This essay is a work in progress, because my life here in the USA is itself a work in progress—or so I should like to think. You will probably receive such letters from me as long as I continue to be a South Asian (I do not see that changing any time soon) and certainly as long as I continue to be an American and to live in America. I will add and edit as time goes on, but I wanted to write about this particular event while both it and the response it evoked are fresh in my mind. No real names have been used.
My husband and I were invited this weekend to the first birthday party of the first-born of some white neighbors. Unusually, since most white people around ignore us completely, this young couple, both of whom we met on their walks out with their little dog, were kind and friendly—it might have helped that they had purchased their house on the same street at the same time we had, and had actually, at one time, been looking at the house that we finally ended up buying. I continued to see them on occasional walks around the block in subsequent months. I say “block,” and not “neighbourhood,” because when one is ignored and treated as invisible by the dominant and privileged group, one cannot call the place where one lives a “neighbourhood.” The term would be a misnomer.
So, anyway, they were very nice and they invited us to the birthday party of their first-born child, Imogen, last weekend. Just wanted this to be a letter letting Euro-Americans know that today, in “post-racial” America, in 2012, when a person who is South Asian or African/Afro-American goes to a party where the majority of guests are European/Euro-American, that person’s experience may still be quite different from what it would have likely been had she been a European/Euro-American herself.
As expected, the vast majority of the guests were Euro-American. One and all ignored us, behaving as though we did not exist, though they freely introduced themselves to one another and chatted with one another in the most friendly manner imaginable. My husband and I stood to one side. No one made eye contact with us. In my experience of other parties and get-togethers where Euro-Americans are the majority, if we as non-Euros make eye contact, we are often rebuffed. Tight and fleeting smiles, no smiles, cat-butty lips, tensed jaws, and scurrying rear views is what we get for our pains. In fact, I am often left with the impression that since, because of our skin colour, we belong to the under or servant class, we had better not speak before we are spoken to.
Of course, then we are not spoken to. Why would members of the master race speak to lackeys like us?
So we stood there and we stood there, watching the conversation ebb and flow easily around us. Finally we were reduced—I use the word advisedly—to picking up a photo album that the hostess had left upon a side table showing their house in its various stages of repair and renovation, and leafing through it, murmuring comments to each other. The only Euro-Americans to speak to us were our host and hostess themselves—which, seeing as they invited us, was not surprising.
The whole time we were there, people’s eyes slipped right over and through us. There was open space, utter blankness, where we were supposed to be, where we actually were. And again, this is not surprising, for in the eyes of those people, we really weren’t there. But since, in our own eyes and in our own bodies, we unmistakably were there, we can tell you what it felt like. In fact, I think now I know what it feels like to be a ghost, a spectre, that is conscious of itself—oh, painfully conscious!—but apparent to no-one else. It was the closest to an out-of-body experience that I’ve ever had, but I’m a lot luckier in that respect than many of those people at the party—all I have to do to enjoy that experience again is go to another party dominated—in more than one sense—by Euro-Americans and shazam!
Once the hostess came over to speak to us—she is a lovely, gracious young lady, and she probably saw that we were the pariahs at her party. The rush of gratitude that I felt at being treated like a human being—at being acknowledged as visible—left me strangely hating myself. I remembered what an Indian woman friend had once said about a bus in an Indian metropolis with male passengers where she hadn’t been subjected to sexually suggestive gestures or leers. She told me she felt grateful to those men for being kind enough not to molest her—felt deep gratitude to another dominant group for merely treating her like a human being. I recognized the same effusive response in myself. I could see what these experiences, of which this party is by no means the first, threatened do to my sense of proportion in due course. In time I would no doubt be hurling myself prostrate on the ground to kiss Euro-American feet if someone so much as said “Hello,” and meant it.
A lady came over to speak to us. It was evident that she was friendly and outgoing and could see dead people. It was equally evident to us that she wasn’t Euro-American. In conversation, Eunice told us that she was from El Salvador. We found that both our countries of birth grew mangoes. A small, but precious fact that somehow bound us together. Since she had a white partner, however, she was not invisible—she belonged.
How would you feel if you were at a party and were treated this way? Oh, wait. If you’re a Euro-American and are into denial, you don’t even have to answer that. Because you will not only never know what it means to be a marginalized racial “other,” since your ethnic group, in terms of sheer raw privilege, straddles the globe, but more importantly, you will fall over yourself to deny and diminish our experience as exaggerated or untrue. This sort of denial is a common strategy that dominant and privileged groups adopt to perpetuate their privilege and to prevent the voices of the dominated (or whatever the current academic term is) from being heard. First, accuse them of lying or exaggerating their experience. I recall Frederick Douglass was accused of exaggerating his stories about slavery. From my own experience as an ignored pariah spectre, I now think that far from exaggerating, he was probably not telling the story of slavery as graphically as he might have—precisely out of concern for the response he did get—disbelief, ridicule, denial, diminishment. Though my experience is in no way the same as his, the responses of the privileged to the attempts of the not-so-privileged to express themselves remain disappointingly similar. The latter speaks; the former scrambles to de-legitimize what is said.
Here are some examples of the responses I’ve come across personally when I’ve tried to share my experiences with subtle racism here with Euro-Americans.
1. Have you considered the possibility that you might be annoying? You know, if Euro-Americans can tell what kind of person I am before I open my mouth, they must be the most perspicacious of God’s creatures. And that still doesn’t explain why, when I’m at a party where Afro-Americans, Latinos, or South Asians are the dominant group, I never have the experience I’ve just related above. Have you considered the possibility that that response might be racist denial?
2. Perhaps you were imagining things—they just didn’t know you. See above.
3. Whites tend to be reserved. Not to their own kind, as far as I’ve observed, and believe me, I’ve made it my business to look, very carefully, over the fifteen odd years I’ve been privileged to dwell here.
4. If you hate it here so much, why don’t go back to wherever you came from? Now that’s a non-racist response if I ever heard one—and I’ve heard some beauties—see 1. And who said anything about hating it here anyway?
5. Why the hell are you so bitter? Gee, after countless experiences of being snubbed, slighted, ignored, and treated as invisible, of which this party is just the latest, I wonder, don’t you?
6. Maybe you’re just not good-looking. Well, yes, there’s always that. That would explain it.
7. Well, one time some African-Americans (or Asian-Americans, or South Asians) ignored me! I get this one a lot—the variation on “we’re all victims of racial discrimination.” Sorry, it’s just not true. The situations are not the same.
Imagine an upper caste Hindu Brahmin or Kayastha complaining that she was once “ignored,” by a group of Chamars. The reasons why she, the upper caste Hindu, would be given a wide berth by Chamars, and the reasons why a bevy of Kayasthas might not invite a Chamar to their party, would not be the same. The Chamars, being a disadvantaged and underprivileged social group, are likely to be nervous interacting with a Brahmin, but they are not very likely to think themselves more privileged than she is. They are not likely to ignore their Brahmin guest out of a feeling of social superiority. The differences in the power and privilege of one group above the other are simply too great. The very fact of making that comparison (well, I’m white and in the USA, and I was ignored by insert-ethnic-group here) suggests that the person is not taking into account the reality of contemporary and historical racial privilege in the USA.
What I mean can perhaps be explained best through another example: Imagine the following scenario:
An African woman reports that she was similarly ignored at a party in India where the majority of the guests were Indian. My reaction, as a humanist, would not ever, ever, be to say to the African: Oh, you know, I was once ignored by some Africans/African-Americans. That response would be to ignore her experience and to basically tell her that I “really got it,” that I could “feel her pain.” I choose not to talk such dishonest rubbish. Instead, I would say frankly what I know to be the truth—that the Indians probably did indeed ignore her because of her African skin. I would apologize with humility for this horrible flaw in the Indian psyche without at any time trying to minimize its existence. I would express outrage and sorrow on her behalf, and, if she happened to be a friend—or even if she were not yet one, since I like making new friends—would invite her to eat out with me or at my own home.
I would not:
• Tell her, or hint, that I knew how she felt because I had once been ignored by some Indian Dalits (“lower-caste” Indians)
• Say: “Well, I’d have left,” which ignores the fact that her I and my I, her subject position and mine, are not the same. She was a guest at the party and should have been welcomed and engaged as such, and may not have wished to embarrass her hosts or draw attention to herself by leaving too early. She may even have wondered whether it was all her imagination or whether she really was being ignored. People who are “outside” a group and targets of subtle discrimination often do wonder this, making it an excruciating double whammy for them.
• Ask: “Are you sure that’s what really happened?” An arrogant, unfeeling response disguised as a kind of concern.
• Accuse her of exaggeration or of pretending that Africans do not discriminate. These are attempts to victimize the victim and to distract from the issue at hand.
I challenge the Euro-Americans reading this to be able to respond with the frankness and humility that this situation deserves. Yes, I said humility. If I were responding to my imaginary African friend (the real one I have hasn’t been to India yet, and I have been utterly frank with her about what I find repulsive about Indian culture) two keynotes of my response would be honesty and humility. For I am aware and I admit that in the global totem pole, South Asian Indians wield more power and enjoy greater privilege than many Africans. I am aware, and I admit, that South Asian Indians have practiced racial discrimination in Africa against Africans. I cannot and do not wish to deny these facts, and they will inform the outrage and loving support I would want to convey to an African friend in an analogous situation.
If you’re not in denial, if you said “Oh, but I’m not like that,” and you do belong to the dominant group, and you do wish to make a difference, I have some suggestions. Sharing this essay with other Euro-Americans you know is among them—because then you will be confronted, first-hand, with the anger and denial of the privileged who wish their privilege to remain unchallenged. I can almost guarantee that that will often be the response, if there is one, even among many “progressives.” Another suggestion might be to speak up, if possible, when you see or hear someone testify to an experience of subtle—especially subtle—racism, instead of pretending that the target is exaggerating or concocting stories. Denying someone’s reality in order to perpetuate their victimization is a classic tactic of abusers that psychologists call “gaslighting.” It’s from the movie “Gaslight,” where the perpetrator makes the lights flicker, and when the target reacts, insists to her that it’s all in her head—that nothing’s happened. It looks innocuous, but it’s really very vicious in its effect because the result is to make the target question her own sanity. Think of the “You asked for it,” or “It’s no big deal,” or worst of all, the gaslight of all gaslights: “Are you sure that’s what happened”? response that female victims of sexual harassment or other forms of subtler gender discrimination often face even today. The situations are analogous.
Here’s to a world where human beings are treated with the respect due to them, and where the shades of skin colour do not mean relegation to the invisible shades of the next world. Here’s to a more just world, where the spectre at the feast is seen to be a living creature of flesh and blood—and feeling.
Post-Script: I have addressed this letter to White America, but I should add that it is also sent out to all of us. We have all learned to discriminate, on one basis or another. None of us are untouched. It is as much a letter to South Asian Indians—our fixed idea that fair skin is beautiful is too notorious to be ignored, as is our widespread belief, so stubbornly held, that the female of the species is inferior to the male. It is a letter to any other privileged group, and a letter to those who have faced discrimination for who they are. It is a letter to myself, for—that word again—in all humility I wish to meditate upon the reality that we are all human and the more bitter reality of how easily we can forget that very fact.
Pubali Ray Chaudhuri is an Associate Editor of Intrepid Report.
Pubali, I think I understand your pain. Or some of it anyhow. While I was born in Cuba of a Cuban father and an American mother, My mother was just as non-received by the Cubans (our neighbors, my father’s friends, and in some cases some of my very own Cuban cousins.) She was always, “the American.” I was always, “la hija de la Americana= the American’s daughter.”
When I came to the United States I had to deal with the reverse of the coin. Here I was, “the Cuban,” or in Mississippi where I lived initially since my mother and her family of origin where from Mississippi, I was, not only “the Cuban,” I was also “Catholic.” In the land where Baptists rule being “Cuban, and Catholic on top,” does not give you much of an entry into the in-group. Anyhow, for one reason or another, either because of my family-of-origin heritage, or because of my political beliefs of which I have never shied away to express in public, or because in some ways I am not like most of the people around me, I have been shunned. Now, I am the one doing the shunning. Thinking of myself better than the crowd that always shunned me. Of course, doing the shunning leaves a very empty, lonely hole to have to face each day. I face it by going for walks in the park, or around my deteriorating neighborhood, or watching old movies on the television, or reading novels … One thing I recently very painfully discovered, but it took me more than forty years to discover it, is that the tragedy of rejection in my case was rooted in not knowing when to let go of relationships and people who when all is said and done are not worth the superiority they think it is their prized sole possession. I feel my empty admiring the beauty of a worthy flower, or eventhough extenuatingly tiring spending time/ being a Nanny McPhee to my grandchildren who are two and five (while I am nearing seventy) and … I write this not as an answer to your experience, much less as an apology for the superior beings that populate this earth of whatever color, national origin, religion or other clause that they might be. I write it as a shared experience of my own journey and the despicable prejudices I have encountered in my own life, which now, it turns out to be that I am doing some of the prejudice dishing-bit around this neighborhood not the ounce of what it once was, to the point that I sometimes don’t recognize my old self. Today there are so many things that separate me from so many others that I wonder was it them, or was it me all along? Anyhow, I have missed seing your posts over at FB. ♥ O:-)