BHEJA BAZAAR: Glossary: Gora

Glossary: Gora

1 Comments

White dude. White man. White folks. This catch-all South Asian word is typically used to separate and distinguish, like the Native American paleface but add some spice and it takes on a bad-ass attitude and can be used to effectively serve a dollop of cultural befuddlement, sprinkled with a garnish of derision. Consider, for example:

Bloody goras! How come they're always in debt?

Article: Creative Commons License 2008 Gavin Barrett

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Gavin Barrett

Gavin Barrett is Owner/Founding Partner + Creative Director, of award-winning Toronto agency Barrett and Welsh.

1 comment :

Anonymous said...: I get the feeling white people will enjoy this one. Young white people in particular will enjoy being called this.

Not quite as much as when a black person calls a white boy "my nigger" which white kids love.

It seems that young white people welcome racial insults that are directed at them because it means they are "down" with whoever is insulting them.

White people like to feel important. If someone makes up a special word just to insult you for being white you must be pretty important.

It also gives racist whites a reason to be even more smug and outwardly hostile towards brown people.

It's very difficult to genuinely hurt a white person's feelings.; May 12, 2008 9:59 am

About the ideawallah

Gavin Barrett is Owner/Founding Partner + Chief Creative Officer, of award-winning Toronto multicultural advertising agency Barrett and Welsh. In pursuit of big ideas he has: nibbled on pigs' ears (not on a live pig at the time); gone elephant-back in the Thai jungle (no elephants were hurt); gambled in a Macau casino (was utterly destroyed). His ads: have run in 35 countries, helped elect prime ministers, attracted the ire of the lawyers for Dolly the clone sheep, drawn an angry crowd in Lagos, have been studied in business texts in Canada and India and received derisive mention in a John Irving novel. His poems: can be found in Penguin’s anthology of 14 contemporary Indian poets, Reasons for Belonging.

He cannot: sing.

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