Basketball and Cultural Blackness
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Indo-Pak basketball can be both powerful and contradictory. While it exists to resist stereotypes about South Asians, its existence also reinforces other stereotypes about other racialized groups as well as gender.
Thangaraj's paper on Indo-Pak basketball highlights how South Asian masculinity evolves through how they engage with Blackness. South Asian men who play basketball adopt cultural elements associated with Blackness, like certain slang or a specific style (mostly the aesthetic aspects of African American culture, in order to challenge the "model minority" stereotype that often confines them).
However, this adoption of "cultural Blackness" is not entirely innocent, as the people who adopt that culture only embrace the "cool" factor while distancing themselves from the struggles tied to Blackness, unintentionally reinforcing racial hierarchies and further commodifying the Black identity, but still detaching from the lived struggle. The idea of cultural Blackness offered South Asian men a way to live vicariously through this curated "American" identity, but they still did not fully adopt Black masculinity, because they viewed their own masculinity as more controlled and socially acceptable, reinforcing racial hierarchies while adopting select aspects of Black culture.
Thangaraj also analyzes how Indo-Pak basketball is framed as an exclusive and hypermasculine space where aggression and dominance define what a man is, which shuts out expressions of gender or sexuality, and further marginalizes women from participating in these activities. These spaces are also class exclusive and further showcase class divides within racialized communities, as participants often need resources for travel or gear, which would reinforce financial barriers.