Heems (Himanshu Suri) on the Underbelly, Rejecting the Model Minority Myth & What Forward Actually Looks Like
By Dr. Punita Rice ·
A note before we begin: this conversation touches on mental health, substance use disorder, and suicide. Heems speaks about these experiences openly and publicly as part of his advocacy work and his mission as a storyteller. If you or someone you know is struggling, resources are available at 988lifeline.org, or by calling 988 to connect to a counselor who can help.
The most common South Asian American success story that gets told on repeat is familiar to us all: growing up to become doctor, an engineer, or a polished immigrant family that made it. And then there is everything that story leaves out… Himanshu Suri, aka Heems, has spent his career telling the second version.
The New York Times has described him “art curator, clothing designer, loving uncle, political activist and, of course, rapper.” That last one is how he came onto my radar (especially his solo albums, and his music with Swet Shop Boys, his collective with RizMC (Riz Ahmed) and Redinho, and of course, Das Racist in the early 2010s). He also has his own record label Greedhead, lifestyle brand Veena Company (which connects artists with their fans). He also appeared most recently on Bait on Amazon Prime, and his latest album A Hundred Alibis dropped last year (Loveseat and The Ballet have been on repeat in my car).
And of course, Heems is a political activist and social activist and a huge advocate for working class Americans, immigrants, and South Asian Americans.
Basically, Heems is a South Asian American creative who chose his own version of moving forward. And he’s someone who has spent years using his platform to tell the stories our community would rather not air… making him an incredible example of a Brown voice to inspire us all.
I spoke with Heems for the Brown Voices Project about growing up working class and Brown in Queens, what the model minority myth costs the people it erases, what he wishes all South Asian American kids knew, and what he’d tell a young Brown kid who just wants to make art…
Here are some key moments from our conversation…
On growing up Brown in Queens (and what his parents were measuring)
Heems grew up in eastern Queens, in a neighborhood that shifted over the course of the eighties (as South Asian families moved in). He went to local public schools in a diverse environment with Indian, Haitian, Chinese, Puerto Rican classmates, and attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan (one of the most competitive public schools in the country).
But the education he describes getting at home had nothing to do with curriculum.
Our parents always instilled in us the importance of school. And… how they would basically judge how successful their whole idea of moving here was based on how successful we would be. Almost quantitatively; the more money we made, the more successful the biggest decision of their lives was. Or unsuccessful.
Heems
Heems spoke about reading Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk, and how it changed his understanding of his own family’s immigrant story. He comes from a working class family, as part of the chain immigration and family reunification wave of the seventies and eighties (as opposed to the earlier wave of PhD-holding South Asians whose arrival shaped the model minority myth in the first place). And this distinction matters to him, and is at the core of who he is as an activist, and as an artist and storyteller.
I still represent the working middle class Indian American experience. Even in my work, I like to talk about the underbelly—we’re still driving Ubers, we’re still in seven elevens, we’re still driving cabs… Working class experience shouldn’t be dirty laundry, but we want to say we’re the doctors, we’re the CEOs, and we’re leaving all these great stories to the side to show this polished, colorful, almost Bollywood color palette of who we are rather than something more gritty.
Heems
On the model minority myth (and who it actually serves)
The model minority myth, Heems says, doesn’t just erase working class South Asian Americans, but gets actively perpetuated by the South Asian Americans themselves who benefit from it… and then use it to close doors on everyone else.
When we talk about “look at the Asians doing so well,” that’s disrespectful to working class South Asians… the model minority myth has been too readily accepted by South Asians who just want to say, “yep, we are the best.” And those are the people that want to shut the door on other immigrants, now that we got here.
Heems
We spoke about the challenges faced by South Asian American kids who don’t fit the myth.
This is the stuff we brush under the rug, but it hangs over us like black clouds eventually. There’s only so much brushing under the rug we can do.
On what the myth hides, and what he wants to address with his own work
What gets swept under the rug, according to Heems, is a whole ecosystem of experiences that the polished version of the South Asian American story has no room for:
the toll of extreme academic competition on teenagers
mental health struggles
substance use
learning disabilities (ADHD or dyslexia)
kids whose needs get overlooked because their teachers assume they’re fine
…this, of course, is backed by my research in Brown Voices.
South Asians with ADHD, with dyslexia, they get left to the side because “oh, they’re Indian, they’re probably good at school.” Or even the toll that extreme competition at elite institutions does to the mental health of young South Asians…
Failed arranged marriages, addiction, mental health, suicides, domestic violence — these things are occurring. It’s a disservice not to explore them as a storyteller, not to deal with them as a nonprofit, not to raise awareness of them with art.
Heems
On Stuyvesant, sleep, and what he told the students when he went back
Stuyvesant gave Heems a rigorous education. It also, in his telling, cost him something he hasn’t fully recovered from:
You can only have two out of three things: Good grades, a social life, or sleep. A lot of the kids forgo sleep—I didn’t sleep enough. Doing that in my teenage years, prefrontal cortex not developed—it really impacted my sleep hygiene for the rest of my life.
Heems
When he went back to speak to students there, that was the first thing he told them. Get your sleep.
But his deeper message for the students was about pressure and path:
I wanted to say: what would I tell me that I needed to hear when I was sixteen? Your path will find you. Education for education’s sake, learning for learning’s sake. Don’t just read for tests. Read. Learn. You don’t really need to know exactly what you’re going to do at sixteen. You’ll get where you need to go. And whatever that forward looks like — there’s a lot of different types of forward.
Heems
On two lives and one identity
In a 2015 Pitchfork interview I’d bookmarked years ago (and quoted in the original edition of Brown Voices) Heems said he often felt like he lived two lives: an Indian one and an American one. I asked him if he still felt that way.
My understanding of identity has come together a lot more as I’ve become more confident, older, and developed my needs for my happiness, not the happiness of my parents or anyone else. I probably identify more as a New Yorker than anything else, or as somebody in recovery, than as “am I Indian? am I American?”
Heems
And he offers a reframe on what those identity questions are actually for:
Am I Indian, am I American — that’s the first stepping stone to more serious existential questions of who am I and what’s my purpose, rather than who am I and what’s my job path.
Heems
On what success means to him
Heems doesn’t romanticize the struggling staving artist trope.
He’s run his own record label, managed his own business, worked blue collar jobs, and grappled with and reset his relationship with money—and has been clear-eyed about all of it.
I never qualified success as purely a quantitative measure of financial gain and status. But cultural capital doesn’t necessarily put food on my table either. And financial capital doesn’t feed my soul. So I need to feed my stomach and my soul.
Heems
I asked him what advice he would give to young South Asian creative kids, and his guidance was practical:
Don’t quit your day job — that’s not an insult, that’s just: secure the bag. And when the work exceeds the bag and has its own bag, then move to the creative work. You need a certain quality of life to create too.
Heems
And then:
Work hard. Be kind. Have faith. When those three things are firing on all cylinders, my life is the best — filled with gratitude for what I have, not lust for what I don’t. That’s where I want to be.
Heems
On what he wishes teachers knew
His answer here was about assumptions:
We don’t come ready and packaged for success. We’re not robots. It’s not a malfunction when we’re not the docile students you thought we were supposed to be. It’s reality.
Heems
He talked about wanting teachers to ask what’s going on at home.
As long as we keep going out there and being like, “we’re doctors, we’re lawyers, look at us,” people are going to think: “that kid doesn’t need help.” And maybe that kid does need more help. Students need to be treated case by case.
Heems
And then, almost as an aside, he mentioned where he found connection at Stuyvesant, and in so doing, shared an idea for how students can find connection in school even if its not with a teacher:
I would just go and talk about underground rap with my guidance counselor. But that made me feel a little more seen. And that helped me a lot. They don’t have to be Indian. They just have to be there.
Heems
This conversation is part of the Brown Voices Project. Their stories are shared here to inspire the next generation to imagine a wider sense of what is possible.
Snippets of this and other conversations will appear in Brown Voices: South Asian American Experiences in Schools, rereleasing this fall.
