Cultural Implications
Among South Asian Americans, the term may be considered divisive, as first generation South Asian Americans use it to criticize the Americanization and lack of belonging to either Indian Asian or American culture they perceive in their second-generation peers or children. Ajay K. Ojha argues that ABCD "is a distinctive way of speaking, as it is humorous among mainstream Asian Indians, but can be taken as offensive or challenging to Asian Indian Americans." Writer Vijay Prashad describes the term as "ponderous and overused" and notes it as one of the mechanisms by which new immigrants attempt to make second-generation youth feel "culturally inadequate and unfinished.". The second-generation Indians, nonetheless, have treated first-generation Indians as "unpolished" and "villager-types". These segregations on both sides have led to the term ABCD and FOB being used.
Read more about this topic: American-Born Confused Desi
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or implications:
“The rumor of a great city goes out beyond its borders, to all the latitudes of the known earth. The city becomes an emblem in remote minds; apart from the tangible export of goods and men, it exerts its cultural instrumentality in a thousand phases.”
—In New York City, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)