Is it Finally Brown Boy Summer?

21 July 2022

It felt like white boy summer would never end. Jack Harlow polluted the charts, Chet Hanks was all over your FYP and Boris Johnson was swagged up in No. 10. Now that the blonde era of Western politics is coming to an end, it feels like the long night is over and the brown sun finally rises.

Kamala Harris is VP, everyone’s third favourite cop (1st being Paul Blart, 2nd being Joe from Family Guy) and guess what, racists? Notice anything different about her? Yes, she’s black. But black has been cool for a while now, I mean, just check your Instagram feed. Kim K has been trying to be black for a while and so has every other white woman you went to school with.

You know what isn’t, and has never been cool? Being brown.

I’m speaking from experience here, as a brown person. In school, I was never brown enough to fit in with the second-generation brown kids, but not white enough to be cool, unfortunately. It didn’t help I was a Jehovah’s Witness and shit at football but being brown certainly wasn’t the helping hand those two attributes needed.

I mean, just check any sit-com ever. The sexless Indian has always been a trope. The long-running CBS abortion; The Big Bang Theory, featured an Indian character that physically couldn’t speak to women. Parks and Recreation had Aziz (yes, I’ll get there) playing a guy who thought he was cool, the joke being that he wasn’t, because imagine that! Unlike that guy from The Big Bang Theory, he actually thought he had a shot with white women, much to the bemusement of his co-workers.

Hell, this isn’t even about being cool for the most part, it’s more about being hated. In England the South Asian communities are viscerally hated. My mum lived on a council estate as a kid and had dog shit posted through her door simply because she and her mum were brown.

I think the stereotypes have gotten worse in the digital age. People now associate Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis with Facebook harassers and call centre workers, rather than corner shop owners and takeaway ambassadors. With the help from popular sitcoms and the like, the sexless Indian is very much an enforced stereotype.

Our knight in shining armour, Aziz Ansari, just had to go and fuck it up didn’t he. Master of None was my show. I loved it more than anything I had seen at the time, simply because it broke away from this stereotype. I didn’t understand the importance of representation in media before that show. There was so little self-deprecating humour that some minorities like to perpetrate to appease the masses, it was a fantastically written show with Aziz just playing a guy. Sure, his heritage and looks played into the plot sometimes, but never in a way that put him or his community down. I loved Aziz, I had his books, I watched all his stand-up specials and interviews, he was a real inspiration for me. And then he had to go do that thing didn’t he? Thanks Aziz.

Anyway, now with all the boring shit out of the way, let’s get down to the future. Brown boy summer.

With Aziz uncancelled, a so-called Indian summer and Johnson no longer PM, and a man of Indian descent front runner for the top spot, are we finally entering a new age of brown excellence? Should I expect to be beating the white women off with a stick? The smell of curry to fill the air? Women ditching their Skims and cladding themselves in sarees? Bollywood movies to fill the multi-plex cinemas across the country? The Spotify charts just filled wall to wall with Punjabi sounds? Imagine that.

Or, of course, the other outcome is that Sunak enacts harsh Thatcherite policies, we enter austerity, people die, and he does more damage to the

brown communities than Aziz Ansari’s wandering hands. Who knows? We’ll wait and see.