Brown White Black

by Nishta J. Mehra

  * * *

  When I was growing up in Memphis, the prevailing attitude around racial injustice as an issue or topic for discussion inside the affluent white communities I knew was a kind of syrupy sympathy, a sort of tongue-clucking—Isn’t that a shame—that abdicated the speaker and their community from being in any way complicit or responsible for the way things were. The problem was never racism, of course, it was poverty or drugs or crime, it was teen pregnancy, it was absentee parents, it was dozens of different euphemisms that all managed to talk about the same thing without ever naming it directly. These “good white people” traveled in entirely white social circles, had exclusively white friends, and would deny, vehemently, that they were in any way racist. (I grew to chafe under that delightful chestnut used in reference to Memphis’s black community, Well, they’re racist, too, you know.)

  I grew accustomed to, dare I say comfortable with, this kind of whiteness, though one never feels a hundred percent comfortable being the only non-white face in the room. More often, I was the only non-white non-employee. My wealthier friends had nannies or maids, and they were always black; at weddings or birthday parties at country clubs, I would feel my guilt bloom under the gaze of the dress-shirt-clad waiters and waitresses loading sheet pans into steam trays, while I felt the need to account for my presence. Though I did not quite have the words for what it was, it seemed that I was betraying something by standing on the other side of the table. My coping mechanism at the time was to disassociate, to try to escape my discomfort; I smiled politely, said thank you, did everything I could to feign obliviousness to the strangeness of the situation.

  Growing up comfortable in the presence of white people necessarily meant that I felt uncomfortable in the presence of black people. Though my family had plenty of brown friends, we, like the white people we knew, did not have any black ones. There were even fewer black girls at my school than there were Indian ones, and even though I was friends with some of them, we never spoke about or related our experiences vis-à-vis the whiteness that surrounded us. For my part, to have a chance of thriving in that environment meant being very careful about drawing attention to my not-whiteness; it was one thing to be celebrated for the “diversity” I brought to campus, but quite another to utilize my otherness as a place from which to criticize. I had too much good immigrant girl training to even let myself think about the things I wished my alma mater did differently or better until after I had graduated from it.

  My primary first-person exposure to blackness was through my parents’ workplaces. Both my mother, who was a special education teacher, and my father, who managed the production plant for a local restaurant group, worked in majority-black environments, and I never quite knew how to behave when I visited them at work. I felt shy, and conspicuous, and uncertain how to relate; each of my parents had black co-workers with whom they had extremely positive working relationships and black co-workers with whom they struggled. These differences were not solely based on race, but they weren’t separate from racial dynamics either. Though I was young, I was still aware that power was in play since my parents served in supervisory roles, had more formal education, and were better compensated than their black colleagues. What I didn’t know much about was colorism, or that it existed in the black community in ways not dissimilar from what I had encountered in India. The difference was, of course, that I seemed dark to my Indian relatives but light to many of the black women my parents worked with, who made me uncomfortable when they told me I had pretty skin.

  Spending time at work with my parents gave me exposure—albeit limited—to a world I found engaging but where I did not think I belonged. I loved the easy laughter of the women who worked in special ed classrooms with my mom, loved the food that the employees my father supervised sent home around the holidays. I developed an ear for the cadence of African American vernacular English, sounds that grew to feel familiar and that I never had trouble deciphering, but that I didn’t dare attempt to speak back. For one thing, I wasn’t sure it would be allowed, and I also wasn’t sure that I wanted to. My nascent sense of who held what kind of power encouraged me to ally myself with and imitate the white people I went to school with and not the black people my parents worked with. All the white people I knew were affluent; the poverty I saw in Memphis was always black in color. Memphis is a poor city overall, with a poverty rate close to thirty percent, but when you break it down by race, the numbers speak volumes—twice as many black Memphians live in poverty as their white counterparts. Though I had been exposed to middle-class and upper-class black families through girls I knew from school (and, let’s face it, on The Cosby Show), I saw them the way that white people saw me: as the exception.

  For a long time, I did a pretty good imitation of a white girl; I embraced being the model minority without realizing that’s what I was doing. My standards and expectations for how to be, how to conduct myself, what to aspire to: These were primarily based on the white examples around me. I never aspired to assimilate fully—perhaps because I did not think such a thing possible—but I was still reticent about my difference, wary of being lumped into a large category of non-white “others.” I didn’t realize that it might be problematic to embrace white people’s tendency to think of me as exotic, or that their propensity for appropriating my culture was something I could object to; to me, making allowances for these happenings seemed like my main way “in,” a way that would allow me to still be different, but the good kind of different.

  Internalizing the tastes and manners of the white culture that surrounded me felt key to my survival because of the limited representations to which I had access. The options for what it meant to be brown, as far as I could tell, were to be black or be white, a set of options that barely even registered as a choice. My friends called me “brownest white girl”—a label I find incredibly troubling now but that I once carried proudly, like a trophy. I now know that this “exceptionalism,” particularly as it’s ascribed to Asian Americans, has historically been used as a wedge between minority groups, keeping them fractured and distrustful of one another. But I didn’t see any of that growing up. I thought I could perform whiteness without absorbing all of the attendant bias.

  I grew up idolizing the very lifestyles I also resented, unconsciously setting them as the bar for what a positive future would look like. These ideas were undoubtedly reinforced by my parents and the immigrant community we were a part of; while our parents held on to certain Indian value systems, like those related to their religious observance and their sense of family, they also took on many of the cultural norms and values of their adopted home: celebrating Thanksgiving, embracing the great American road trip, proudly flying the flag on the Fourth of July—things for which they had no prior frame of reference. In much the same way, though we were not white, we framed what we were the same way whiteness originally created itself—in opposition to blackness.

  Our parents bought into the dream of this country and, like new converts, fed it zealously to us: opportunity, privilege, responsibility, success. That dream, of course, was modeled on a conventional American understanding of what success “looks like,” meaning it was modeled on straight, wealthy white people. For our parents, success looked like graduate degrees (law school or medical school—business school was acceptable but not quite as good), it looked like money, it looked like heterosexual marriage and kids and a nice house in a “good” part of town. Our parents were willing to make concessions—they conceded the possibility of some of us marrying white guys, allowed us to date, to cut our hair short, to go to prom. But there were always limits, laid out jokingly, but not jokes at all. Just don’t bring a black boy home … or a Muslim boy. One of these prejudices immigrated with our parents across the ocean; the other, they absorbed. It was in the water everywhere around us, that Memphis water people claim has a distinctive taste. How could we not have taken it in osmotically, through the skin? We thought we were observing the two worlds from a distance, occasional
ly dropping in as visitors or guests, but we weren’t, of course. We were participants. We were complicit.

  For years, I felt no solidarity with other people of color—in fact, I tended to avoid them, particularly if they seemed politically charged or willing to wave their race or ethnic identity flag more enthusiastically than I thought necessary. I cringe now when I remember how many times I felt relief that I was the “right” kind of immigrant because my parents had come here legally and basked in the attention that came with being the kind of immigrant success story people like to trot out. Back then, I had very little knowledge of how the immigration system worked, knew nothing about quotas or measures of worthiness or how much luck played a part in my parents making it here. I had no sense of history, no knowledge that my people—like nearly every group of people before us—hadn’t always been welcomed here the way that history textbooks and talk of “melting pots” made it seem. I remain proud of my parents, who did, in fact, work incredibly hard to build the life I came to take for granted. But what my family and I didn’t see, as so many white Americans don’t, were the systems of privilege and structural advantages that contributed to our success. And that by accepting the Dream, we also accepted the rest of the narrative. We didn’t read the fine print.

  We thought that we were progressive—at least, it seemed like we were. Election year after election year, we continued to be one of the rare front yards in Germantown not sporting a sign for the Republican candidate du jour; I was one of a handful of kids at my elite private middle school who proudly sported a pin for Clinton-Gore on my jean jacket. My parents listened to NPR and watched The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer; my mother made it a point to explain why they voted for candidates even when it meant tax increases for our family; they were happy to pay, felt that doing so was fair, part of what came with being financially successful, a willingness to share with others for the benefit of everyone.

  And we did talk about race. As brown people existing in a city that was starkly divided between black and white, it would have been impossible to claim we “didn’t see color.” The attempts of others to categorize or place us into proper context went a long way toward teaching us about the way race worked in America. Though we faced ignorance and discrimination (my parents more so than I), we were regarded with a kind of curious fascination, often annoying but mostly well meaning. As Indians with brown skin, we did not rank on the social ladder with our friends and neighbors with white skin, but we were also saved from the bottom of that ladder because we had money and because we were not black. This is what activist Deepa Iyer has termed the “racial bribe”: access to higher status for immigrants who carry the party line, which includes regarding blacks as inferior. Though it seems obvious to me now, for so long I was ignorant—probably willfully so—of the extent to which my parents and I and our immigrant community had internalized the dominant narrative around race. Even though we of all people ought to have known better, ought to have seen. But, as Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison says, “Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American.”

  The racism I witnessed within the immigrant community I grew up in mirrored what I saw in the white communities I spent time in: it was covert, coded, subtle. References to those people coupled with the tendency to shift the conversation to the black community’s own responsibility for their problems are what stand out in my mind, though it’s possible that I heard uglier things that either didn’t register or I don’t remember. Within our Indian community, my family was on the liberal end of the spectrum, so it was common to hear conservative talk that I knew my parents disagreed with; my mom was notorious for engaging in political debates, my dad more likely to gloss over differences so as not to ruin the good time everyone was having.

  These days, I occupy so many different societal intersections that my tether of belonging to the community that raised me feels tenuous, still valid only by virtue of being grandfathered in. I feel cut or impacted by many different events, but my community doesn’t necessarily have the same experience or recognize that my experience is different from theirs. In 2015, one of my aunties circulated a petition about Sureshbhai Patel, the Indian grandfather who was attacked by Alabama police while walking around his family’s neighborhood. As a recipient of the e-mail, I was also subject to a series of “reply all” outcries and demands for justice, none of which I disagreed with; this incident, like all examples of police brutality, was horrifying. But where were these people when twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, whom my son will someday resemble, was gunned down in a public park by the police?

  Becoming the parent of a black son has given me the perspective to see that there is a real reluctance to engage in a conversation about the Asian American community’s participation in anti-black racism. Related to this is a tendency to accommodate and apologize; I learned early on that white people are bad at being uncomfortable, so in order to deal with them successfully, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt, cut them slack, and not make too much of a big deal about anything. But I am no longer willing to inconvenience myself or make parts of myself invisible so that I don’t upset others—whether they’re white people or brown people.

  * * *

  As a college student, I developed an awareness that I had taken on the tastes and aesthetics of the white world inside which I was raised, but the biases that came along with that inheritance remained hidden to me for many years. Then, the summer before my senior year of college, I landed an internship on Capitol Hill. It wasn’t glamorous (if any of these internships ever are); the small, bipartisan commission for which I’d be working consisted of a staff of twenty and had zero name recognition among the general public. Still, I was getting the chance to spend a summer in D.C., and I was thrilled. My parents generously offered to cover my expenses and helped me find a room to sublet in a three-bedroom apartment in Columbia Heights.

  At that time, Columbia Heights was considered a “transitional” neighborhood: another one of those coded words that really means “not many white people live here.” The neighborhood had gone from being at the top of the list of places tourists should never visit to the top of the list of the District’s prime targets for gentrification. When Metrorail’s green line expanded north, Columbia Heights got a subway station of its own, bringing commerce in the form of local businesses: hair braiding, discount furniture, Laundromats. A bank reopened, bringing its stately, Corinthian-style building back to life, while adding bars to the bright glass windows. On my walk to the Metro every morning, I would see contractors adding crown molding and hardwood floors to the old brick town homes, anticipating the advent of higher rents. Gang graffiti was replaced with murals painted in the same style—vibrant, neon colors celebrating community, diversity, and peace. It was in Columbia Heights that I had my first taste of Salvadoran food from a small basement restaurant and learned to identify the flags of Vietnam and Somalia that flew high above the tiny backyard gardens of refugees.

  Even though the demographics of D.C. are very much in line with my hometown, when I first arrived in Columbia Heights, I felt certain that I didn’t belong. On the cab ride there, I despaired when my driver flew past the trendy neighborhoods with their familiar boutiques and coffee shops, only to come to a stop in front of a tiny corner store, its glass windows obscured by vertical stripes of metal. A lone neon sign—“BEER”—proudly declared the nature of the business. The door to my apartment was set into a wall of concrete, the paint peeling and the lobby it opened onto dank and featuring a neglected smoke alarm that beeped routinely, pleading for a new battery. Everything about the place felt shabby and unsafe. Nearly every face I saw in my new neighborhood was black or brown, and it made me incredibly uncomfortable.

  I had spent my whole life in a “nice” neighborhood. When I was eighteen months old, my parents had a house built in Germantown, a small suburb of Memphis with a population at that time of about twenty thousand. Aesthetically pleasing,
with perfectly manicured lawns, big brick houses, and meticulous zoning, Germantown has the lowest crime rate of any city its size in the entire state of Tennessee, its own highly ranked school district, and all the status markers my immigrant parents worked so hard to achieve. It was, in short, full of rich white people.

  That was the milieu I felt comfortable with, was accustomed to, and, if I’m being completely honest, felt I deserved. I had grown up with the cognitive dissonance of knowing that I wasn’t white while also sometimes forgetting that I was brown. I had all the status markers, things that my parents had hoped for and worked hard to give me: family vacations, disposable income, clothes from Gap, luxury cars, my own telephone line. At the same time, I had internalized everything that whiteness taught me to believe and feel about blackness—namely, fear. My parents managed to make it out of India, but that didn’t keep us all from becoming colonized.

  I had longed for the ease of moving around in the world that my white classmates seemed to have, and I thought that by imitating them, I would achieve the same. But this sword turned out to be double-edged: although it precluded a sense of belonging with other people of color, it guaranteed affinity with whiteness only up to a certain point. Something always happens to make the bubble burst—the No, where are you really from? questions, the boss who laments that he can’t get the “smell of Indian food” out of his clothes, as if that food is a monolith and all of it stinks. Even though I lived inside of a white world, I was well aware that I was a visitor inside of it, granted a visa that could be revoked at any time. Reminded, time and again, like each time I was “randomly selected” for special screening at the airport, that my status was only probationary—that I could exemplify the Dream all I wanted, but at the end of the day, my skin would still be brown.