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Posted on 06/25/2025 8:39:49 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
When I was a little girl, my mother used to call me her “Mississippi Masala.” A term of endearment and, as I would later come to find out, a reference: the nickname almost perfectly encapsulated my particular diasporic experience. My Pakistani parents moved to the United States in the 1990s, settling down in Mobile, Alabama—a town that is just about as south as you can get before plunging into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
People are shocked when my birthplace is revealed. To many, a Muslim South Asian family has no place in the flattened conception of the Southern United States. The South, thick with the scent of magnolia blossoms and studded with jewel-toned swamps, remains the symbolic site of the Black and white racial binary within the American imagination. This notion has a historical basis. The Southern United States is plagued by the persistent aftershocks of its heavy and violent history—the history of racial slavery, the Confederate project, the Jim Crow era, and the vicious persistence of white supremacy. Yet, these legacies aren’t confined to the South and are far more complex than a binary could ever capture.
As Indian-born director and filmmaker Mira Nair’s film (and my namesake) Mississippi Masala (1991) shows, we exist within a racial hierarchy with innumerable rules, boundaries, and baked-in contradictions. Black Americans and South Asian immigrants in the South are both marginalized under white supremacist society but in different ways. And sometimes, the social confines of racial hierarchy are erected and policed by people of color themselves.
Nair’s film grapples with the ugly assumptions and potential for understanding between the two groups—all while weaving a vibrant narrative about the phantom pain of displacement, the intricacy of Black and South Asian (non)solidarities, and how boundary-crossing love fights to prevail.
(Excerpt) Read more at theindy.org ...
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I think this stuff is worth bringing up to get a sense of how the new generations of people in America view it, and their place within it...
Zohran Mamdani's father is also of note and charisma himself --a highly cultured professor of anthropology at Columbia University.
The movie “Mississippi Masala” grossed total sales of about $7 million, after a budget of somewhere around $5million. So it didn’t lose money (most films do) but its total gross was miniscule.
The fact that Mamdani’s mother had one leftist racial-narrative movie 35 years ago, Dad is a leftist Columbia social-studies teacher from a former British Colony, and Jr. is a completely unknown red-diaper baby - puts of red flags they are some sort of globalist / intel agents
After 20 years of Obama, Stanley Ann Dunham, USAID, MI6, DAVOS-Bilderburg - its gotta be a consideration.
Just like Greta Thunberg and Sen. Jon Ossoff, the nepobabies of film directors and academics - with a narrative scripted like a Hollywood movie.
IIRC, Key West is as far south before plunging in to the Gulf of America as you get.
It was actually a pretty good movie.
“ just about as south as you can get before plunging into the warm waters of whatever the f…”
And NYC is as east as you get before plunging onto Long Island, a place that is becoming more and more pro Trump than any stupid NYC wants to dream of
What’s his point. He lost me
The whole family is charismatic and talented, so bummed that their energies are spent toward leftist politics.
Obama at least pretended to be somewhat moderate...
“IIRC, Key West is as far south before plunging in to the Gulf of America as you get.”
Geographically? Of course. Culturally? Not so much.
😂😂😂😂
I remember the Indian father telling a young Denzel Washington ‘You don’t know what racism is’. It said something about American blacks as this fella was on the receiving end of it in Africa.
I actually saw back when I was in college. Long time ago. I remember it being a decent flick with Denzel Washington.
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