"But the Bengalis in the mixed-race community kept few written accounts of their lives. Bald’s evidence is their footprint in business—restaurants and shops—and their occupations listed in census tables, for example, as countermen, chauffeurs, porters, firemen and subway laborers.

My grandfather became a shopkeeper and lived the rest of his life in the black community of New Orleans. People from around the world melded easily into our location. In the 19th century, Tremé was home to one of the most powerful and liberal communities of free people of color in America, rooted not only in Africa but also Europe, the Caribbean and—I recently learned from a classmate—as far away as New Zealand.

My grandfather married a woman of French, Choctaw, African and possibly Mexican descent: a New Orleans Negro. They remained in Tremé until he died, just before the birth of their last child: my father.

But the neighborhood changed in that time. The year after my grandfather arrived, in 1897, New Orleans decided to locate its red light district, Storyville, on the edge of Tremé. As Bald explains, for the next 20 years, Storyville and, after it, the Iberville projects had the effect of decaying the area where many Bengali and black families had settled. And in the 1960s, the federal government erected an interstate highway down Claiborne Avenue, the heart of the black and Bengali business community, further eroding the ability to trace the settlers and their descendants.

Still, black Bengali descendants like my family in New Orleans clung to the oral histories of our immigrant ancestors who—whether by choice or common oppression—embraced the black community in eras of fierce white persecution. Our stories lacked, however, any details about Indian families abroad, the villages that peddlers left or the ways that they arrived in the United States. Bald reweaves this frayed context of lives and, on a larger scale, serves as testimony to the black community’s diversity."

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Hip-hop music is frequently described as violent and anti-law enforcement, with the implication that its artists glorify criminality. A new content analysis subtitled “Hip-Hop Artists’ Perceptions of Criminal Justice“, by criminologists Kevin Steinmetz and Howard Henderson, challenge this conclusion.

After an analysis of a random sample of hip-hop songs released on platinum-selling albums between 2000 and 2010, Steinmetz and Henderson concluded that the main law enforcement-related themes in hip-hop are not pleasure and pride in aggressive and criminal acts, but the unfairness of the criminal justice system and the powerlessness felt by those targeted by it.

Lyrics about law enforcement, for example, frequently portrayed cops as predators exercising an illegitimate power. Imprisonment, likewise, was blamed for weakening familial and community relationships and described a modern method of oppression.

Their analysis refutes the idea that hip-hop performers are embracing negative stereotypes of African American men in order to sell albums. Instead, it suggests that the genre retains the politicized messages that it was born with.

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In 2007, I moved to San Francisco from Stockton – a place once named the most miserable city in Forbes, a place where empty storefronts and people hanging out in front of liquor stores are fairly familiar scenes. I attended the journalism program at SFSU and lived in the Sunset, but was immediately drawn to the Fillmore. I eventually started covering and writing stories about the Fillmore for my reporting class. While I researched the area’s rich history – including the disastrous urban renewal program, which pushed out many of the city’s African Americans in the 1940s through the 1970s – I began to understand why there aren’t many of us in San Francisco’s historically black neighborhood. Partly it’s because there just aren’t many black people here in the city these days (according to the 2010 census, African Americans make up 5.8 percent of SF).

It wasn’t until I graduated college that I realized that while I was writing about black businesses and black people, all my friends were white. This wasn’t a brand new concept to me. I spent my days in high school listening to indie rock and punk music. In Stockton, I was used to being the only black person at rock shows, and I was one of only two black girls in my graduating high school class. The racism I experienced in my hometown, while sparse, was overt and by strangers. But there was something different going on here in SF. Partying with the hipster white dudes in the Mission would start out fun, but our hangouts would end with me feeling conflicted. If these people were my friends, why did I feel so bad when I hung out with them?

Before all the hate mail rolls in, I’m not saying that San Francisco is racist and my experiences with assholes in the Mission can’t possibly be a statement about this city as a whole. That deserves a larger article. However, in this city that prides itself in being so progressive, it feels like we need to go back and master something both simple as well as incredibly complex – each other. We can learn to embrace our differences without making them a joke or a spectacle. It might take more effort than making bourbon ice cream, but I feel like we can do it.

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At the Clínica Monseñor Oscar A. Romero in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Victoria Ortega, 33, focuses on women’s health, HIV prevention, beautification, and safety. As a transgender woman and community organizer, she actively incorporates LGBTQ issues into her community-building in the neighborhood.

Ortega has built a great nonprofit career for herself and recognizes the employment and career limitations transgender women face. “There is a lack of leadership-building for trans women,” she says.

Latino/a transgender people often live in extreme poverty. According to a National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) survey, twenty-eight percent of transgender Latinos reported a household income of less than $10,000 a year, which is nearly double the rate for transgender people of all races, more than five times the general Latino/a population rate, and seven times the general U.S. population rate. For non-citizen Latino/a participants, the poverty rate was 43 percent. The unemployment rate for Latino/a transgender people is 20 percent.

When Alexis Martinez, 63, came out in 1998, her successful printing business began to suffer because she was losing clients. She says she was also harassed by workers because of her gender identity.

Martinez says she was aware of her gender identity from a very early age. “When I was four years old, I knew what I was,” she says. At nineteen Martinez began taking hormones, but she stopped at the age of 29. As a result, she became depressed and battled alcoholism and cocaine addiction until she resumed hormone treatments at the age of 43.

“There are multiple challenges– housing, jobs, and medical care– exacerbated in the trans community,” Martinez says.

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The closing lyric of “The Only Black Guy at the Indie-Rock Show” goes, “I wonder if white folks who like Jay-Z often feel as alienated as me,” which opens a conundrum. Somewhere between the Beastie Boys and Eminem, hip hop became one of the most popular art forms on earth, one socially acceptable for white people to like. Whereas American society quickly co-opted and overtook rock‘n’roll, crafting it into its own (white) image, hip hop remained in the category of “black” music and ultimately became the easiest way to stick it to the Baby Boomer Establishment. Soon, African-Americans were recognized as the arbiters of cool — finally recognized for our contributions to American popular culture, dating back almost an entire century — and whiteness became a synonym for squareness.

The reason why the Stuff White People Like humor genre has so many holes in it is because the vast majority of the things lampooned are not white-specific, they’re creature comforts of the middle class. But the lines between race and class are getting blurrier and blurrier by the day, and there are quite a few people of color being born into comfortable financial situations who will likely never know what it’s like to be poor. Thus, memes like White Person Bingo end up portraying a common theme in popular culture: class stereotyping poorly and tastelessly masquerading as race stereotyping. This is hugely problematic because it implies people of color are exempt from liking or owning things that are associated with the middle class. Sometimes the people who make these jokes don’t realize there’s a not-so-fine line between craft beer and malt liquor, and it’s not a line of color.

There is the implicit notion that indie rock is generally linked to the “highbrow middle class” end of American culture. (If your Average American Joe drew a line that connected NPR, indie rock, and white people, that line would be straight as an arrow.) Critics and fans suggest it’s an auteur’s medium, while areas of art chiefly practiced by people of color are most often celebrated for their immediacy and accessibility. (In layman’s terms, the most acclaimed works by POC are things you don’t have to think hard about.) This line was less defined in 2012 (Channel Orange and goodkid, M.A.A.D. city, for instance), but the topic of race and class frequently come up when an artist of color creates something widely considered “highfalutin’” or “artistic.” And then critics fall out of their seats to praise genres of music they generally don’t care about, they pretend the entire world has changed because a person of color has created a challenging piece of art. “These artists are moving beyond the artistic vocabulary of the environment,” they’re likely to say.

But what about those kids of color born into the middle class? It’s likely that they’re going to be turned onto the culture all on their own, without the cooler older siblings who passes down their Pixies records. Also, what about the kids of color born into poverty, ones who take solace in skateboarding and punk? Couldn’t we safely assume the vast majority of people who regularly read this website have Screaming Females (or at least Screaming Trees) listed after Schoolboy Q in their iTunes libraries?

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I wanted to compare a review from an Indian publication with a review from the New York Times, but I could not because the New York Times never fully reviewed 3 Idiots. I guess they didn’t think a singing-and-dancing movie made by and starring brown people was worthy of a review, no matter how successful it was.

I was able to find a short review in the Village Voice which described it as a “tuneful, enjoyable college comedy.” Compare that summation to the review in the Times of India which called the film “the perfect end to an exciting year for India: the year when the aam aadmi [common man] voted in progress, liberalism, secularism and turned his back to corruption, communalism, regionalism.”

So, what did the Village Voice miss? Let’s start with “tuneful.”

3 Idiots actually only has two true musical sequences, although there are two other songs that play in the background and are intercut with dialogue. The first song, “Aal Izz Well,” shows the hijinks of the three heroes (Madhavan, Aamir Khan, and Sharman Joshi) while in college. The second is “Zoobie Doobie,” a euphoric fantasy put into song by a young girl in love (Kareena Kapoor, granddaughter of nine-time Filmfare Award winner Raj Kapoor).

Both songs heighten the emotions of the scenes surrounding them by contrasting joy with sorrow. The happy “Aal Izz Well” ends with the discovery of a suicide. “Zoobie Doobie” has a bouncy tune, but its visuals reference the famous “Pyar Hua, Ikrar Hua” sequence from the classic film Shree 420 (1955), foreshadowing a difficult end to the love affair in 3 Idiots.

Traditional Indian drama theory encourages the creation of multiple emotions in one piece; today that is described as a “masala film.” Just because 3 Idiots includes multiple comedic scenes alongside its serious ones does not mean it is a “college comedy.” Once the songs are given their proper weight as support to the narrative rather than a distraction from it, once the comedy is considered as merely a part of the film–not its whole–the recurring theme becomes visible, and that is what The Times of India (and the Desi audience in general) appreciated.

At the beginning of the film, a college student is found having hung himself; later, one of the main characters jumps from a third floor window. Towards the end, it is revealed that the heroine’s brother throws himself in front of a train. All of them were promising middle-class college students, driven to suicide by the pressure to succeed. A recent study in The Lancet found that suicide was the second leading cause of death among Indians between the ages of 15-29. The successful “tuneful” song from the film, “Aal Izz Well”, inspired a website aimed at helping Desis considering suicide.

If the NYT had considered the film worthy of review–and had been open-minded enough to get past the songs and the comedy–they might have had to acknowledge the film’s underlying commentary: that India is not the promised land of academic superiority and happy-up-by-their-bootstraps entrepreneurs it desperately wants it to be; that it might have social issues more serious than can be solved by a song.

But then the NYT would never seriously review an Indian movie anyway, because that would be an acknowledgment that the leading creative force for many people in the world comes not from Los Angeles but from Bombay. Indian films are shown all over Africa, and Asia, and the former USSR. They are popular in Britain, Australia, and Canada, and are breaking into South America; a telenovela set in India, for instance, recently debuted in Brazil.

During its aforementioned “golden age,” Indian films frequently deal with the basic economic issues and the “where do we go from here?” questions the country faced after winning its independence. The withdrawal of Britain from India was an especially shoddy colonial retreat; there was very little plan in place for the transition of power; and, while the violence on the border between the newly created Pakistan and India was the most blatant result of this policy, the films from this time point to other, more subtle, problems such as lack of infrastructure, sustainable economies, and a national identity. And these were the hugely successful films that established the “Bollywood” style. From the very beginning, people wanted to see problems onscreen.

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