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

