I Hate Everything About This.

But I’ll leave it to PhillyGrrrl at Sepia Mutiny who writes:

Words like “fetishism” and “objectification” came to mind as soon as I saw it. The chorus, “Girl do that Indian dance/Dance for me now/Dance for me now” is nauseating enough, but “Ma got hair like Pocahotantas/Hands on the ass of an Indian goddess” induce further vomiting. As does ” shake, wiggle it , slither like a snake, mama.” In short this video reinforces every stereotype already out there about South Asian women. Servile? Check. Exotic? Check. Kama-Sutra-fantasy? Check. And yes, I know it’s not very different from any other misogynistic hip-hop song out there, but really? Really? And ode to brown fever?

I will add that she’s right — this song isn’t anything new. But its stereotypes seem much more blatant. I wonder if that’s because I’m not used to pop songs specifically about South Asian women, but I am used to songs that reduce black women to big butts and brown skin.

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  • Alisa

    Perfecting what R.Kelly created?

    • And in case we’ve forgotten:

  • keke

    Ugghh, I couldn’t even get through the entire song. From the moment I heard, “Girl do that Indian dance” coupled with the “indian music” I was sick.

    and the last point you made is so true. When I was younger, I understood that women of color were objectified with songs and video images that focused the big butts and brown skin. Yet, I found myself justifying and even embracing these images because I saw it as appreciation for the way I looked; particularly because mainstream images described big butts and brown skin as unattractive. Now that I am a little older, I can’t help but feel uncomfortable when I hear some of the lyrics today, but at the same time my immediate reaction is not as strong as it was when I heard “Indian Girl”.

    I must have built up some sort of tolerance over the years of listening to music that objectifies black women. Because while I do get disgusted at times, my visceral response is not to turn the music off. But I could not sit through “Indian Girl”, I immediately recognized it as misogynistic and filled with those awful stereotypes.

  • Wow. That really is impossible to make it through.

  • Val

    I think that since, for the most part, non-Black women have not protested the misogynistic lyrics of hip hop aimed at Black women hip hop figures it can just move on to attack women of other races.

  • Man, fantastically horrible. Makes me really glad those dudes aren’t black.

  • Wow this is deep. The globalization of hip hop reduced to white boys rapping about “she like to get buck naked and f*** sleazy” over images of light-skinned women that look more European than South Asian and a few vaguely ethnic ones that could represent any race. Ghandi put in all that nonviolent work and M.L. King paid homage to his strategies for this? Wow. Just wow.