Hope amidst the hate, by Natasha Pappu, News India-Times, 27 March 2003. English language.
An Indo-Canadian woman is deported because her name, Cruz, is unappealing to immigration officials in Chicago; Hindu temples in St. Louis and Kansas City bombed on the same day; a lawyer arrested in Albany for wearing a “give peace a chance” t-shirt; Indian-American kids harrassed and arrested by the request of their former elementary school principal for “congregating” on their former school playground; chalk marks on a Webster Groves elementary school playground that read “Nuke Iraq” with graphic drawings of weapons of destruction.
The news is bad; the news is alarming everywhere, if you are brown or liberal or both, and live in 2003 America. Racism, hatred and exclusivism have always flourished at the fringes of North American life, simmering potently below a paper-thin surface. But the current political climate has encouraged this troika to rear its heads with pride. It has allowed the inherently hateful to ride the banner of patriotism triumpantly, exulting in the right to hurt and to destroy and to pollute the hearts and minds of the next generation.
And insidiously, at the edge of our suburban fairy-tale existence, (wasn’t there always a “big bad wolf” character in every fairy-tale?) the “code-speak” of spite and fear is pervading my three-year-old daughter’s world. “What a lovely little girl you have. Just look at those dark brown eyes.” Or, “I just love Indian children. All you can see is their big, black eyes and their white teeth shining in their faces.” Or, “Don’t go too far north, honey—it’s dangerous. Of course, it’s just black killing black.”These are words from shop-keepers, hair-dressers and grocery-clerks, all of whom accept our money and our business happily, and welcome us back when we return, seemingly oblivious to their code of segregation and ignorance. They are the people who inhabit our humdrum lives; the self-same folk who pride themselves on their equality of outlook and their lack of racist tendencies. Minerva is as yet too young to absorb the hurt behind these commonplace utterances—or is she? Lately, my toddler has been obsessed with shades of brown. “Why is daddy more brown than me?” she will ask plaintively. And of her African-American school-mate: “Why is Sam all the way brown, and I’m not?” Although we happen to be talking about the color wheel, and Minerva has a particularly keen eye for detail, I cannot help but wonder how this obsession has insidiously crept into her consciousness.
My daughter, in India, would be prized for her light complexion—she is fair, fairer even then my Kutchi grandmother, with hair that verges on light brown. She is indeed, so fair, that people who meet her with just one of us in tow often assume that her other parent must be white. For this reason, my husband and I have sometimes worried that we would be the target of unkind remarks and prying questions, more so because she is a light daughter of dark parents, in a culture that reveres paleness and reviles dark skin. We need not have worried, as it turns out. To the average Midwesterner, Minerva is simply another brown face. In the time that we have lived here, I cannot remember a single compliment that Minerva has received about her physical appearance that does not have some reference to the color of her eyes and skin tagged inevitably onto its end. As parents of an adopted child, we also have to face well-meaning comments like “You do such a good job with her, almost nobody can tell that she really isn’t yours,” and “What does her real mother look like?” No matter how much I inure myself to the complacent babbling of our well-wishers, the sting of their ignorance never lessens.
A few nights ago, Rohit and I watched a program on PBS about a schoolteacher in Iowa who performed a test on her third-grade students in the 1960’s. For one day she told them that blue-eyed people were better than brown-eyed people. Brown-eyed people, she said, were stupid. They were lazy, liars and incompetent. In a matter of hours, the students perceived as inferior began to act inferior. They slunk around the edges of the playground, shoulders hunched and eyes to the ground, refusing to interact with the blue-eyed children. The blue-eyed children, on the other hand, lost no time in taunting their “inferiors,” quickly creating the slur “brown-eyes.” On the following day, she told them that the reverse was actually true, that brown-eyed children were superior to blue-eyed children, and in minutes the situation was magically reversed. When the groups were tested, a set of friendly, eager-to-please and functional third-graders had been transformed into two distinct groups, the “superior” group far outperforming the “inferior” group in a series of academic exercises in both cases. The schoolteacher went on to become famous for this study, which she recorded on camera, and repeated with several groups of children as well as with adult prison guards.
It took just a matter of hours for a negative self-perception to pervade the consciousness of these children, resulting in a sizeable gap in their academic and social performance just because they perceived themselves as unable or incompetent. These statistics, while shocking, make perfect sense. Who among us has not had a day when we were in perfect harmony with the world, when we sparkled and were brilliant, and when all tasks were easy? For that tiny pocket of time, we were flawlessly in tune with the music of the universe. What is that feeling, after all, if not perfect self-confidence: the knowledge that nothing is impossible for that resonant moment? Can we make sure that our children have more of those moments than of the other kind—the kind filled with self-doubt and fear?
As a minority community, we will always be subject to discrimination – at least, for the forseeable future. My husband reminds me however, that life in India was no easier for him and his sister, both of whom were routinely twitted about their dark complexions by various relatives. Human nature is disconcertingly similar, and bullies, it seems, exist everywhere.
And so, I do believe we hold the instrument of change in our own hands. Why is it that I have never seen an Indian name on the contibutor list for the St. Louis Museum of Art, the Science Museum, the Missouri Botanical Garden or the St. Louis Zoo? Why is it that Indian-Americans seldom run for local office? Why do we seldom volunteer to serve on our children’s school-boards, or coach their soccer leagues? The answer is that we are too busy building a financial buffer for our children’s education and for their futures—we are far too busy planning for the future to participate in the present. However, this simplistic approach will only garner short-term gains for our nuclear families and almost nothing for us as a burgeoning North American minority. Let us step back and imagine for a moment life in India—could we really have the lives we enjoy here, were we to return? The financial and personal freedoms that my husband, my daughter and I are privy to in North America would almost certainly elude us in the country of our birth. Yet we give our adopted nation very little in return for the favor of opening their borders to us, and routinely take our emigre status for granted.
If we do not begin to contribute to the community in which we live, then that community will not open its arms to welcome us wholeheartedly. If we are not the active ambassadors of our culture, we cannot possibly expect run-of-the-mill neighbors to open their hearts and their minds to our customs, to our backgrounds, and to our families. Until we take the intitiative and cross over the line from being benificiaries to active participants in the microcosm of our local lives, we will never really be Americans.
