OUR FAMILIES AND FRIENDS CAN’T BE RACIST, OR CAN THEY?

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

In the US, 2.9 per cent of the population was multiracial in 2010, writes Samira K Mehta in the first essay, Where Are You Really From? in The Racism of People Who Love You. By 2020, the number had grown to 10.2 per cent.

Born to a white American mother and a South Asian immigrant father, Samira Mehta dissects her experiences in seven essays.

For a person of mixed belonging, racial and cultural differences come into the most intimate parts of life.

How much more complicated is that question of where we are really from when one’s parents are from two different continents, two different cultures? Because each parent is from somewhere.

How does such a person respond when people who love her – and whom she loves – reveal racist tendencies?

In the aftermath of Trump’s first campaign, the incidence of overt racism shot up and Mehta was subjected to hurtful remarks and spat upon on the metro. Sharing this with a friend she finds herself tearing up. Because the racism that hurts her the most is not the racism that she fears the most.

“It’s the racism of people who love me, the racism that I don’t know how to see, or talk about, or name, and that because I can’t quite name it as racism, it often ends up making me feel crazy.”

When people ask where she is really from, they are telling her she can’t possibly from the place where she was born, “in the only country I have ever lived”.

Mehta, a scholar and essayist, quotes Khyati Joshi, “an educator of educators” who calls this dynamic the perpetual foreigner. 

“Those of us who cling to the identity we have made for ourselves in a new country are baffled when it is not accepted at face value.”

Mehta shares a poignant story about her father towards the end of his life.

When my father was dying, it became completely clear, though, that he was not simply claiming to be from Connecticut because he did not like answering questions about his immigration status.

He reacted with confusion and dismay to his wife’s reassurance that she would take his ashes back to India if that is what he wished.

“Why do you want to send me away from my home?”

But the same man would insist he was Indian when visiting India with his family.

In a hilarious episode that almost all of us who have travelled back with children who were raised here will identify with, Mehta writes that at tourist attractions like the Taj Mahal, he would be affronted at being charged the entry fee that foreigners are charged and insist that she hang back and not open her mouth, lest she reveal she was less Indian.

There are fascinating insights into family traditions and dynamics. How, as a strict vegetarian, Mehta recoils from a serving spoon that her aunt offers her after dipping it into a meat dish. And she’s someone who can’t pronounce her own last name, the soft ht in Mehta, which doesn’t exist in English.

“My name is a shibboleth, letting any member of the Indian community, or honestly, any non-South Asian person who has put serious time and effort into learning South Asian languages, know that I am, in the end, not authentic.”

As a child, she did not like Indian food, though her mother’s Indian cooking was loved by everyone.

She associates her not feeling Indian enough to her halfness and also not having as much contact with the Indian side of the family, so where does this instinctive “pure-impure” response stem from? Mehta devotes an essay to understanding this aspect of her personality.

The essays also dive into how parents of non-white children can be resistant to acknowledging racism in their children’s lives, and thus leave them ill-equipped to deal with it. Even if they have experienced it themselves as a mixed-race couple.

She quotes journalist and novelist Sanjena Sethian who posits that “Indian Americans from my subculture – usually wealthy, dominant-caste Hindus – often actively embrace stories casting ourselves as America’s great successes, as the outsiders who confirm the meritocratic American dream.” In this formulation, racism will not hurt Indian Americans because, in essence, we do not deserve it.

But it loops back to racism – often inadvertent – children of mixed race can experience from both sides of the family. Teaching them to code switch, to play at being American or Indian, based on the context in which they find themselves.

In another essay Mehta parses the difference between cultural exchange and appropriation. Knowledge of a culture and respect for it are key, she concludes.

This is not an indictment of family, rather, it’s an attempt to understand, with generosity and humour. All she’s seeking, finally, is that they understand her as she understands herself.

“I always like people better when they accept my answer of where I am from, without asking a follow-up, because it means they are engaging with me, as I experience myself, not as they want to experience me.”

I am not so sure about one of the conclusions she reaches, that “to be Indian, from India, is to never be able to forget the English”. How many of us who were born and raised in independent India give any mind space to those who colonized us? On an ongoing basis? Perhaps this applies to her father because that was the India he left – and therefore, the India he always carried within him.