"The Man Who Wouldn't be King" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - August 2013)

It was May 1992. Los Angeles was still on fire. Although the tumultuous scene was on our television set in India, it could not have felt any closer to home. The newscaster offered a recap of the story that my family had been following intently since April. Tensions had flared in the aftermath of the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial. Despite videotaped evidence, the jury had exonerated the policemen responsible for violently assaulting the black motorist. The acquitted policemen, as well as the jury, had been all white. In a year, we would be emigrating to the United States. Los Angeles was our destination. And, like King, my first name is Rodney.

King was so much a part of my consciousness that I would often introduce myself as “Rodney… You know… like King? Rodney King?” I often needed the added qualification because, as I was told on more than one occasion, it was odd that someone of my racial background would have “a name like that.” As a teenager, newly immigrated to the States, my job at a fast food restaurant was my firsthand introduction to my new city’s racialization. In many ways, my workplace was a representative microcosm of Los Angeles – they were both equally diverse. Yet, what was plain to see was that while the staff at the restaurant were generally first generation immigrants, it was largely upper management and the clientele that were white.

During the unrest, when King famously made his televised plea for the people of his city to “get along,” his statement became the stuff of legendary ridicule. Was it that the notion of co-existing amicably was so simplistic, or that the sentiment had come from an ordinary black man with a rap sheet who had been beaten by the police? What the incident had done was to raise questions about police brutality and whose rights the keepers of the peace were protecting. For South Asians, among members of other ethnic communities, similar issues of racial profiling and civil rights violations rose to a crescendo in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. Racial injustice may not be unique to any one minority group, but it is this very ubiquity of violence that should make us more mindful. Events in the current moment prove the need for us to voice our outrage, especially when it comes to those as defenseless as an ordinary, unarmed, young black boy whose life and rights seem to not matter at all.

Itself a legacy of the civil rights era, the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 aimed to disprivilege national origin in changing how immigrants would be allowed entry to the United States. Even in so doing, the express purpose of this change was to draw in highly skilled immigrant labor. The contemporary visibility of an upwardly mobile South Asian, and more specifically Indian, presence in America can be attributed to the 1965 measure. While 9/11 proved that class privilege was no deterrent to racial victimization, clearly, not all South Asians who immigrate to America do so from the technocratic ranks. Provisions made through family reunification clauses have diversified the community’s class demographics. In my family’s case, our petition for immigrant entry was made on the basis of my mother’s East African roots. As Goans of Kenyan heritage, despite the lack of quotas, it is evident that our case was helped because we were not only South Asian but also African – we ticked the diversity boxes for two developing regions. 

It is within these slippages of race and nationality that my personal experiences of being a dark-skinned resident of the United States have taken shape. The arrest occurred in January 2009. It had been a few short months after I had become an American citizen; short months after I participated in an election that brought to office America’s first black president – a man who, like me, had an East African history. Just off the bus from work, I was on foot, a few blocks away from my apartment in West Hollywood when a siren blared behind me. In broad daylight, I was handcuffed in my own neighborhood and shoved into the back seat of a deputy sheriff’s car. Citing a violation of the fourth amendment – which protects people from search and seizure without justifiable cause – I took my case to the ACLU, stating that I had been a victim of racial profiling. “What makes you think this

was about race?” the lawyer had asked. “What would make me think it wasn’t?” I wanted to say, but was stopped from doing so because the case just was not high profile enough for the organization. Technically, I had not been arrested because I had not been brought to the station; never mind that one never forgets what a pair of cuffs feels like.

“Rodney, huh?” The officer was looking at my California ID while the cold steel continued to bite into my wrists. Upon finding my UCLA identity card, establishing that I was an instructor there, the officer’s tone changed dramatically. “The reason I stopped you,” he said while uncuffing me, “is because you resemble a man who committed a burglary in this area earlier today.” Leaving aside the ludicrousness of why someone would be traipsing about on a brightly lit sunny day just after they had perpetrated a crime, I got straight to the point and said, “You stopped me because you made an assumption about my race.” Inadvertently confirming my suspicion, the officer responded, “It doesn’t matter if you’re a black. All that matters is that you matched the description I have.”

Was it because “a black” was in the wrong neighborhood? The irony should be apparent that in an area thought of as being liberal because of a large gay and lesbian presence, my complaint to the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department was met with the party line that, after an internal investigation, it was ascertained the officer had acted in accordance with policies and no evidence of racial profiling could be found. I am sure it was also not racial profiling when a San Mateo policeman stopped me for questioning in September 2011 claiming that I resembled a criminal. “I’ll show you what I mean,” the officer said, producing an image. “You have the same eyebrows,” he explained helpfully. It was probably also not racial profiling when I was questioned extensively at airport immigration in September 2001. 

In spite of my name, my dark skin, and my African history, unlike Rodney King, I have the “privilege” of proving that I am not African American. “Long after your case is closed, you are going to have to be Rodney

King for the rest of your life. Do you think you can handle that?” attorney Steven Lerman had asked his client, the Los Angeles Times reported in a story following King’s death last year. “Steve, I just don’t know,” King replied. The same article quotes an earlier interview in which King had mused, “People look at me like I should have been like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. I should have seen life like that and stay out of trouble … But it's hard to live up to some people's expectations, which [I] wasn't cut out to be.” King was an ordinary man upon whom national attention had been thrust without him having asked for it. As I mourn the miscarriage of justice in the Trayvon Martin case, I am reminded of an ordinary King. These are the legacies that remind us that injustice is all the greater because of its ordinariness, and all the more ordinary when one is black. 

The print version of this India Currents article appears online here, and also on The Aerogram. My thanks to the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club for recognizing this piece with an award for analysis at the 37th Annual Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards on May 31, 2014.

"10: 9/11" - O HERALDO: The Transient (Goa - 3 September 2011)

Crossing Borders

“So, you’re Indian?”

“Uh huh...”

“But you were born in Kuwait?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering if my passport had magically altered itself.

“I see,” the customs official responded, not seeing at all.

It was two weeks since 9/11 and while “swarthy” skinned folk expect the allegedly indiscriminate scrutiny they attract, I knew it would now be exponential.

“Returning from the U.K., huh? That where the accent’s from?”

“Oh... I went to an Anglo-Indian school –”

“And you’re a U.S. resident now?” The official asked, cutting me off. “You look...” He stopped himself, likely about to say “black.” “And you have a... What is it? A Spanish name?”

“Portuguese.” I so desperately wanted to point out the irony of this interrogation given that the official was East Asian American, but I knew that my seemingly muddled identity was dangerously close to having me tossed in a secret detention centre. Not how I wanted to end this holiday.

The man finally handed me back my passport, but with one last question: “Why?”

“It’s called colonization,” I said, and hurried away.

The Inscrutable Goan

In 2003, Berna Cruz fared far worse. Returning from seeing family in India, she transited in Chicago where her Canadian passport was declared a fake because it was thought inconceivable that someone of Indian origin could have a “Spanish” name. Denied contact with Canadian authorities, the distraught traveller was deported to India on a Kuwait Airways flight. Fortunately, she was assisted by the Canadian consulate in the Gulf.

It would seem as if diasporic Goans, travelling for the most mundane reasons, are international people of mystery - our displacements and colonial history not easily lending themselves to nationalist projects of categorization. But why should they?

U.S. War Department Pocket Guide to China (1942)

Similarly Different

Borders are pierced every day, as painfully proven ten years ago by those hijacked planes. The United States descended into a perilous spiral when the terror was brought to its own soil. Attempting to make itself whole again, the nation’s ire was directed externally against Afghanistan and Iraq through vigilante foreign policy. Internally, xenophobic attacks erupted nationwide against those that were or bore any resemblance to “Muslims” or “Arabs” – South Asians, Jews, and even Latinos. These events only further demonstrated that terror comes in supremely white hues too, as also seen in the July Norway bombings. Rather than critique the chauvinism responsible for post-9/11 attacks against their communities, the understandably assimilatory impetus of the aggrieved was to instead reiterate their own Americanness: We are not like “those” terrorists. But who exactly “those” people are has never been a stable qualification. The other always changes in marking the difference against which a nation can define itself. Even as multiculturalism is celebrated, it is not a wholehearted embrace of difference. Rather, it is the re-characterising of difference as being suitably Nationalist.

If colonial projects were about managing difference – for example: extending Portuguese monikers to Catholic but not Hindu Goans; then neo-colonial ones are about successfully deploying difference. When a neo-imperialist war continues in Iraq, does it make much difference that the U.S. President is a black man? The world changed after 9/11, but some things continue unaltered. Not least, a decade on, the importance of acknowledging difference and allowing it to be exactly what it is – a challenge to the status quo.

 A version of this article appears in print and here.

"Pan-South Asian Identity" - ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ASIAN AMERICAN ISSUES TODAY (2009)

Pan-South Asian American identity refers to the shared collective identity of South Asian individuals living in the United States, who otherwise have distinct national origins. South Asian Americans include Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Indian, Maldivian, Nepali, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan Americans. Despite religious, ethnic, and regional diversity within the South Asian American population, the shared experience of European colonization, displacement, and discrimination in the United States are some factors that have fostered the development of a pan-South Asian identity. Because it is a relatively new phenomenon, debates among South Asian Americans remain whether a pan-South Asian American identity is possible, whether one even exists, and how it exists within a larger Asian American rubric.

These multiple and layered identities are the result of cultural and population exchanges between regions, of arrivals of people from outside South Asia who became part of its cultural fabric, and of displacement caused by European colonization. The legacies of the colonial period continue to manifest themselves in South Asia and in diasporic communities; hence, it is not unusual to find South Asians whose migrant journeys span generations and continents, as is the case with Parsis, an Indian ethnic group of Persian origin who found employment in East Africa under the British colonial administration that also ruled India. In 1972, expelled along with other Asians by post-independence dictator Idi Amin, they may have attempted to find refuge in Canada because it is part of the British Commonwealth and, itself, a former colony. Other multiple diaspora South Asian origin groups include Indian Fijian and Siddhi (African descended) Pakistani Americans, for example. As immigrants, South Asians share many similarities with other Asian American groups, but they have not generally been part of the larger ethnic umbrella group.

“Desi” is a term often used to encompass pan-South Asian identity in the United States. Originally meaning “of the land,” the word desi connotes the idea of origin and connection while also recognizing the transnational, shifting, strategic, and pieced-together identity of an otherwise diverse and often disparate group. The appearance and adoption of the term desi, even if not uniformly, implies a process of self-definition and a means by which to construct a multifaceted immigrant identity.

AFFILIATION AS IDENTITY

The region of South Asia has long been synonymous with India, and more specifically north India, whose historical, religious, and cultural sway have greatly influenced the area and the global imagination at large. The mistaken interchangeability of India with the wider and very diverse location of South Asia adds even more confusion to questions of naming of ethnic American identities, when it comes to South Asians in the United States. Consider that the term “Indian,” as used in North America, does not necessarily differentiate between those of Asian origin or Native Americans (perhaps explaining why the U.S. Census has employed the classification “Asian Indian” for clarity). Also, the term “South Asian,” which has gained currency only lately and not necessarily within all ranks and generations of the community it seeks to aggregate, correctly identifies geographic and historic origin but seems phenotypically at odds with the commonly held notion that Asian Americans are only those of East and Southeast Asian origin.

In the civil rights era of the 1960s, Asian American identity centered on ethnic movements that attempted to address the lack of recognition of communities, some which traced their immigration histories back to the nineteenth century such as Chinese and Japanese Americans. In comparison, while indentured and other laborers of South Asian descent had been in the United States during this period, their numbers were far smaller and generally understudied. Increased visibility came with the arrival of greater numbers after the 1965
immigration laws changed to attract educated and skilled immigrant labor from South Asia and elsewhere.

Immigrants who arrived during the post-1965 period were thus differently skilled than those South Asians, primarily Punjabis, who settled in the Pacific Northwest and California in the early nineteenth century and onward and who took to farming, which was in keeping with their agricultural background. What both sets of immigrants—nineteenth century and post-1965—had in common is that shared religious and cultural practices allowed for community formation. The Punjab region crosses the borders of what are today northern India and Pakistan and is also a multifaith area, with Sikhism being one of thereligions followed. Though secular and multifaith, India’s population is predominantly Hindu, as are most U.S. immigrants from that country; similarly, Pakistan, a theocracy, is largely Muslim, as are most of its emigrés. These differences may suggest that South Asian immigrants of various ethnic and national origins limit their associations with each other in their adoptive countries, and while that possibility exists, shared histories, customs, and, in some cases, religious backgrounds, have fostered panethnic community formation for South Asians in the United States.
Professional and class-based affiliations should also be credited for the roles they play in this process. At universities, South Asian student-founded organizations, though often ethnic-specific, may also offer opportunities for multiethnic desi programs, focusing on culture or community service. These youth-based
affiliations also extend into off-campus venues, such as the club scene. These trends, though largely more visible among second-generation South Asians, have also aided gender-based community projects, such as South Asian women’s organizations that counsel and shelter female victims of domestic abuse, including
women who are first-generation immigrants. Just as pan-South Asian identity may be fostered through community design, factors external to the community can also play their part. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in which the World Trade Center’s “Twin Towers” were demolished by hijacked planes, many South Asians found themselves detained by authorities for interrogation or fell victim to vigilante violence by those seeking revenge against anyone thought to resemble the perpetrators of the attacks. The conflation of Muslim/Islamic, Middle Eastern/Semitic, and South Asian identities, be they in targeting individuals based on phenotypic appearance or erroneous assumptions about religious and ethnic garb, caused both the ironic possibility of pan-South Asian solidarity in protest against the violence and detentions, but also equally widespread disidentifications based on ethnic and religious differences within the larger South Asian community and against other national-origin communities, usually Muslim-identified ones. This desire for safety was thus predicated upon an appeal to American solidarity, but it also ostracized specific groups within and without the South Asian community. Some took great pains in explaining the significance of religious garb unique to their faiths to mainstream audiences in hopes of gaining acceptance and tolerance. However, these same efforts also resulted in disidentifications between various marginalized communities.

PROFESSIONAL DIFFERENCES

The high visibility of U.S. South Asians in lucrative professions related to medicine, finance, engineering, and computers, among others, is often in contrast to those, equally visible, employed as taxi drivers and convenience store clerks. While the former, described as immigrants of opportunity, made their way to the United States post-1965, their sometimes less-privileged kin followed suit under family reunification provisions made in the 1980s, and they had to take on professions that did not match those of their more affluent sponsors. In some cases, it is the enterprising, earlier-arriving family members whose investment in the form of a motel or franchised convenience store has provided the possibility of employment for a newly arrived family member of lesser means. South Asian–owned franchises of popular businesses, such as fast-food restaurants and gas stations, rely on kinship networks to staff their venues, but they also attract nonfamily employees of similar ethnic origins. These kinship and ethnic-solidarity networks, while supportive, can also be fraught with the possibility of abuse, where new or undocumented immigrants may be taken advantage of because of their lack of knowledge or because of their precarious position in the eyes of the law. To protect against these and other kinds of labor abuses, including those by corporations, organizing efforts have given rise to desi organizations such as New York City’s Workers’Awaaz, a nonprofit dedicated to educating South Asian women employed in domestic service about their rights, and Taxi Workers Alliance, which protects the rights of taxi drivers of South Asian origin.

In addition to class and professionally based distinctions between South Asians in the United States, there is also the added dimension of ethnic and national origin. Not all South Asians immigrate to the United States directly from South Asia. Those that come from other diasporic locations, such as the Caribbean, Guyana, Suriname, parts of Africa, or Fiji, may be differently skilled than their counterparts from South Asian countries. Even within South Asian countries, not all have the same opportunities available to future immigrants, often necessitating their departure in search of opportunities abroad. This also indicates that South Asians, of various class and ethnic backgrounds, often have transnational families and maintain ties that cross continents. Thus, while South Asians in America may regularly be identified as a model minority, this is not a uniformly panethnic trait and is a supposition that belies the class diversity and some of the issues facing these communities.

Published here.

"Clerical Errors" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - May 2007)

Before quoting Mahatma Gandhi, Hillary Clinton sought to familiarize him to her audience at a 2004 Missouri fundraiser by saying, "He ran a gas station down in St. Louis." Drawing on the audience’s recognition of the predominance of a particular ethnic group in the running of convenience stores, the remark was racist because it sought to entertain a mainstream audience by casting a major figure from that ethnic group in a position of ridicule. The audience laughed, fulfilling the intent of the joke built on the back of the well-known stereotype in American media of the South Asian clerk. The South Asian community and others were rightfully offended and Clinton issued an oblique apology along the lines of "I’m sorry it was taken that way." While much had been made of the event’s inherent racism, little was said of its elitism and that of the South Asian American community’s response. Clinton’s equation of Gandhi with the lowly occupation of a clerk failed to acknowledge the rising affluence of professional desis; and the community’s response advertised this fact in its desire to not only correct Clinton’s gaffe, but to also separate the elite among us from those who tarnish the shiny image of the model minority. Given a voice, how might South Asian clerks themselves have responded and would Gandhi not have felt more akin to them given his message of dignity in any form of labor and uplifting the underclasses? None of this excuses Clinton’s comment. Rather, it highlights the continuing problems of the representation of minorities in American media and the divide within communities along lines of class.

The National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) claims nearly 150,000 shops under its aegis, with revenues close to a half trillion dollars. While there are no ethnic-specific surveys, many estimates by Asian-American trade associations and groups such as the National Coalition of Associations of 7-Eleven Franchisees underscore the evidence of a high rate of South Asian ownership in the convenience store business. This begs the question of why, despite the large proportion of South Asians and other minorities in the convenience store arena, we are yet to see a 7-Eleven or AM-PM commercial that acknowledges this fact by featuring South Asian employees or actors who play them. Evidently, actually matching the reality with self-made media representations would cause such companies to appear to have been overtaken by immigrants and one wonders if the misrepresentation is in fact an attempt to reinscribe Americanness by creating distance from the foreign other.

The reality of who runs convenience markets has been relegated, instead, to the fictional representations in any number of television programs and films that are mockingly xenophobic, etching the image of the middle-aged, sometimes turbaned, funnily accented, angry brown man and his hapless wife deeply into the imagination of the American viewing public. This has been proven nowhere better than with one of the most recognizable South Asians in American media: cartoon character Apu, Quik-E-Mart clerk of The Simpsons, who is voiced by a white actor. In their November 17, 2003, press release, NACS proudly claimed "Apu May Not Be All That Bad for Convenience Store Image," citing the character’s work ethic as inspirational, and chiding him only for flouting commonly held theft-deterrence rules by having a rifle behind his store’s counter. Nowhere in the press release do they mention Apu’s ethnicity nor that of a large number of convenience store owners.

Even the films Clerks (1994) and its sequel Clerks II (2006), which glorify the profession, do not feature South Asians in the titular roles, made even more ironic because they are set in multi-ethnic New Jersey. And when a second-generation South Asian American youth came face-to-face with a first-generation, older, desi clerk being terrorized by young white bullies in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (2004), one of those rare moments in mainstream film history that acknowledges the diversity of immigrant identities, Kumar ambivalently flip-flops between aiding the clerk and then leaving him to the devices of the vagrants, taking advantage of the confusion to steal their car and continue in his pursuit of a burger.

Today, as South Asians become more noticeable in high-profile professions across the American economic landscape, their desire to prove they have made it often requires an overstatement of those aspects of the American dream which are marked by rising class status, political power, and visibility. It is often embarrassing, then, to be associated with the image and reality of the convenience store clerk, the taxi driver, and the motel owner. Even where South Asians now own such businesses, having worked their way up in classic immigrant style, the desire is to distance themselves from those roots and those who have taken their place. Particularly for some new immigrants, even today, these are the professions that give them their start. They are the South Asians most visible to the mainstream, given the prevalence of these small businesses, and they are also often the ones in the front line of criminal attacks, petty crime, and anti-immigrant violence, as made amply evident post 9-11.

The popular American media stereotype of the South Asian clerk is troubling in its uni-dimensionality. In representing a section of our population, it leaves out the many other roles played by members of our community, but it also does no justice to the clerk himself—his accent representative of his ability to speak more than one language; his curtness perhaps bearing testament to the long hours and late nights; and his work ethic being less about that (and him) than that he does this job to make a living and support his family.

An online version of the print article appears here.