Category Archive

I’m behind on my writing - adjusting to a job like the one I have is difficult because while I’m learning a lot, the routine is suffocating me. What an idiotic thing to complain about, I know. I’m feeling overwhelmed about the fact that I have no plans for August, and am torn between desperately searching for a job, and running away to somewhere. I’m not really the running away kind, in the way that I’ve been daydreaming about, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s just because it’s always what I’ve told myself. I’m feeling stuck, and tired, so writing hasn’t been on top of my to-do list these days. My apologies.

In any case, behind on my writing means I didn’t get around to writing about Loving Day, which was last week. A belated Happy Loving Day to you all. The Washington Post featured a great article - “What Mildred Knew” - that is definitely worth reading if you haven’t yet.

The other day I got asked a question from one of my best friends, an Indian American living in Texas, a friend whose life is a stark contrast from my own.

“So have you just given up on finding an Indian guy?”

Where could I begin? I couldn’t explain to her, someone who grew up in a context where there were only two kinds of appropriate men to date (Indian-Hindu; White), that it wasn’t that I’d given up on anything, that I’d been struggling with the guilt of dating white men for over three years now. And I couldn’t find the right words to tell her that it had both nothing and everything to do with race.

I hadn’t sworn off white men exactly - more like men altogether - but I had definitely decided that the problems of my past relationships could have been attributed to ignorance about white supremacy, white privilege, and the loaded histories and contexts behind relationships between white men and women of color. The risk of being exoticized and fetishized, of feeling colonized as a body, as an individual, could be avoided if I avoided relationships, specifically relationships with white men.

Well I think we all know what happened then, so I won’t bother reflecting on that again (moving on is hard. but that’s an entirely separate, and probably password protected post for another day).

I went to a wedding on Saturday night, tagged along with some family to this big North Indian Bollywood-esque wedding. There were probably four hundred people there, all dressed up, and at the head of the reception hall, the bride and groom sat like awkward cake-toppers on a throne that resembled a prom-photo backdrop. I was the only young woman with short hair, and the only woman who wore black (which, at a Hindu wedding is perfectly acceptable, though apparently not as appropriate as Barbie pink or Vegas teal).

As one of the groomsmen prepared to make a toast, he turned to the groom and began: “Dude, I always thought you would do something stupid, like marry a Chinese girl, and have to learn to use chopsticks or something. But at the end of the day you did the family right, you did us all proud, by marrying within the community.”

I was seething. is that the right word? It was seething mixed with stinging tears mixed with having the wind knocked out of you. I was all of those things, but managed to maintain my own plastic expression as half the audience clapped ferociously over the notion of “doing the family right.”

My parents did not “do their families right”. They married out of communities. They married out of religions. They married out of region. My mother was a triple threat to my father’s community and vice versa. The women in my father’s community felt they had been done wrong, that my mother had “stolen away one of the good ones.” My mother’s parents were progressive enough at the time to be supportive of the marriage, but they both dealt with the consequences of their daughter’s choices from their families. And while they were legally allowed to get married in India, I don’t doubt that they paid in other ways for their “betrayal to their own kind.”

My friend has dated exclusively Indian men. She is a perfect candidate for the kind of narrative her community strives to fulfill - a beautiful, intelligent woman who is looking forward to a life in the suburbs with children and maybe a dog. She and her husband will play boardgames on the weekends with other North Indian couples, and their social life will revolve around Indian functions, poojas, and weddings.

This just isn’t the way I grew up. I feel no real connection to South Asian culture - my own parents never drove culture into me because they too couldn’t handle the other aspects that come with it - the moderate politics, the gender divided functions, the classism, and prejudices.

So I told her the truth in the best way I knew how. No, I hadn’t “given up” on Indian men - the ethnicity of my partner just doesn’t matter as much as his politics - his racial and gender politics, his ability to negotiate through the dynamics that are bound to arise in being with a woman of color. Meeting straight men like that isn’t like shooting fish in a barrel, it turns out. More like standing blindfolded in a lake trying to stab at fish with a fork. So I’m in a privileged position not to have to limit myself to “Indian Men,” I’m not going to. There is a part two to this, about my failure as a candidate for the seemingly prototypical Indian man, but that’s really another issue altogether…

Until next time.

I thought I would start up on posting links here - I don’t remember why I stopped - maybe because it seems like a cop-out-post. Still, with the primary elections in the air and my increased commitment to educating myself about politics and that ever-so-talked-about-real-world, I thought I would share some articles that I find worth reading. The titles speak for themselves today:

“After College Ends, So Does Activism” by Adam Doster

“Why Clinton Trumps Obama and Will Continue to Trump Him” by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

“Interview with Chris Rabb: Founder of Afro-Netizen.com” from Mother Jones

A note - I still haven’t developed a full opinion on who I am supporting from the Democratic candidates, though I’m pretty sure my heart is with Obama. When I figure it out for sure, I’ll do one of two things: write about it, or tell everyone to mind their own business.

It’s 2007 and I’m an adult that is not only exploring the possibilities of public policy, but is also continuing to ask myself what it means to be a progressive and socially-conscious individual; so it’s no surprise that I’ve spent the summer slowly trying to peek my head into the world of politics. By this I mean, keeping up with debates, reading publications such as Mother Jones, and wikipedia-ing as much as I can about free trade and straw polls, school vouchers and civil unions. Educating myself about politics, as it turns out, is tricky. I tried watching the news on television and couldn’t seem to do it - my brain spends so much time teasing out the imperialist and Euro-centric agenda of broadcasts that I can’t seem to concentrate on names and events. I started listening to podcasts - that was helpful, because now I have access to BBC broadcasts and NPR broadcasts whenever I want, for free. And I’m still developing a bookmarked folder of politics publications.

When Bush was elected in 2004 for a second term, I was still an underclassman in college. I teared up and hibernated for the weekend at the thought of the POTUS remaining the same, and therefore, U.S. foreign policy and agendas staying the same. Now as the next election rolls around, I find myself wanting to really look at the media coverage and debates surrounding the candidates - probably because there have only been two families in office for the majority of my life. That scares me.

Over the summer, I’ve been working as a research assistant and have had the chance to read a substantial amount of feminist theory and literary theory related to American Studies. This is a field I was never particularly interested in - but after 10 weeks of reading hundreds of essays and writing hundreds of abstracts, I’ve realized more than a few interesting things.

The thing I want to share here is this: While I have tried to acknowledge my citizenship privilege in my day to day life (these privileges include being able to travel abroad without complications, applying for scholarships and financial aid, etc.), I still have an us-vs.-them mentality when it comes to the decisions made by Congress, the House of Representatives and Mr. POTUS himself. In college, there are always general comments made about the government: “Look what they’re doing, they’ve started this war, they’ve continued the war, they’re trying to ’save’ oppressed people abroad, they’re not helping public education” and on and on. When do I begin to really own up to the reality that as a citizen, and as someone born and raised in the United States, I’m carrying the burden of my country’s actions and decisions on my shoulders as well.

When we talk about institutional vs. individual racism, we learn to rethink the mentality of “Oh, I’m not racist. Other people are racist” - we learn instead, to think about whiteness and white privilege and about what it means to be benefiting from an institution that helps certain people over others.

There is a parallel here and it is the fact that it’s easy to get caught up in claiming that as a progressive liberal, as a Democrat, as someone who didn’t vote for the individuals who are appointed to govern the nation, that there is no blood on our hands. It’s easy to just feel sorry or guilty about it and then move on - because we can move on, because we can put everything on conservatives or the GOP (My reference to political parties should not suggest that our beliefs also fall along a similar binary - I merely mentioned the Dem. Party and GOP because they are labels that often get used in the us-vs.-them debate).

I guess what I’m saying is that for those of us who are not already, for those of us who are U.S. citizens and have citizenship privilege, we are responsible and all need to continue engaging ourselves in issues of national and local and foreign policy; we need to read feminist and antiracist materials that look critically at nationalism and imperialism and colonialism and globalization and the War on Terror; we need to get past feeling sorry and guilty and, as Audre Lorde urges so well, do our work.

I might try to rewrite this post soon - these are thoughts that have been swimming around me since 2001 and it’s the first time I’ve tried to ‘pen’ them down.