The Karma of Brown Folk

A few years ago, my cousin was interviewed on TV, a specimen presented as proof that European Americans were being denied admission to Berkeley because there were too many reserved seats for minority groups. My cousin may have mentioned her brown Daddy, my uncle, in addition to the Ukrainian American mother from whom she gets her pink skin tone, but at any rate, the interview didn’t mention it, presenting her self-identification as “white”. Since matriarchy has never been a driving force for race identification in the US, we cousins thought this was amusing, if opportunistic. In the time since, my cousin has graduated from a UC school, fulfilling the model minority requirement in true South Asian fashion. But for me, the fact remains that on National TV, her relationship to her father, to me, her Indian cousin, was denied, and through that denial, her relationship to our common Indian grandparents. And saddest of all, assuming it was her choice to deny her Indianness, rather than the editor’s, I understand because I love her, why it was necessary for her to pass for white. In the USA, dichotomized between black and white – it’s so much easier for a brown person to say we’re white, Aryan or Caucasoid.

Vijay Prasad tackles his community of desis (South Asian immigrants and those with any blood connection to the subcontinent) on just such issues of self-identification. He begins with a review of the history of North American othering of India and Indians, the designation of India and Indians as bizarre and passive, and comments on the North American avoidance of critique of colonialism. In the process, he reveals and critiques the legacy of misinformation that South Asians find themselves dealing with every day, presents a long overdue answer to the sappy platitudes and simplistic jingo of Deepak Chopra, and a highly welcome critique of Dinesh D’Souza’s facile dismissals of affirmative action.

Comparing our current state to legacies of Du Bois, King, MK Gandhi is no simple nod in the direction of these gurus, but a soul search that is exacting as it is unflinching.

Prasad points out the inappropriate comparisons D’Souza makes between immigrants and blacks.

He would prefer that South Asians and Americans be more concerned about social justice than about the individual’s capacity to deal with the social structure in which he finds himself, with an activist’s certainty about the identity of the oppressor, the white community.

Protesting “the way we are used by white supremacy” (pg 193) he demands individuality for desis, while acknowledging no such possibility for individual whites who may also be focused on social justice issues. Never once does he allow a tip of the topi to the white liberals who have, with their interest in the New Age movement, differentiated themselves from Americans like say, Jesse Helms or Pat Buchanan. Perhaps some of these were attracted to Indian food, religion and philosophy (neatly intertwined as in all religions) by Deepak Chopra’s permission to feel good platitudes, but – lighten up, eh? – from the 80s to now, there is a huge change in mainstream acceptance of Indian products: clothes, food mediated by Yogi Teas and Nanak Halva, that suffices for many of us who remember the contempt of an older generation. So, complaining about the static and undifferentiated view of Indian culture, Prasad makes the same error himself. If deliberate, it’s a small revenge in a book that urges and celebrates resistance to the forces of injustice we endure and commit in the new world.

You sense Prasad is way too smart to blame “the system” as is fashionable today, but the Marxist in him concentrates only on corporate managers and employees, ignoring a large segment of the population of North America who work for themselves. The entrepreneur professional for whom work may indeed be a joy and who may experience the fear and stress associated with risk but also the freedom to explore and give back in community relationships.

and the solidarity he recommends across ethnic groups does include European-Americans. But to label European Americans “whites” in the publication year 2000 is to be wilfully blind to the gradations of self-identification of European Americans, the spectrum of political dissent within European-American communities in the USA. Racism is all-pervasive but Prasad acknowledges it only when expressed downwards, forgetting it is just as easy to express racism up the socio-economic scale.

Prasad is a little harsh when he upbraids Deepak Chopra for walking away from real social divisions and preaching the panacea of social acceptance and wilful blindness to inequalities. Chopra packaged Hinduism in hardcover, but his message is the same Brahminical message preached to the underclasses of India for centuries, that anger and opposition are elicited not by external forces but by internal ones, the message that pours cold water on the slow burn that erupts in organized labor and social protest.

Discussing the failure of our parents utopia in the UK, Prasad points to young people’s music as proof of protest, and describes the emergence of SA gangs as “a convenient alliance...between Asian commercial bourgeoisie (who did not want to lose control of their neighborhoods and market places) and the local Asian lumpen proletariat.” then he cautions – “the Alliance was not radical but defensive, intended to protect the bourgeoisie aspirations of the community. Plenty of radicalism rises from the need to defend every small gains we desis make in the new world and Prasad offers the small entrepreneur no admiration for chutzpah, combativeness, organization or adaptability but dismisses all such entrepreneurial spirit as bourgeoisie aspirations. Someone should explain that money has to be made before one can give it away.

I met a man from Bellingham WA who never heard that there had been anti-“coolie” and anti-“hindoo” riots in his hometown in 1907. It came up in conversation because I said I know so little about the place except for this fact, culled from my knowledge of the history of my community. And after my recount, he and I faced one another across an expanse of table, both wishing we had words to bridge the stain his ancestors and the amazing fact of his ignorance of it.

The Ghadar Party Prasad so admires in the book had all the elements he decries today – concentration on Indian politics to the exclusion of the real problems of the immigrant populations, the promotion of an anti-imperial but fixed cultural image of India. At first, it seems odd that he would laud the Ghadar movement for its engagement with Indian politics but critique the same backward looking stance in desi organizations in the US today. The difference he points out -- and it is a crucial difference -- is that Ghadar was against British Imperialism in India, where as North American desi cultural and religious organizations of the present are engaged in support of Hindu fundamentalism. Ghadar’s fight was to free India so that desis in Canada could get a fair shake, whereas the IHPA and other fundamentalist organizations of their ilk today are intent upon draining funds from the Indian immigrant community to their own coffers. Prasad exposes the difference by simply following the money.

When Prasad applies an inappropriate post-facto Marxist standard to a protest, he seems more leftist than logician. Speaking of the subject of the Southall Youth movement in England, he says, ‘A convenient alliance was formed ... the alliance was not radical but defensive, intended to protect the bourgeois aspirations of the community. As nothing like the Southall Youth Movement had been organized before, SYM was rather radical by the standards of its day. Prasad, however, seems to define the term, “radical” as “promoting redistributive social justice” and by that definition, no, SYM was in no way radical. But it was an effective grass roots movement protecting life and hardwon property.

He quotes Black Panther Fred Hampton’s 1969 question, “Did you ever cook something so long that it turns into something else?” and it’s a question the author might well ask himself in relation to the USA.

In conclusion, Prasad advocates solidarity across minority and disadvantaged ethnic group lines as solution to prejudice between communities of color, again with whites as the prime presumed common enemy. European Americans were also on the front lines in the sixties, protested the Vietnam war, stood outside the WTO conventions in Seattle. The solidarity Prasad admires must include all who believe in social justice, excluding no one, not even “whites” on the basis of skin color. Tribalism can only be countered when each member of a tribe knows it will receive justice in the courts and from the institutions of the land. There are “whites” who acknowledge and support the need for changes in the INS, the police and the courts, and this phenomenon should be acknowledged.

But the larger point, that we desis should be concerned about justice for all minority communities, not only our own, that we should fight social injustice wherever we encounter it, be more involved, protest more often rather than shrug and accept things is a good reminder to all readers, desi or not.