Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Is White The New Brown?

Jacinta - too kiwi to be Indian?Is this a case of "the pot calling the kettle black"?
Or at least, not brown enough?
A blonde blue-eyed Wellington woman is at the centre of a new racism storm after winning a Miss IndiaNZ beauty contest... and then being accused of not looking Indian! Jacinta Lal was booed and has been the subject of complaints to organisers from Indian spectators who she says are no better than the dearly-departed TV presenter Paul Henry.
Jacinta - who won the central district Miss IndiaNZ back in April - has a Fiji-Indian dad and a NZ mum, but festival organisers received complaints questioning her eligibility for the pageant. Jacinta said she had heard people saying that she didn't look Indian enough to win!
The rucus has only now surfaced after the Henry incident. She says: "The Indian community seem to have taken great offence at Henry's comments but when I attended that beauty pageant, I saw huge offence coming back the other way. There's no difference between what Paul Henry and those select few Indians were saying."
Jacinta also raised eyebrows when she came to Auckland for the national Miss IndiaNZ pageant in August.
Organisers strongly emphasise that this event is not an Indian event but a Kiwi-Indian event, so entrants must have NZ residency, NZ citizenship and some sort of Indian background. It would have been nice if some of the spectators had kept that in mind...

No comments: