Cultural Blackness and South Asian Ballers
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Thangaraj discusses cultural blackness in the context of the Black American culture that is often commodified for the purposes of imagining hyper-masculinity among non-white racialized people, specifically black American men. Proximity to blackness among South Asian men in America, has been, in a way, used as a tool for creating an American South Asian masculine identity. The ways in which cultural blackness has been commodified by white America to create the image of a hyper-masculine Black American man who plays sports, who is apolitical, whose labour is useful, and whose identity is considered “embraceable” and palatable for White Americans. South Asian men, who alone, are often excluded from Americanness, and by American ideas of masculinity, use their proximity to Black men as non-white racialized people in America to participate in forms of cultural blackness, that to the white American, is more authentic than if a white American man were to participate in them due to the racialization of South Asians and their proximity to blackness.