Topically, Mississippi Masala feels particularly urgent against today’s political backdrop. It often seems as if members of my South Asian community prefer to ignore the existence of learned, intergenerational anti-blackness under the hasty guise of solidarity. This convenient denial has played out in the public arena over the past year. Consider M.I.A.’s tone-deaf comments about Black Lives Matter in April — the incident that expedited the Afropunk backlash — in which she said Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar weren’t stepping up to the plate for Muslim, Syrian, or Pakistani (read: ‘brown’) lives. Beyond the erasure of black Muslims that this sentiment implied, it also suggested that she believes Black Lives Matter is merely a political fad rather than a movement borne out of urgency. M.I.A. showed little willingness to concede her own allyship.

A month later came Azealia Banks’s Twitter row with Zayn Malik; the rapper took a jab at the pop star’s Pakistani heritage, calling him a “curry-scented bitch.” This prompted South Asian Twitter users to reclaim #CurryScentedBitch as a site of self-love. Browse the hashtag and you’ll see young South Asians, largely from the diaspora, preening for selfies. Many were light-skinned, and ‘pretty’ according to Eurocentric beauty standards, with the effect of reinforcing the latent colorism in South Asian communities that buttresses anti-blackness. Compiled, such images suggested these bodies had, collectively, more worth and value than a dark-skinned black woman; there was no interrogation of how racial insults, as cruel as they might seem, can only cut as deep as the relative social power of the perpetrator. And obfuscated in this vaguely corny narrative of righteousness was the fact that South Asians were gleefully engaging in a pile-on of a black woman. Revisit Banks’s December 2014 interview with Hot 97, where she passionately, tearfully spoke about feeling alienated in an industry engineered against black people, and black women in particular. How do Banks’s undeniably pungent comments to Malik square with insecurities, rooted in white supremacy, that she’s vocalized so candidly? Answering this question didn’t seem to matter to the #CurryScentedBitch champions.

This inequity goes deeper than pop culture, into politics. After Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina last June, the state’s Sikh-American Republican governor Nikki Haley initially hesitated to remove the Confederate flag from the capitol. She’d previously said the flag was integral to the state’s identity, somehow unaware of its charged symbolism. And it was only after much waffling and external pressure that Haley ordered the flag’s removal, saying that it, “while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state.” Little about her outlook on black lives changed, as proven in comments she’d make a few months later: “Black lives do matter, and they have been disgracefully jeopardized by the movement that has laid waste to Ferguson and Baltimore.”