Many of my south Asian friends date non-south Asian people. To hear many of my brown girlfriends tell it, dating a south Asian man comes with cultural baggage—like being tied to a patriarchal set of rules that keeps you firmly mired in specific, oppressive gender roles.
When south Asian men date white women, some cite “genuine attraction,” yes, but many say they’re “just not attracted to brown women.”“Brown men aren’t scared of brown women, they are scared of being boring and predictable if they end up with one,” Shriya Samarth, a media junkie and friend, told me over the phone.
Here are three south Asian women and one black woman.
They are charming, funny, ridiculous, and charismatic, but they, too, do not appear again.
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Every single brown woman who was paraded across the screen as part of an endless lineup of suitable girls ended up an anonymous, unnamed, and crumpled footnote in the story.
These men had to go through them to reach their white women at the end.
Interracial dating has been a facet of living in the diaspora for ages.
I myself have a mixed family and mixed-race cousins. But there’s a huge difference between brown men dating white women and brown women dating white men.
They are ground up into the burger that is the storyline, while the pursuit of the white woman bookends the whole project.
We see this in Master of None, The Big Sick, and Meet the Patels.
Instead, Ansari dedicates five episodes to a visiting white woman whose main feature is her Italianness.