Curse you, model minority-where is your humanity?
A South Indian perspective on the pitfalls of race
In light of the Black Lives Matter movement, I’m ashamed of myself.
As a European of Indian heritage, I wonder where my place is currently. I yearn to identify with the brave young men and women marching against racial prejudice all over the world but I’m deeply conscious of being part and parcel of the problem that enshrined and continues to enshrine social injustice in today’s world.
I’m also part of the ‘model minority’ myth that has been propagated by supremacists for decades-Indians are generally considered to be either whip-smart IT-whizzes who belong in Silicon Valley, successful business tycoons or white-collar professionals such as doctors or lawyers. We’re the ‘good foreigners’, the one’s who can be counted on not to make too much of a nuisance of ourselves, the ones that can be tolerated in a neighbourhood if not actively sought out and whose children may help instill better values in Western teenagers but who should not inter marry, for all our sakes. Maybe I’m being melodramatic but the experiences I’ve made in white society have been so ambivalent that the characterisations just don’t seem that moot at all.
Whatever the real state of affairs, Indians of the second generation (which I technically am, though I choose not to identify as such) grew up hearing the mantra of ‘work hard to triumph within the bounds of the system’. The system of racial prejudice could be won over if we only studied hard enough, worked hard enough and became the all round people-pleasers and suck-it-ups needed to ensure our parents hardship would never be our own.
Our elders may even scoff at the idea of our generation facing racism. We didn’t have to come to a foreign country, not knowing either language or customs and were not forced to carve out an existence for ourselves with the burden of a family hanging over our heads like a literal sword of Damocles. Any racism we face pales in comparison-it’s cute, in their reckoning.
And now that we have been granted all the status and privilege they worked so hard to achieve, we were tasked with one and only one thing. Play the game and keep your head down. I know that many of my white friends grew up in an atmosphere that encouraged them to protest against injustice of any kind, whether that concerns racism, sexism or the protection of the environment. Their parents raised them to march for their civil liberties and to speak up against any and all forms of injustice they encountered-a vestige of the 60’s culture those parents actively sought to cultivate in their offspring.
My parents were too busy keeping afloat in order to take the same stance, and later were preoccupied with raising us without any support system to fall back on, so I never blamed them for not raising that kind of awareness in me-they had, after all, distilled strong values of what was right and wrong in me which helped me find the path myself.
The only thing I can’t condone is their ambivalent attitude to race.
When it suits them, they are quick to condemn ‘the white man’s racism’ against ‘us’ but when there is a chance of anything disparaging us as Indians in relation to a recent racist incident, they are insistent not to be thrown in the same boat ‘as that black drug dealer’. They would be sympathetic and maybe even enjoy reading a news story where a black man ended up soundly abusing a clearly racist police officer but they were clear in that we should never try to get directly involved in incidents of that kind-speaking up was useless.This was the white man’s country-we were all foreigners and had to play by the rules. We couldn’t set the rules. Their society, their rules.
It stings, in many ways. Because as health professionals, my parents know the extent of racism endemic to society, they are familiar with the stumbling block that race can play in a community that chooses to identify as homogeneous. To want the best for your children is natural. To unconsciously acquiesce to a broken system in order to achieve that is not. Martin Luther King said
‘The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people’.
My parents are not racists. Yet, at times, they say things that stump me, that stump them once we’ve had a discussion over it.
‘It’s only natural that Austrians would think badly of them-they shouldn’t be walking around with a gaggle of kids, wearing frumpy clothes like that, it just invites the question of whether or not they live off welfare’
‘So many beautiful young girls-why do they insist on covering themselves with those head scarves?’
‘I’ve never met a single________(insert ethnic group) who was decent. I know there are some good ones but I never met them’
These are opinions said in the heat of the moment and that are often retracted but they do tend to re-occur in conversations.
I have always been adamant about the fact that if a single black person is racially profiled on the street, it has an impact on me and my community as well. If a black person cannot be free, none of us ever will be, model minority or not.
What does that word even mean? It’s no less than a cage in order to keep us complacent. It’s dangling a carrot in front of a group of desperate rabbits, a promise of acceptance that will always remain elusive, however hard one may try. Because, try us we might, we will never be able to subsume that mantle of whiteness however much we are the ‘preferred ethnicity’. Trevor Noah in his witty memoir ‘Born a Crime’ sums the situation up perfectly:
That’s what apartheid did: It convinced every group that it was because of the other race that they didn’t get into the club. It’s basically the bouncer at the door telling you, ‘We can’t let you in because your friend Darren and his ugly shoes.’ So you look at Darren and say, ‘Screw you, Black Darren. You’re holding me back.’ Then when Darren goes up, the bouncer says, ‘No, it’s actually your friend Sizwe and his weird hair.’ So Darren says, ‘Screw you, Sizwe,’ and now everyone hates everyone. But the truth is that none of you were ever getting into that club.
We shouldn’t even want to get into that club.
There is a better one waiting for us, one where we can be ourselves with our black brothers and sisters. But even the best of us succumb to the myth of acceptance-the great Indian national icon Gandhi no less. The man who inspired millions with his call for non-violent resistance and influenced black anti-colonialist leaders across Africa was also an enabler. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, while he lived in South Africa as a young lawyer, spewed vitriol against the resident black population that would astonish many of his admirers today. The ‘Great Soul’ is adamant in that Indian people should be considered superior to Africans in every way, shape and form, a kind of thinking that is still prevalent considering the recent race riots incited against Africans in India.
How ironic that this is done by a people who have been colonised themselves and, in many cases, have a skin tone similar to the ones they choose to disparage. It’s particularly ridiculous considering it’s a country where an African minority has existed for hundreds of years and even ruled swathes of the country!
In another post, I have talked about the struggle of being brown and living in Europe- many times, it’s with my black friends that I was able to commiserate. Black intellectual writing and thinking from the likes of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, W.E.B Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and, most recently, Ta Nehisi Coates, have sustained me at times when I felt I couldn’t face up to the struggle of the so-called post-racial world where equality is apparently up for grabs to the enterprising. To know that people of my own heritage are denigrating, or even wilfully ignoring the plight of those they should feel the most connected to, is heart-wrenching.
Because, however much I achieve, I am always conscious of being the odd one out-the first brown person in my office, the first person with an English name at work, the only Indian in my community to pursue journalism. Lying to myself that I am a part of a bigger whole-that I’m not ‘so black’ (actual words spoken)-just won’t cut it anymore.
Why do I say that? Let me tell you a story.
A few months back, prior to the Covid-19 scare, I went for mass on a Sunday.
After the priest had proclaimed the peace, I saw everyone, including the white woman on the chair in front of me, turn around in order to wish their neighbours all the best. I saw her retract her hand and turned to my right-my neighbour seemed an unobjectionable man in every shape and form, the only thing distinguishing him from assorted company being that he was black. In the split second of that appraisal, she turned to me, hesitated, retracted her hand and, finally, turned around to face the front.
That was the one moment I was proud and not ashamed.
I’d been mulling over the fact of whether or not I was a conformist enabler and I was glad that the choice had been taken from me once and for all. At the very least, I never had wool over my eyes and after this, I never would. I was brown and I was also black in that moment. Turning my head up to the canopy, I smiled and vowed that I would always be both.
In my shame, that is the moment I would like to hold onto.
