Friday, September 20, 2013

America is good, mostly..

I'm not one to defend the US or India, but this off-late bashing of the United States for the recently crowned Miss America is getting a little out of control. Sure, she's the first Indian American, who deserves some respect to overcome cultural barriers and stereotypes. But to expect everybody in America will get on the 'multicultural bandwagon' is ridiculous to say the least.
No doubt, there were some racist pricks across the country who took offense to the fact that she didn't look exactly like Barbie, but is that really that bad? I mean, to say that everywhere else in the world we have an acceptable level of racism except for the United States is a big lie, to say the least. Let's take India, for example. There are enough racists in India to ensure that newly crowned Miss America Ms. Nina Davuluri never sees the world stage. A lot of Indian people living in India are obsessed with skin color. It is automatically assumed in India that the lighter your skin color is, the better/more beautiful you are. It doesn't matter your eyes are bigger than your mouth, or that you look sideways when you're trying to look straight - that is the bottom line 'truth'. So to somehow imply that all of America is racist and evil because some ignorant losers think that Ms. Nina is not American enough is simply inaccurate. In ever country, there are ignorant people.
If anything, we should be proud of the USA that a dark skinned Indian girl got to be the woman of the year, she couldn't have had this privilege in her own 'home' country. So just stop whining and be thankful.
Be thankful that you live in a country that for the most part respects who are as oppose to what you look like. Even though it would be easy for me to pretend that I'm a target of racism - I'm not. Most people try to be politically and socially correct by not assuming they know everything about me based on my skin tone or my name. They give me a chance. They let me speak. They listen when I speak. They are genuinely impressed when I can do crazy math in a matter of seconds. That is more than what I can say about my motherland - India. I'm so tired of being called not 'pretty enough' because I'm not light enough or that I should use the cream 'Fair and Lovely' because the mean the same thing. Aren't my grandma's days over yet?
Geez, stop giving America a hard time about this. We got other bigger issues we need to discuss and worry about. How about the fact that we have experienced 250 mass shootings this year alone? How about the fact that 48 million of our people are on food stamps? Do we really need to spend all our energy discussing the ignorant 2% who think the current Miss America isn't American enough? We need to focus on constructive criticism, because simply criticizing doesn't accomplish anything.