1.
Some white kid puts a chokehold on some Indian-American kid in a Dallas high school, then gets only 1 day of suspension while the brown kid gets 3, and it is presumed that I am one of those people who will of course be (1) deeply interested in this, (2) outraged by it, and possibly even (3) willing to sign a petition being sent around by the brown kid’s mother.
But hey, I’m the one who subscribed a few years ago to an online news magazine aimed at members of the greater South Asian diaspora, wasn’t I? And the one who still occasionally checks out a sensationalizing email headline when they send one, right? And the one who has many times considered unsubscribing but still hasn’t done so?
The magazine’s Instagram profile has some minimal detail about the Dallas incident itself and its apparently unfair/presumably racist aftermath. Then there are the less-than-journalistically sourced additional factoids in the comments section. And of course the pile-on of fear, paranoia, and umbrage. The brown boy victim (!!!) was disciplined more harshly than the white boy. MUST BE RACISM! THIS IS TERRIBLE! Wait, the brown boy has a long history of disciplinary problems? and was cruelly taunting the white boy before any violence ensued? and is possibly a known bully himself? OK BUT STILL VIOLENCE IN RESPONSE IS NOT OKAY! WHITE BOY SHOULD GET THE HARSHER PUNISHMENT! Wait, the white boy’s father is on the school board? OH SEE NOW THIS IS THE WHITE POWER STRUCTURE CRUSHING US AGAIN!
I’m semi-mocking all this in my head but reading it anyway. Experiencing no particular emotional response, yet not navigating away. From my seemingly safe perch in another part of the country, and long past my own school days that did contain, from time to time, moments of being racially bullied…I find myself wondering why this school incident should matter to me any more than the thousands of similar things that happen every day, to all types of young people, which I will never hear about.
Finally in the Instagram stream of comments, a young man—brown like the entire readership of the magazine, as far as I can tell—says There are two sides to every story. He seems to be the only one not presuming or projecting.
Somebody else chides him for stepping out of line.
2.
I joke that I’m the least Indian Indian-American you’ll ever meet. A bad desi. I’m a member of my birth/youth culture, not my parents’: a GenX product of greater NYC and its leafy green NJ suburbs, most profoundly influenced by my friends and teachers at a private day school, and my Columbia undergrad & grad school professors—in all cases, primarily secular Jews and lapsed Catholics, or to put it another way, white(ish) urban intellectuals and artsy types.
Deeper still, I think…I’m the direct result of the books, records, and films I’ve incorporated into my being over decades. (Ask me sometime about how Thomas Hardy’s JUDE THE OBSCURE may have been, in 10th grade, the first feminist novel I ever read.)
My South Asian extended family was itself less committed to “Indianness” than to their particular form of evangelical Christianity, along with a hint of that Anglophilia you sometimes find among the formerly British-colonized.
(Bullies and abusers are well-represented on both sides of my family, which might explain why I’m not conditioned to immediately, unthinkingly believe stories in which brown-skinned people are the presumed victims.)
Once I was past the awkwardness and insecurities of middle school, I became an expert code-switcher, a charmer, a vibrant and friendly thing, a person who got good at making herself right at home in any tribe, even those where she might encounter small casual bits of racism or (more frequently) undercurrents/overcurrents of exotica.
Indian people are the most beautiful in the world!
Indians are the most spiritual people of all!
Indians like you are so smart! You’re going to go to med school, I suppose.
I mean WTF is a Jersey girl supposed to make of all that? Smile & nod in public, occasionally pushing back but with a controlled, educative tone of voice. There’ll be time later for private rage and snark, for rolling one’s eyes when relating an anecdote to friends, and for remembering that being treated as the Other is no fun even when they’re trying, weirdly, to compliment you. You do realize there are plenty of ugly and stupid Indians in that nearly a billion population, don’t you? A thing I’d rarely get to say out loud.
Besides, as we all should know by now: If you’re going to puff yourself up with pride when they make strange tribally-based compliments, you can’t be too shocked when they drag you and your kind down, either.
3.
I’ll tell you about a (rare) time when I wildly abandoned myself to the pull of commiseration and identification. I was home with our adopted African-American son, then still an infant, when I heard some news about a black toddler in another part of Baltimore being accidentally dragged to death by a driver in a truck. It’s still hard for me to understand the mechanics of this, but apparently the boy’s mother had been trying to cross a busy intersection when the handle of the stroller latched onto a Ford F-150’s back bumper. The stroller went flying more than a mile down the road before the driver realized anything strange.
Nearly twenty years later I am still deeply horrified by this incident.
The shredded little boy was still alive, briefly, by the time his mother got to him.
I was beside myself for weeks. I mourned more for this unknown child than I have for my own half-estranged family members. I mourned for this unknown child as much as I did when one of my college friends was killed by a car while riding her bike. My tender new-mother heart mourned for this stranger’s African-American son as if he were my own. I’d never, ever experienced anything like this, nor have I since.
I found the family’s address in the newspaper and sent them a mournful note and two hundred dollars. A year later, I got a kind thank-you note.
4.
I know who I am and I know that on some level I don’t belong anywhere and I am mostly very, very glad about this. But I realize that floating free without a strong racial/tribal identification is a privilege in some ways—a privilege that used to seem fundamentally “American” to me. I was a child of the FREE TO BE YOU AND ME era. My sense of self is syncretic and sui generis because it had to be. My blood relations were the kind of people you have to escape. Unbelonging was sometimes hard in my youth; now it is my comfort zone. Certain things get to me. Others do not. I can’t always explain why. It is a luxury, I know. Even in this country purportedly dedicated to rugged individualism, it is a luxury and a privilege to feel like a citizen of the world and a citizen of nowhere at the same time.
5.
It was 1988 and I’d been fired from my first writing job at an alternative weekly newspaper—one of my proudest moments, actually. It was essentially for insubordination, even though the publisher looked at me with genuine concern when he said, “You don’t seem very happy here,” then gave me two weeks to wrap up and clear out. See, I’d had this quaint notion about journalistic separation of “church and state” (i.e. editors/reporters completely uninfluenced by advertisers, something that used to be standard practice). So I refused to accept assignments directly from Dave the sales manager. (“Sandy, I need you to go do a write-up about this Realtor out in Jersey City, they’re having a 20th-anniversary celebration, mkay?” Hot news tip, Dave. Thanks, I’ll pass. Actually, I probably didn’t contradict him to his face—just ignored his directive.)
I was proud to be fired, but then again, as some proverb or another must say, Pride Payeth Not The Rent.
Resourceful me, I soon had two possible jobs to look into. One was a full-time gig writing business news for various trade magazines in a company that published titles for jewelers, fabric store owners, real estate developers, and so forth. The second was a part-time job as a photo assistant at Newsweek. A friend of mine named Abigail was leaving and her busy boss, a photo editor, was happy to have her recommend a replacement. There’s no guarantee I’d have been hired, but in those days I was charming and bright enough to be offered pretty much any job I interviewed for.
On a visit out to New Jersey to see my father, I happened to mention, with great excitement, the possibility of working for a big deal national magazine like Newsweek. He didn’t have much to say, other than this:
Well of course somebody named Abigail would have that job.
I was stunned.
I’d never thought of Abigail as “a white Anglo-Saxon person,” just “my nice and helpful friend.” You’d be perfect for the job, she’d said, and I doubt my ethnicity played any part in her assessment. I’d been pretty lucky up to that point to encounter some random bigotry from powerless people but very few material barriers, at least none that I could see. From a young age, I’d been offered starring roles in school plays, leadership roles, and jobs I hadn’t even applied for. I was charismatic and high-energy, the kind of young person whom teachers and bosses liked to promote.
My immigrant father had lived a different, more challenging experience as a minority in this country—but he was also the product of significant narcissistic abuse by his own father, steeped in early trauma and lacking deep confidence. It wasn’t right for him to project his personal and racial self-loathing on me, but again and again, he would.
It’s not that I’d never been treated in obvious or subtle racist ways. I had, often enough. But the fact that I was born in this nation, and well propagandized by its facade of happy pluralism, freed me from that type of aggrieved paranoia.
Or did it?
At 21 or 22 I wasn’t yet free of my father’s immediate influence. He implied that Abigail had her job only because she was white. He didn’t have to explicitly say that I probably wouldn’t get it because I was brown. But I backed off anyway. With the semi-legit, yet not really sensible excuse, that I needed the full-time trade magazine job for financial reasons (I mean—I could easily have picked up a restaurant gig or something else to supplement) I never even called Abigail’s boss for a chat.
While the trade mag job turned out fine for the moment, it was a truly ignorant decision for a bunch of professional reasons, first and foremost that I’d foregone significant prestige. Newsweek wouldn’t have guaranteed later success, but working in trade journalism was essentially a downgrading. And an ironic one. I’d complained about wanting journalistic independence at my first newspaper job; now I was in a segment of the writing business where all our advertisers were also all our sources for stories.
Because of my father’s perfectly understandable racial insecurities as an immigrant in this country, I had self-sabotaged.
Then again, I never wanted to be in mainstream journalism in the first place.
It was not who I really was.
6.
I shouldn’t be ashamed of this fact, but I am. In the days after 9/11, I stuck close to home. I thought about donating blood but talked myself out of it. I stayed in my neighborhood which, although primarily white and certainly harboring its share of racists, is also more or less urban/progressive/friendly.
I was briefly very afraid to catch shit from anyone “out there” presuming I was “related” in any way to the men who’d brought down the towers.
Meanwhile, in New Jersey just a few miles East of Manhattan, my father was putting a NEVER FORGET bumper sticker on the back of his Jaguar. Was this an earnest, heartfelt show of identification and mourning, or unconsciously chosen talisman to keep him safe from bigots?
Both, is my guess.
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