I really truly hate this scourge of anti indian and more broadly anti south asian racism online because barely anywhere feels safe anymore. The most unrelated videos and content will have so much violent vitriol it makes me hurt. I genuinely don’t understand how horribly violent and disgusting these people can be and it’s worse towards darker skinned people and the amount of hate copped by south indian people is so genuinely painful. I’m not naive or stupid, racism has always existed and will continue to be violent and disgusting but the way we’ve become the internet’s collective punching bag is truly heinous. It’s also gotten markedly worse in the past 5 years or so and maybe this is me being a conspiracy theorist tinfoil hat idiot but part of me can’t help but think that the turbocharged racism was really kickstarted by pewdiepie going up against t-series when he was butthurt that channel hit iirc a billion subscribers before he did. I don’t even know why I believe that but I do.
I also want to add that so much of the colourist hate is a direct result of antiblackness. It’s imperative to me that people who read this understand that the greater (white) internet’s perception of south asians is directly tied to its perception of black people. It’s about perceived proximity to whiteness that no amount of model minority behaviour will change. It’s also about the complicity of fair skinned and/or privileged south asians (and when I’m talking about Indians and the greater diaspora I’m talking about upper caste people, north indians, wealthy people, hindutva nationalists, indians in the western diaspora I have so many Thoughts and Feelings and Opinions about western diaspora indians omg). I would also like to make it known that I’m not surprised in general at the degree of violence and hatred and abuse of these racist acts; as someone who tries to be a good ally to people of all oppressed classes, in particular for the purposes of the intersections of racism in this context, to black people, I am well aware and have been for a long time now the lengths and extents of vitriolic rhetoric and racist abuse. That isn’t new to me at all. What is new is the speed and with which this has become a new norm of internet culture and indeed wider culture in general and how far and deep it has become entrenched. That is what shocks me because I feel like the start of it was so subtle that the outpouring of it the last few years has felt sudden so now I’m just questioning where the catalyst was and how things devolved to their current state.
