hurl these words at one another.
I’ve heard people from the same minority
communities use them to describe each other;
I’ve even heard people use these phrases to
describe themselves.
When people within the same communities
use these metaphors to describe each other, they
are effectively telling others that they are not
good enough — that they don’t fit in or that they
sold out. Just because I don’t watch as many Bol-
lywood movies as you or speak as fluent Gujarati
or Hindi as you doesn’t mean I’m any less Indian.
On the other hand, this same logic applies to
people who think others are “too Indian” or
F.O.B.s, meaning fresh off the boat. It’s ironic, isn’t
it? If you are seen as “too” Brown, you are pres-
sured to assimilate. If you are seen as not “Indian
enough,” you are mocked.
So why do we feel the need to put groups of
people into distinct categories? Henri Tajfel, a
prominent social psychologist, suggests that
it’s because of the social identity theory, which
states that a person’s social identity gives them
a sense of dignity; thus, they subconsciously
develop an “us versus them” mentality. When
terms like coconut, bananas or Oreos are used,
it is implied that someone has fallen out of the
social groups they identify with, causing them
to feel as if they don’t fit in anywhere.
Whether or not someone has racist inten-
tions, using these foods to describe someone is
racist. It undermines our individual identities
and assumes that all minority groups are the
same. While terms like coconut or Oreos aren’t
as blatantly offensive as other slurs, we need
to understand the negative stereotypes these
words validate. Using foods as racial meta-
phors based on the physical colors of our skin
is not only dehumanizing for people of color
but it is also illogical since our identities aren’t
reliant solely on our skin tones.
There is no “right” way to be a person of
color. By creating such narratives, we restrict
people into boxes and only perpetuate the
model minority stereotypes we fight so hard
to break. Just like my bedroom, I encompass
pieces of both my cultures. It is important to
acknowledge our history and ancestry, and
there is no one way to do that. Let’s take own-
ership of what it means to be a person of color
and recognize that existing as a person of color
varies for everyone.
A³ (Asian American Authors) Spotlight is a writer inter-
view series created by TMD’s Michigan in Color and Arts
sections to spotlight and celebrate Asian American authors.
The goal of this series is to feature artists whose content
diversifies the landscape of Asian diasporic literature.
At the beginning of our phone call, Jyotsna Sreenivasan
and I agree that had we met in person, we would be drink-
ing herbal tea together. Sreenivasan — an author, English
teacher and University of Michigan alum — is easygoing
and lights up when we talk about books — perhaps a symp-
tom of her passion for teaching. The author’s voice is soft
but strong; it’s hard to feel nervous in her friendly pres-
ence. In her collection of short stories released this past
May, “These Americans,” Sreenivasan explores the gap
between immigrant parents and their second-generation
children in her latest book. (Second-generation Americans
in the book are defined as native-born with at least one
immigrant parent.) The author sat down with The Daily
to speak about “These Americans,” teaching English and
being second-generation.
Sreenivasan’s book “These Americans” is a collection
of seven short stories and a novella , all of which feature
second-gen Indian Americans grappling with what it
means to live within, between and beyond two cultures.
Favorites of mine include “The Sweater,” in which college-
aged Nandini learns how to knit sweaters while dealing
with the all-encompassing pressure from her parents to
succeed academically and attend business school; “Mrs.
Raghavendra’s Daughter,” in which Mrs. Raghavendra
simultaneously grapples with her grown daughter’s sexu-
ality and her husband’s death; and “Hawk,” the novella, in
which recently-divorced Manisha tries her hand at teach-
ing at a private school in the face of what initially appears
to be innocent cultural misunderstandings.
The book — which often focuses on parent-child rela-
tionships — explores what it means to be a parent when
cultural expectations of love (familial, romantic, friendly)
don’t fully translate between generations. Sreenivasan
paints ephemeral scenes filled with the weight of mis-
communication; yet, despite occasional frustration at the
characters, this book makes my eyes water and evokes
memories of the worries my mother tried her hardest to
hide from me. The love with which she writes about Indi-
an parents makes me want to call my mom and read to her
about Revati’s heartbreaking friendships lost with age in
“Crystal Vase: Snapshots,” or the overwhelmed narrator
in “Perfect Sunday,” searching in Idaho for jobs that make
ends meet while taking care of her kids.
I’m curious about Sreenivasan about her attitude
towards portraying Indian American families. She laughs,
“Well, first you have to live through it, right?” She pon-
ders for a second, “I think as a younger person, you’re
only thinking of your point of view, right?” For Sreeniva-
san, understanding the perspective of an immigrant par-
ent took time. A few years ago, Sreenivasan wrote a story
about an immigrant father frustrated with his teenage
daughter. After immersing herself in a different perspec-
tive within her work, she began to realize “how much love
there was behind all of those strict rules.”
As she became a mother, her perspective changed even
more. “Once I had a baby,” she says, “I realized how hard
it was to be a parent … My parents were trying to do the
best they could, and they didn’t have a lot of Indian role
models for raising a kid in a different country.” Parenthood
prompted Sreenivasan to ask herself, “What’s it like from
(my parents’) point of view?”
“(The answer) seems to strike people in their hearts,”
Sreenivasan says, which is a bit of an understatement. Every
time I read the author’s perspective of a parent frustrated
with their child, whether it’s Mrs. Raghavendra fighting
with herself to accept her daughter, or Prema determined
that her daughter will have a better life, I feel punched in
the gut by the overwhelming intensity of the “parental”
perspective I normally butt heads with. The author is inten-
tional with her endings — Sreenivasan’s short stories are
distinct; instead of telling an entire story, she creates vivid
snapshots of families left without any sense of firm resolu-
tion that readers might be used to. At first, I found the end-
ings puzzling, but as I continued reading the increasingly
elaborate stories, I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Each of Sreenivasan’s short stories arose independently
of each other. Sreenivasan had published many stories
over the past two decades, but she only considered putting
them in a collection within the last few years. The author
played around with the order of her stories, taking inspi-
ration from a collection by another second-generation
author: Julia Alvarez’s “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their
Accent.” Ultimately, she decided to arrange her stories
in ascending order of the age of the second-generation
subject, indicating a sense of cultural growth with age —
fitting, considering how central the theme of being second-
generation is to her works and, most importantly, her life.
The Certified Lover Boy: Why Drake
crediting R. Kelly harms Black women
Digesting foods as racial metaphors
A3 Spotlight: Jyotsna Sreenivasan
asks what Indian parents can give
to their American children
Design by Madison Grosvenor
Design by Caitlin Martens
MARIA PATTON
MiC Columnist
DEVEN PARIKH
MiC Columnist
MEERA KUMAR
Daily Arts Writer
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
I stuck through “Gilmore Girls” even though Lorelai
Gilmore seemed like the kind of person to tell you she
didn’t study for the test when she really did, the kind to
make you feel bad for pulling out a calculator to add up
the bill plus the 15 % tip on top even though after din-
ner your mind can only do so much mental math and the
kind of person to tell you she never said something so
adamantly she’d make you question your own sanity for
weeks on end so you’d ask yourself Did I really feel that
and hear that and understand that? Over and over and
over. Even though she really did say the thing she said
she didn’t say.But Lorelai made up for everything in wit
and it made her tolerable, charming even, so that liking
Lorelai one day and despising her the next depended on
the episode and your mood and whether you watched
“Gilmore Girls” on a Wednesday or a Friday. Because
Lorelai was so temperamental, paper-thin in that special
sort of way, she rendered it almost impossible to cherish
or hate or adore or even simply enjoy her in all her volatil-
ity. Her relationship with Rory was impactful, powerful,
the mother-daughter duo America loved to love because
Lorelai Gilmore named her daughter after herself and
no one in the history of motherhood had ever done such
a bold thing. It was genius, and it made watching their
bond unfold and grow once a week an even more enjoy-
able prospect.
You do not grow to despise either Rory or Lorelai
because they have never been the kind of characters with
enough substance to follow, to unravel, unpin and untie,
until you begin to realize you aren’t really liking what
you’ve found. It is an instantaneous process, it happens
between the span of one episode and another for you to
realize, YOU KNOW WHAT, THIS ISN’T REALLY
WHAT I HAD IN MIND. You begin to understand that
Lorelai is filled to the brim with immaturity and that Rory
is more of a mother than she ever will be and even more
so, if Lorelai is this insufferable, then Rory must be a mil-
lion times more unbearable. Rory is so smart and so pretty
and she’s going to become the next Christiane Amanpour
and Rory is just the most perfect, thoughtful, insightful
teenager this country has ever seen. Except it was never
really about the kind of person Rory Gilmore was, because
nothing about a normal teenage girl from the East Coast
was as ragingly fantastic as everyone had made it seem
for so long, but it had everything to do with the position
that Rory occupied. The grandparents that paid for a pri-
vate school education, Stars Hollow, the blue house with
the wrap-around porch and the very entirety of white
womanhood gave her charm, the unabridged power and
propriety that became so synonymous with what it meant
to be Rory Gilmore. And to deny Rory such a thing is to
reduce her to nothing.
And what about Lane Kim? Whatever happened
to Lane Kim? Rory’s best friend forever and ever, the
all-star supporting character of the 20th century. Lane
Kim played in a rock band, and was cool with a capital
C even when she was handing out fliers for her mother’s
Seventh-day Adventist Church. She was able to straddle
being a first-generation Korean-American, Stars Hollow
in all of its entirety and her mother’s ever-watchful eye
that made most viewers forget what it felt like to have a
modicum of privacy and peace, all with remarkable ease.
The Lane Kim we all knew hid her childhood, her inter-
ests, the things she loved most about life in her bedroom
closet and under baseboards. But most of all, Lane was
never allowed to be a woman, never allowed to love or
learn or grow in the way that Rory was. And when you
grow up on the periphery of someone like Rory Gilmore,
almost there but never close enough, when you can never
seem to belong, never seem to fit or be taken as you are,
never allowed to truly be without a million and one strings
attached, you get Lane Kim and you get Chastity from “10
Things I Hate About You” and you get Dionne from “Clue-
less” and you get every other token best friend, antagonist,
fairy godmother, Extra Number 23, woman of color. So
instead, you aggressively champion all the Rory Gilmore’s
of the world. Convince yourself you see so many pieces of
you in all of them, even though they were never designed
for you and never think about women like you. And no one
wants to end up being a Lane Kim, with your existence
undesirable in every way, mostly, your only life’s purpose
existing as a means to teach Rory or Cher or Bianca how
to be a better person.
Lane Kim was written in a way that rendered her
devoid of complexity and meaning. Show writers chose to
portray her as a projection, a side extension of Rory Gilm-
ore more than anything else. And because it seemed as if
Lane Kim was nothing without Rory, much of the way
her life unfolded was the will of what the show’s writers
deemed a fulfilling future. And no one ever fought for
Lane the way they did for Rory or Lorelai. Lane’s boy-
friends were always missed attempts at love rather than
full-fledged relationships. Rory had dreams, Rory went to
Yale, Rory stole a yacht but it was okay because she was
Rory Gilmore and Rory Gilmore has always been magnif-
icent. Rory let her dreams fall apart on her own doing and
Lane wasn’t allowed to dream. Lane never left Stars Hol-
low even though she so desperately wanted to and Rory
came back because she really had nowhere else to go. And
Rory Gilmore was allowed to fail, to fall apart and come
undone, to not know any better, and Lane Kim never got
the chance.
All my love to the Lane Kims of the world. Because they
have always deserved so much more.
All my love to Lane Kim
SARAH AKAABOUNE
MiC Columnist