During the years of slavery in America, there was a hierarchy of blackness. 'House niggers', those slaves who curried favour with their white masters, were allowed to live in the plantation home and enjoyed a higher status of slavehood than their brethren who worked the fields. That house niggers were usually fairer, after generations of 'intimacy' with their masters, further contributed to their status and to the lessening of their blackness.
It always paid to have a bit of 'cream in your coffee'.
In The Karma of Brown Folk (2000), Vijay Prashad explodes the myth of South Asians as a 'model minority', and argues convincingly that they perpetuate racial inequality in the US, precisely because of their willingness to play this role of house nigger. Preposterous, you say? Read this book and you may be convinced otherwise.
While sociologist W.E. Du Bois once asked America's blacks: "How does it feel to be part of a problem?", Prashad asks his fellow desis: "How does it feel to be part of a solution?" He points out how South Asians are a select group in the US— courted by right wing Republican politicians seeking to prove that anyone, regardless of race, can make it in America. They are held up as the 'model minority'—successful in professions, business, and now the high tech sector.