Abstract

This essay is a testimonial of the author’s experiences, memories, and reflections about becoming a person/woman of color, discovering, and unearthing the meanings of racialization, white privilege, and white supremacy in the contemporary United States. The author gives voice to her new migrant experience as a Brown woman from India, positioning her reflections and learnings amidst the history and politics of colonialism and capitalist development, linking it to contemporary neoliberal academia in the United States. By sharing some events and encounters in her relatively short stint in Charlottesville, Virginia, between 2016 and 2019, the author reviews her attempts to critically analyze concepts like women of color, diversity, colorism, privilege, invisibility, and othering. The article further connects some of the author’s experiences of racialization in view of the growing politics of casteism and Brahmanical supremacy in India, locating and reassessing herself in the midst of Trump’s hardened propagation of white privilege in the United States and Modi’s Hindutva, both emanating a politics rooted in racialization, exploitation, and marginalization of the other.

My Brown

I share here my experiences and thoughts on the process of knowing and becoming a “person/woman of color.” It is partly an auto-ethnography, an outcome of my own desire to share and engage constructively with some of my experiences of living in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the United States. There is always more untold than told; however, this story told here involves my living as a privileged Brown and highly skilled salaried migrant, a teaching faculty member on an annually extended temporary contract in the University of Virginia’s Global Studies program. Through an analysis of some select experiences of being part of a workplace that was mostly “white,” in an institution inseparable from its legacies of slavery and white privilege, I offer this lived experience to help understand the discourse on colorism, racialization, diversity, white privilege, and white supremacy in Charlottesville, Virginia, extending and connecting it briefly to my own critical understanding of caste privilege and Brahmanical supremacy in India.

In the first part of the article, I talk about my experience of migrating and the initial perceptions in Charlottesville of the process of racialization as a migrant Brown woman. In the second part of the article, taking cues from a few works that helped me in my attempts to understand the history of racialization, slavery, and white supremacy, I discuss my understanding of the term women of color in relation to the processes of othering. In the third part, I talk about life in Charlottesville in the period 2016–19, my visit to the Thomas Jefferson home in Monticello in Virginia, my workplace—the Global Studies program at the University of Virginia (UVA), Charlottesville—and the events in Charlottesville in August 2017 in relation to the white supremacist rally and its aftermath. The fourth and the final part of the article briefly reflects my attempt to connect my critical thoughts on the meanings of caste privilege and Brahmanical supremacy in India to racialization, white privilege, and white supremacy. I try to understand how my situation pushed me toward a reassessment of myself as one from a privileged middle-class, middle-caste Hindu background in a Hindu Brahmanical society—moving as a Brown woman to the United States—a society rooted in white supremacy. For me, examining and educating myself through these experiences are illuminating for personal, epistemological, and political purposes.

The Move to the United States

In moving from Narendra Modi’s India to Donald Trump’s America, I found myself in the midst of a right-wing restoration. Moving to the United States meant experiencing the heightening of racialized right-wing politics, whereas in India I lived in the midst of growing casteism. While Trump was busy with blatant anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-leftist moves (Painter 2017), lynching of Muslims and Dalits became an everyday story under the Modi government and the assertion of Hindu extremism in India.

Born and raised in South India, I lived life between my twenties and forties trying hard to see myself both as an activist and an academic. After teaching in a university in New Delhi for nine years, I moved to the United States in 2016 to take up an academic appointment at UVA in Charlottesville. It wasn’t a well-thought-out decision to migrate to the United States. Within a year of moving, my newly adopted city became the site of the largest white supremacist rally in many years, giving a jolt to the new kind of racialization I experienced.

For some of us, there are those moments in our lives when we suddenly realize we have a color. Soon after I arrived in the United States, I had an interesting telephone conversation with my mother who has never lived away from her home in Kerala, India. I said, “They call me a woman of color,” and she asked, “What does that mean?” As a feminist, I soon realized it is, of course, a new process, different from the process of becoming a woman, as the other. I had to learn that, in this process, anyone who is not “white” or overwhelmingly of a European-like phenotype becomes “colored”; a process that continuously and consistently contributes to the making of white, the color or not a color—not as an imitation but rather as the original source from which the other colors spring.

I have tried to understand the historical and political significance of the term people/women of color, how it came into use, and how it became normalized in a historical context as a way of contesting and resisting the negative racialization of particular groups of people. I learned more about the complex history of the term in the context of immigrants in the United States—of the double consciousness of the Black American and the connection between color, class, and labor. As M. Jacqui Alexander (2006: 269) put it: “We are not born women of color, we become women of color.” For me, the phrase people/women of color represents the lack of a full person, an absence imposed by its invisibility. It also shows how the invention and construction of that absence is superimposed on the color of a person. The presence of a person comes to be defined through—or fundamentally reduced to—their color. Whiteness meanwhile is construed as the opposite of this reduction, to serve as the universal phenotype. Whiteness, and thus the white community, is created through its own negation—negation of white as a color, while its creation and negation simultaneously negate or diminish the reality of the other. Therefore, defining and naming the community of the other seem to have occurred through bringing them together, collapsing them into an undifferentiated mass as people of color.

Is othering interpreted through an absence, the lack of one or another positively associated phenotype trait? I understand that the power and privilege of whiteness were not simply created from what is assumed to be lacking; rather, they were created through a process of erasure of what existed before, as noted by many decolonial and first nation scholars (Balkenhol 2016; Smith, Tuck, and Yang 2019), and it is these historical processes of othering and erasure that met the needs of colonial capitalism, slavery, and development (Callinicos 1995). For the “colored” or those who become a person/woman of color, it’s important to learn these historical processes that are part of the history of colonialism and slavery.

In a world of white supremacy, with its different origins, specifically in the historical context of the United States, I came to understand that these other colors are not merely alterations but can also be constructed as “aboriginal” types that are “naturally” inherited, shaping the otherness. I had much to learn about the invention of “whiteness” through the settler colonial context (Dunbar-Ortiz 2015) and through capitalist slavery (Williams 1994), which in the United States became associated with the one-drop rule that underscores white supremacy and eugenics, especially in the southern states, with claims that separate Black, Brown, yellow, and white bloods exist (Du Bois 1998). I also became aware how white supremacy made people of “Asian,” “mixed,” or any other background fit into the one-drop rule—which has no biological or scientific basis—and thus created a basis for (a heightened logic of) racism. In other words, I began to understand how, over the course of recent human history, whiteness (and what are seen as common European phenotypical features) became the canvas and the original art form, while other colors (and phenotypical features that are seen as straying from European norms, played out differently in different contexts) were constructed as secondary alterations, the negatively racialized others. Importantly, I began to see clearly how ideologically and politically white supremacy functions as a norm of world order and how it is built—as white privilege—into the institutions, laws, and policies of the global system.

Knowing/Reading Color/Race

Being familiar with feminist literature on heteronormative sex/gender systems and capitalist patriarchy, life in the United States motivated me to learn more about racialization and its relationship with patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy. The work of James Baldwin has inspired those who were part of the struggle against racism in the United States from the 1960s onward. His writings helped me bridge the personal and the political through a deeper understanding of race, class, sexuality, and masculinity, within the complexity of these relationships in the context of U.S. imperialism. As a migrant, his experience of the cultivated blindness and delusion around color and whiteness in America resonated with me, and I instantly recognized his description of white privilege and how it “attacked one’s sense of one’s own reality” (Baldwin [1962] 1993: 18). Baldwin reminded me that the value placed on the color of skin everywhere in white America is a political reality, not just a personal or human one (89–90). Further, his position that “white Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need or want” (131) made me aware of the near impossibility of the privileged white to see themselves as the other.

Reading the history of the invention of race and the material base of white privilege helped me learn the importance of knowing race as a myth or fallacy of race (Montagu 1997), the problematic interpretations of the relationship between race, whiteness, and racial inequality, and how the invention of race itself has allowed societies to restrict the scope of equality along racial lines (Malik 1996); how the politics of white supremacy informs whiteness as it exists in the United States as a settler colonial society (Mills 1997); and how the processes of racialization need to be seen through a deep, historically informed understanding of capitalism and the rise of imperialism and neoliberalism (Horne 2018; Reed 2013). In addition, I recognized how the invention of race—like the invention of the tribe—led to further inventing, discovering, and colonizing through control, in which the “colored” were put into ‘tribes’/colonies and were given the appearance of monolithic entities in need of enlightenment and civilization (Mamdani 1996).

Feminist theorists have explored how women’s oppression historically has been constructed through a heteronormative sex/gender system which along with its relationship with capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy, contributes to local patriarchies (Rubin 1975; Ebert 1996; Mies 1986). As a feminist scholar who has spent most of my life in the Global South, I am interested in the debates in feminist epistemologies on binary thinking in the context of the North-South debate, issues of representation, and the process of othering. I recognize and acknowledge the importance of the relevance of these debates in the individual and community spaces, while I also see the need to go further to connect the knowledge created from these debates to larger structural goals for change.

On the politics of othering and the binary relationship between the privileged and the oppressed, feminist theorists like Linda Alcoff (1991) support the position of a meaningful silence, a retreat and receptive listening by the privileged white community, while also proposing a position of speaking to/with instead of speaking for/about the other. Moving forward from this position, a meaningful silence of the privileged self seems highly problematic. Listening and speaking here has to be a position taken depending on the context in relation to whom you are speaking to or who the audience is. Silence can not be a meaningful position while speaking to the privileged and vice versa. I see as extremely important an attempt to address white privilege by un/learning from history, acknowledging white privilege; joining the struggle to fight white privilege through a dialogue within the white community.

I see herein an attempt to address white privilege by un/learning from history and joining the struggle to fight white privilege; through a dialogue within the white community, a process of seeing, learning from, listening to, and acknowledging white privilege, as extremely important (Harding 1993; Case 2012).

I also appreciate the fact that there are members of the privileged white community, though very few, who consider it their primary struggle to challenge the ideology of white supremacy and its politics of conquest, discovery, and control, as racialized communities should not be expected to fight racialization and white privilege alone.

The irony of becoming “colored” is that you do not initially see whiteness in the way you are expected to see it. However, the experience of becoming “colored” is a shifting terrain, moving between feelings of invisibility, objectification, hypervisibility, or exoticization of yourself. In situations of power struggles, all these become unnerving and sometimes unbearable, as Black feminist thinkers have described (Collins 2000; hooks 1995). I have found these debates on issues of invisibility and hypervisibility very meaningful, especially to explore the multiple locations of invisibility and the link of invisibility to hypervisibility and to otherness. Life in Charlottesville was marked by the external imposition of invisibility, either my own or that of anyone who isn’t white, which came very close to the absence or denial of the full person and the occasional hypervisibility, a racially sexualized nature or otherwise. However, addressing this led to the repetitive narrative, that of a commonly assumed response of the so-called race in me, the Brown, which would be angry and desperate, with a hidden deep desire to become one with the white. I have been curious about the debates on the hidden desire to be white—as discussed from Frantz Fanon to bell hooks (1995)—as a yearning in the nonwhite/Black world’s imagination. For me, it has always been important to reveal that the imposed invisibility and hypervisibility did not seem to contribute toward any deep or hidden desire in me, and maybe among the other “colored” too, toward becoming white.

Fanon’s ([1952] 2008) critical reading of whiteness and his critical interpretation of the self, its subjectivity, and its heightened forms of individualism helped me see how talking of color or experience was shaped to some extent by politics around identity and the individualization process (Fanon [1953] 2004). However, the focus here was on the individual’s subjective struggle and the search for the color of one’s soul in terms of how the white man would see it. On the one hand, this opens space for the possibility of acknowledging that there is a segment among the other who may not have the slightest desire to be white; it also reminds us that the absence of a desire—conscious or unconscious—to be white does not necessarily come from anger, hate, or despair.

Of course, my experience as a new migrant with a professional position encountering white supremacy doesn’t reflect the experience of the working-class Black community’s having to live or coexist in a former slave-owning society, nor does it mirror the experience of Indigenous peoples existing in a settler state that dispossessed and murdered their ancestors. I understand the differences in Black and “colored” histories and how these differences provide distinct context to these communities for theorizing racialization and white supremacy. Much of the focus in research on whiteness and white privilege has been toward a deep comprehension of the day-to-day reproduction of whiteness, acknowledging its intentional blindness and its promotion. As Gloria Wekker (2016: 172) describes in the Dutch context, understanding white privilege and whiteness is a process of recognizing and learning the history of “white innocence” founded on an intentional ignorance with its aggressive rejection of the possibilities of knowing. It is, however, also a process of reflecting on white privilege as a symptom, an outcome of the economic and political power and the ideological and cultural landscapes created through it. Further, for me, more than the focus on the individual and the cultural links, a focus on white privilege needs to help contribute to a structural analysis of the roots of racialization and its birth thorough colonial capitalism.

The new experience of racialization brought an unfamiliar level of anger and disgust in me, which perhaps emerged from my inability—the inability of the “colored” to identify and accept the inferiority in one’s color. I was born in the 1970s. Much was written in the 1960s and 1970s about the processes of racialization in the mind and language of the colonized. Colonialism had widely ended, at least in its formal political definition, and the discourse on understanding neocolonialism and decolonization contributed to a more thoughtful reading of the politics of race and white privilege. Today I understand white privilege as a dynamic of white supremacy; in most of the world, postcolonial societies are still ruled by people who are invested in global white supremacy, which represses through institutional and cultural forms as the norm of the global capitalist order. This complex location brings me closer to Albert Memmi’s ([1965] 1991) conceptual subcategory of the colonial—the colonial who gives up his or her privileges out of choice but still remains a colonizer. Memmi’s colonizer/colonized framework helps reflect on the complexity of these binaries and the diverse histories and processes of the colonial and white privilege. A love for the colonized is combined with a pride for the white legacy. Further, Memmi’s reflections on the feelings of self-hate and shame among the colonized of the 1960s helped me better understand the self-hate produced through racism/casteism and its impact on the subjectivities of the oppressed.

New migrants are often told that they suffer from a cultural shock. This made me wonder what exactly was cultural about the space in which I found myself. Limitations of language or cultural anguish are used to explain much of the inability of a new migrant to adjust to the developed world. In its simplest form, the elucidation of what is cultural is interpreted within the privileges of the developed world. For me, the local lifeworld in this modernizing capitalist empire of the developed felt mostly as one that was devoid of any culture of its own—an absence of variety or diversity along with an abundance of materiality, conformity, and uniformity. In Charlottesville, I experienced the emptiness of a small white town, a culture borrowed through the processes of colonialism and closely tied to the neoliberal market. However, I understand that this process is not limited to Charlottesville or the Global North; the culture of the local in the Global South is also changing radically with the invasion of neoliberal global capital and the culture that it imposes.

Historically, European colonialists have been successful in producing non-European Black and Brown men and women who fully internalized European norms and values (Kiernan 1969). For this section of the contemporary non-European elite, not recognizing colorism and racialization along with the history of racism, slavery, and global capitalism may be an advantage. Many among the powerful elite in postcolonial countries seem content to apply colonial standards and policies to local communities in their home countries. The minds of the elite in postcolonial countries such as India are recolonized and still enslaved (deSouza 2017). More than the recolonization of the enslaved minds, most elites in the Global South are content to enjoy the benefits or profits of supporting such recolonization through the contemporary neoliberal capitalist system. A better understanding of this recolonization politics has enabled me to learn about and reflect on the complexities of my racialization in the United States. I am able to see a caste Hindu becoming Brown in a town like Charlottesville, and the importance of talking of both racist and casteist practices together in contemporary times. The privileged among the colonized, the elite among the Brown and Black communities have mostly invested in global white supremacy, the norm of global capitalist social order. Personally, I do separate myself from this colonial elite among the colonized as someone whose entry into the elite or privileged space is new and limited to my transition from a student to a skilled immigrant in the Global North. However, this current position also makes it important for me to face the challenges produced by white and Brahmanical supremacy and privilege within Western academia both epistemologically and politically. Here I am specifically thinking of the privileged who collaborated with the colonial capitalists for profit, in the world of development or in business, government, the arts, or other fields.

Life in Charlottesville, 2016–2019

I did not know much about Virginia’s role in the history of American slavery, with Richmond serving as the capital of the treasonous Confederate states during the American Civil War (1861–65). I knew nothing about the history of the University of Virginia and its buildings, which were constructed by chattel slave labor. I had taken a decision to move out of Delhi in India, and it wasn’t important where I was relocating to. So I packed two suitcases and left, and in the next two to three years, I tried to learn about the history of UVA as part of the larger history of Charlottesville in the context of capitalist slavery, racism, gentrification, segregation, and much more.

Life in Charlottesville was shaped by how I experienced the lifeworld as a highly skilled new migrant entering a particular community. I came with my own understanding and experiences, as a first-generation migrant, limited and skewed in some ways but deeper in others. I had to learn how people are socialized to see things through the racialized order of whiteness, Blackness, and other identities and, in so doing, work to see experiences beyond these monolithic existences and representations. Beyond the status quo understanding, I wanted to learn from the community, how they speak of themselves, within and beyond their own identity and community. Though there would be many attempts to understand the power hierarchies, privileges, and oppression within specific white and Black communities in Charlottesville, in reality, any conversation on racism got stuck on identifying a specific community as Black or white. It seldom went into the deeper politics of racialization. I saw this as a reflection of the binary thinking, processes of othering, and the silence or retreat of the privileged. In many ways I could see how a simplified, straightforward, and dichotomous relationship between racialized communities exists, reflecting the artificial barriers that have been created to separate people from one another (Balibar 1991) and the real-life experiences that occur through a spatial concept of geographical borders (Agnew 2009)—a separation that helps regenerate Black and white communities in Charlottesville.

In 2016 I visited Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello just outside Charlottesville. It has a relatively new so-called slavery tour. The tour starts at the servants’ dwelling (built circa 1793–1830, reconstructed in 2014) for the enslaved Hemmings family (the enslaved woman Sally Hemmings who was raped, had given birth to children by Thomas Jefferson). At the entrance of the dwelling is a placard entitled “Not so bad?” Further on, the note reads as follows: “John and Priscilla Hemmings lived in a cabin similar to—or even better than—the dwellings of the many poorer free whites. . . . ” These were words of perhaps both guilt and arrogance. Although the walking tour did serve as a learning process, the placard at the entrance along with the young white lady who gave the tour, with her interpretations of the slave family life, filled me with feelings of sadness, anger, and a sense of humiliation. In response to a question from the audience on the family life of the slaves, the tour guide explained that the selling and buying of slaves were done taking into consideration that slave families should be kept together. Walking with the all-white crowd of tourists, I couldn’t help but be furious at myself that I paid or had to pay the Monticello estate to do a slavery walk and put myself through this experience. As far as I could see, I was the only nonwhite person in a crowd of around sixty people. Suddenly, at the end of the slavery walk, an older white woman approached me and said, “I am so sorry!” and walked away, adding another dramatic and bizarre moment to the slavery walk.

Leaving India, I was already familiar with the proto fascism of its prime minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu right-wing party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with its various tendencies. Now I also became familiar with contemporary American politics, with Trump coming to power. Often in the mornings, as I woke up in Charlottesville, I would wonder, “who said that, was it Trump or Modi?” However, the events of August 2017 made me see Charlottesville and the United States more clearly. That month, amid a controversy about the removal of Confederate statues, white supremacists from all over the country organized a “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville, instilling terror and inciting violence in the Black and other negatively racialized communities, leaving three dead (one activist and two state troopers) and many injured (Hart and Danner 2017). Hundreds of armed white supremacists marched through the streets of Charlottesville, violently abusing and attacking those who resisted their presence. That fatal evening, the white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately rammed his car into a crowd of protestors, killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others. Heyer, a thirty-two-year-old woman, was on the street to protest the white supremacist presence in her town.

Earlier, on July 8, 2017, I had joined hundreds of counter-protesters against a rally of around fifty Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members. The KKK was upset about the city’s plan to remove a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park—one among many, many Confederate statues in Virginia (Spencer and Stevens 2017). I lived close to the street where the controversial statue of Lee was located. Weeks before the rally in August, activists cautioned people in the town to prepare themselves in peaceful but powerful resistance. I had convinced myself that nothing very volatile could happen in this university town. But it did. On the evening of August 11, neo-Nazis marched not only through the streets but also through the corridors of the rotunda of UVA. While students from multiple backgrounds hid for safety, the alt-right marchers shouted, “Jews will not replace us.” A small section of students stood face to face with them, bravely and peacefully, showing powerful resistance. I had just returned from my summer break in India. The day before, I was in a local flight from Charlotte to Charlottesville surrounded by many with white pride T-shirts coming to Charlottesville to join the Nazi rally. While helicopters circled all night, one of my neighbors left milk, bread, and some snacks at my doorstep with a note saying it isn’t safe to go out. That evening, holding hands with a few of my friends, I stood near the site on the roadside where Heyer was murdered.

The happenings of August 11–12 in Charlottesville have been extensively covered. In its aftermath, I attended meetings, memorials, and events devoted to sharing, thinking together, and healing from the aftereffects of that night. There were two starkly different versions of the events of August 11–12. In the immediate aftermath of August 11–12, in contrast to liberal-minded white people saying, “This town wasn’t like this, it was never like this,” the Black version ran: “There isn’t much new about all of this, if you know the history of this town. Only maybe the intensity of what happened now is new.” Like many others, I found that whenever I was in a public space, my Brown became suddenly visible in the eyes of white people and was greeted with a smile. That was new and, of course, it was encouraging to have that expression of sympathy and recognition; it lasted for about two weeks, before things returned to normal. Just two months after the pro-Trump Nazi/Klan/alt-right rally in Charlottesville, to my disbelief, a report was published in the Washington Post, listing Charlottesville among the top twenty-five happiest towns in the United States (Hui 2017). The town’s real estate market soon stabilized for the positively racialized middle strata and wealthy of Charlottesville. The return to normalcy was greeted with enthusiastic relief. Maybe such incidents do little to alter history.

Every history told, every institution, every public space in Charlottesville has beneath it a legacy of slavery and segregation. Yet the history of post–Civil War Vinegar Hill (Field Studio 2015), once a flourishing Black community, and its transformation into contemporary Charlottesville, with the ever-growing gentrification of the Black community, is still mostly absent from any inquiry into race, racism, and slavery in the history of Virginia and the United States. What is present and visible is the narrative of the colorless white. The white Charlottesville constantly asks you to look at the bright side of this beautiful, tree-lined, quiet town with its mountainous landscape, its long chain of nice restaurants and southern architecture. Yet one struggles not to see what is hidden and made invisible. In January 2018 the city elected Nikuyah Walker, its first Black woman mayor. The election of Walker was also a response by the liberal members of the community to the events of August 2017. While the election of Walker set the tone for a progressive step forward, the cloak of invisibility thrown over the active presence of Black women and men in the leadership of resistance remained, except in a few spaces like the Jefferson School of African American Heritage Centre. These resonances were clear if you listened to the Black community in town. For them, there is still a need for collective strength to move forward, learn from the trauma, and seek lessons of tolerance and resistance for the future.

In any public space in Charlottesville, whom you happen to be with makes a big difference. Whether you are with a white man or a white woman, a lesbian/queer/trans white person, a lesbian/queer/trans Black person, another Brown man or Brown woman, a Black man or a Black woman will often result in a different experience. From the waiters at the restaurants who look right through you, to the dogs that bark only at you, the random white people who say how beautiful you look in that Indian dress, the white man who whispers to your white friend “you are with a colorful woman today,” followed by a laugh, or some of your white students who feel entitled to get good grades from you—for me, Charlottesville breathed racism. Except of course for a few close friends and the beautiful Rivanna River trail, it was easy to feel isolated. It can sometimes be a paranoia similar to Baldwin’s ([1962] 1993: 95) experiencing the inability to distinguish “a real from a fancied injury,” in which one believes something happens just as a result of one’s color even when that might not be the case.

It is a constant struggle to resist a surface-level reaction, trying instead to clear one’s head and consider the deeper structural processes at work. My South Asian friends who were born and brought up in the United States sometimes do not see it the same way; they seem to have become accustomed to it. Was I being paranoid? Perhaps it is real, but you see it only when you are new. Or you could be blinded by the familiar if you are an insider (Bolak 1996). However, it’s undeniable that Charlottesville is visibly segregated in racial and class terms. I could try imagining the history of the blood that was spilled in these streets, the segregation endured by the many marginalized, the social apartheid for the poor, the transgendered, and the homeless. I strongly sensed its heavy burden when I spoke to the ordinary working-class people or the activists based there, especially those from the Black community, or through the Black homeless men sitting in the streets of its downtown mall, speaking loudly to themselves.

In the aftermath of August 2017, every event, every memorial I attended affected me deeply. I felt the need to distance myself and found it easier to focus on a primary struggle, connecting with those who have had similar experiences. I do not come from the Black poor or the white poor in Charlottesville, I did not feel I could represent its middle class or elite, or even its low-waged taxi drivers who are often migrants from distant countries. However, I could relate with the particular experiences of the marginalized, the negatively racialized, migrant, and working-class people in Charlottesville and connect these to larger struggles commensurate with experiences from my world.

Many conversations in the aftermath of August 2017, including among UVA students (usually from middle- and upper-strata backgrounds) and activists, focused on white people in Charlottesville, thinking together about how to have a conversation with the white community about white supremacy and racialization, or how to address gentrification in the town. Charlottesville soon became a focal point in political debates nationwide. The town drew much attention as offers of support and solidarity poured in. While this led to some community support projects, inside UVA it led to massively funded projects like its Democracy Initiative or Democracy Labs. While some university students became the voice of the community and were present everywhere, few among the university faculty were also visibly present or vocal in responding to the events of August 2017. Of those who were present, many struggled with the boundaries between their own career interests and their (contradictory) social and political commitment. With millions of dollars flowing into these projects, the relationship between the Charlottesville community and the university and its experiments in democracy would understandably be a complex one to negotiate.

I had been teaching a course on global development in a global studies program, as the only nonwhite faculty at the time, to a majority-white student cohort at UVA, many of whom were from wealthy or middle-class backgrounds. I was constantly reminded by my colleagues of the value of my presence as the only woman of color in the program. For me, it was a gradual learning process to equip myself through my everyday lessons at work, dealing with the white innocence of my colleagues. In my experience, resisting white innocence and challenging white privilege are more difficult with those members of academia who teach the very same subjects like racism or feminist politics in the classroom. During my own experience of teaching, I found my identity often limited to being a woman of color and a new migrant, perhaps ticking the box for the program. For the few students who were from a background similar to mine, or those who were interested in studying India or South Asia, it meant bringing familiar and important issues like caste or patriarchy to the classroom. Since most Brown students in this context would also be from privileged backgrounds, this entailed addressing or challenging caste/class privilege in the classroom, which is extremely relevant in relation to critical theories of development and decolonization. The discipline has witnessed a shift from “international” to “global,” and a fundamental challenge in the discipline has been combining the discourse on decolonizing academia at the same time that academic institutions continue to offer international development studies as a career option (Rutazibwa 2019: 158). These debates with their complexity and inherent contradictions help students challenge the myths around development and critically and pedagogically engage with coloniality and Eurocentrism, while shifting the focus from seeing the Global North as a permanent location of good life and solutions (174).

For me, a deeper analysis of the relationship between white privilege, capitalism, and development is reflected in my classroom discussions around student loans, housing loan mortgages, access to health insurance, and other problems facing the vast majority of working people in the contemporary United States. It is imperative for us to rethink especially in the contemporary times what it means to see the United States as a developed country. Many students at UVA come from families in the greater Washington, DC, area, with parents involved in the U.S. imperial state and its numerous apparatuses, intervening constantly around the world. This impacts their worldview. For me, it was easy to connect and contrast the developed and rich United States to a country like India where millions of people lack education or access to basic health care. It helped me open up a space toward a more radical and critical approach in the classroom, unraveling the meaning of development in the context of contemporary United States and its continuing imperial hegemonic power in shaping life in many Global South countries while abusing its own internal poor and marginalized.

It Is a Labyrinth

When I received my first invitation at the university to attend a reception for diverse faculty, I was perplexed. It showed genuine ignorance and newness on my part that I had to find out if I was part of the diverse and if white people would be there too. It took time for me to understand that the diversity reception or diversity week serves a clear purpose in a majority white space. Diversity, like color, is not white, and for many spaces in social and institutional contexts, addressing racial politics is possible only through holding diversity events with a variety of “colored” people. For the “colored,” when a place is not diverse, it is like “walking into a sea of whiteness” (Ahmed 2012: 35).

Experiences of racialization in the workplace are subtle and complex, and one is constantly negotiating within the limitations of a safe space between narcissism and the liberal disguise (Goldberg 2009). In my experience, being recognized as part of the diverse community is loaded with patterns of patronization and paternalism that are sometimes difficult to uncover. This has been true even in feminist spaces where white women in academia who discuss unlearning racism could nevertheless be patronizing and condescending (hooks 1984). Furthermore, this recognition and level of consideration demands, in return, unlimited amounts of gratitude (Ghorashi 2014) for being there. There is a need to constantly tell you just how amazing you are (even though you are different) or that your presence is so needed because of who you are (not white). hooks (1984: 12) sees this is an inevitable outcome of being focused on individual attitudes rather than addressing racism in a historical and political context.

This process of being and becoming just exactly what you are expected to be, nothing more, nothing less, makes one vulnerable and cautious. It is also an outcome of the heightened levels of individualism, insecurity, and paranoia within the highly competitive and careerist atmosphere of U.S. academia, which encompasses racialization and works in complex ways between different genders, classes, and nationalities. For institutions like UVA, this paranoia in response to attempts at a deeper conversation on diversity projects and their meaningful implementation reflects the fear that the so-called historical pride and legacy of the institution is being challenged. When you are overwhelmed by good liberal white people with good intentions in good institutions, you tend to lose or forget your own story and doubt your own ability to understand life and the world around you. It is a labyrinth.

Diversity projects are intended to aesthetically erase racism. However, in the process of institutionalizing diversity, in some sense, your simply being there is enough in itself (Ahmed 2012: 22). In implementing projects on diversity, you mostly have to work in the absence of much support for that goal. Sara Ahmed describes the effort to make diversity meaningful in institutions as like “banging your head against a brick wall” (27). Nevertheless, diversity or a focus on differences seems to be seen as a more attractive option than equality; it creates an illusion of equality, though with no historical or material base (Ebert 1996). The possibility of practicing diversity in the absence of decolonizing practices within institutions is not talked about. Thus diversity projects can steer one away from equality and justice while remaining part of the diverse. For Ahmed (2012: 176), “to inhabit a category of privilege is to not come up against the category.” What is invisible to the white in a diversity project is visible to the “colored,” and vice versa. Are diversity projects within institutions making the “colored” see themselves as lesser beings and then creating a common space for all lesser beings to come together? Diversity projects, much like multiculturalism, are used by liberals to mask racialized social relations, protecting the status quo. Diversity is where the real color of your skin counts, and yet not all diverse people fit in there. As far as the elite-run, majority-white institutions are concerned, in the long run, if you fit in, your smiling face will appear everywhere—in brochures, websites, and the like. But in order to reach that point, you need to be disciplined and trained, made aware of your worth and your place.

The Caste of My Brown and the Exits

Feminist epistemologies argue that it’s essential for a feminist subject to be reflexive in order to be free from all binary thinking and oppositional categories (Ramazanoglu and Holland 2002: 88) and to critically locate one’s self in a position of strong objectivity (Harding 1993). I have learned, from the complexity around feminist debates on representation, how difficult it is for the privileged to recognize and acknowledge their power and privilege and to put reflexivity into practice (Ramazanoglu and Holland 2002: 119). This has inspired me to attempt a deeper political and epistemological reading of myself, learning from the challenges through a critical reading of my experiences, locating myself in this discourse into the ethic of personal accountability, acknowledging and recognizing myself within the politics of caste. While conceptions of color and phenotype, and colorism, do exist in India, more structurally prevalent are dynamics around caste. A deeper perception of the complexities of colorism and racialization has helped me reflect on my understanding and engagement with the increasing influence of Brahmanical supremacy, Brahmanical patriarchy (Chakraborty 2018), and the caste regime in both contemporary India and the United States. Similar to white supremacy, Brahmanical supremacy as an idea and as politics functions as a norm, supporting caste privilege by influencing societal norms and state institutions, through laws and policies in India. It represents a way of life leading to the hegemony of a Hindu caste-based regime, supporting the creation of a Hindu nation through Hindutva, a political ideology to propagate an extreme version of Hindu nationalism.

The rise to power of the right wing in India, which supports the ideology of Hindutva, an extreme version of Hindu nationalism, has seen a large-scale increase in lynchings and police brutality against Muslims and Dalits, and in incidences of killings associated with inter-caste marriages (wrongly termed honour killings) (Grewal 2013) or of love jihad (Sarkar 2018). Recently, India has also witnessed a redefining of its constitution through an amendment to the Citizenship Act, which has been followed by brutal organized violence against dissenting voices. In contemporary times, there has been a widespread growth among the South Asian diaspora of Hindu nationalism and support for the politics of Hindutva in India. The BJP-led government in India has extensive support from the non-resident Indian (NRI)/South Asian community abroad. In the past few decades, the NRI community in parts of the United States, UK, and Europe has played an important role, financially and culturally supporting the growth of the Indian right wing in India and the rest of the world. In the same period, Hindu extremist groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh have been promoting the ideology of Hindutva, using the power and sentiments of dominant cultures, traditions, and nostalgia and interpreting and linking these with the virtues of a spiritual orientation against the Western materialist world. Decolonization thoughts in recent times have been more easily (mis)used in the Indian context, replacing colonialism with Hindu nationalism (Sharma 2019) to support the right-wing agenda. There is also growing investment in research within social science academia especially in the Global North, in the name of Hindu ecology, Hindu economy, and so on. Multiple academic approaches to decolonization within ecofeminist and other ecological and climate movements are being appropriated, misinterpreted, and infiltrated by Hindu right-wing ideology. Along with securing large-scale funding to support themselves, these Hindu extremist organizations have successfully propagated the need for a process called re-Hinduization (Bose 2008; Jaffrelot and Therwath 2007). The solidarity expressed between Modi, Trump, and the NRI community in their enthusiastic support for a right-wing alliance was seen in the Howdy Modi event in the United States in 2019 and the Namaste Trump event in India in 2020.

Indeed, there is a similarity in the erasure or silencing of the history of colonialism and slavery in the Western world to the erasure of the history of caste atrocities under Brahmanical supremacy and Hindutva rule in India. Like the ethnically cleansed Indigenous population in the United States, Dalits (the casteless untouchables of Hinduism) were among the original inhabitants of the country (Joseph 2018) whose history of continuing economic, social, and political oppression also has been erased. For thinkers like B. R. Ambedkar (1916), who contributed immensely to resisting casteism and Brahmanical supremacy, caste is like “an artificial chopping of the population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into another through the custom of endogamy.” Caste Hindus imposed casteism on people who historically have been an integral part of their lives and communities, leading to centuries-long discrimination, oppression, torture, and lynching. Sadly, knowledge production both in the Western and Indian academia on the ideology and practice of caste has been problematic and limited.

Similar to Baldwin’s thoughts on race, Ambedkar saw caste and untouchability imposed by Hindu religion as a confiscation of the human persona. Ambedkar believed that Brahmanism created, enclosed, and fortified communities, imposing a caste order, wanting Indians to believe that caste is produced and reproduced through these communities. There is a history of international solidarity between Black movements and Dalit movements, and conversations by scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois discussing the caste system in the context of racism. However, for Ambedkar, Europeans wrongly emphasized the role of color in caste. He argued that caste is fundamentally linked to, and has evolved through, class, division of labor on the basis of occupation, and enforced endogamy, all of which define a Hindu social order (Ambedkar 1916, 1979: 18–22).

It is particularly important to point out that, ironically, while the Indian/South Asian diaspora in the United States experiences racism and may even resist it, few have tried to recognize and unlearn their own caste practices and privileges that they transplanted from India. It’s a historical reality that India’s migrant Hindu community spread casteism wherever they went. There is a vital need to educate students from the Indian diaspora on casteism, so that they can consciously connect to the painful history of racism in the United States. One of the challenges is to remind them that the dynamics of racism and colorism go beyond North America and to show the similarities between the struggle against racialization and white privilege and fighting casteism. This is further linked to the realization and acceptance that people from the Global South have their own role in reproducing racialization, anti-Blackness, and anti-Dalitness. Such racism is manifest, for instance, in frequent violent assaults on people of African descent in many Indian/South Asian societies (Adibe 2017), which is best understood through what Sureshi M. Jayawardene (2016) calls a history of “racialized casteism,” linking race, caste, and colorism.

Stories of South Asians migrating to the United States are multiple, plural, unfinished, and ongoing. Many who migrated earlier were privileged, representing the landowning, upper strata of Indian society. There are many experiences and stories of the struggles that their parents went through as first-generation migrants. However, these stories tend to lack a critical analysis of their own privileges both in India and in the United States. While the fear of migrants has grown in the United States, it has also provoked questions around understanding colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, and the response “we are here because you were there” (Mehta 2019). Recent research shows increasing caste-based discrimination and caste violence among South Asians in the United States (Equality Lab n.d.; Public Radio International n.d.). In India Hindu nationalists seek to impose a rigid caste system, while denying it even exists, and in the Western world their leaders present Hinduism as a pure spiritual universal religion reflected in symbolic representations such as yoga and vegetarianism.

Over the past decade, I have seen many in my middle-caste/class family who were leftist, progressive, or secular becoming Islamophobic and supporting the Hindu right wing in India. This has led to heated arguments and conflicts within the family. When my ties with my family fell apart for political reasons, I tried to seek the support of those outside my family and community, especially among my Dalit activist friends. An interesting and tough lesson for me during this process was that it was suffocating and frustrating for them to hear of my struggles. It reminded me that I had also found it suffocating to be forced to listen to progressive white members of the Charlottesville community talking of the dangers and the threats they had to face in fighting white supremacy. It helped me understand why the Dalit community does not want to hear caste Hindus sharing their stories about fighting casteism, demanding a larger share of recognition and appreciation in the name of experiencing the pain and price paid for resistance.

It’s a Journey

Ethical and political questions around the hierarchy and privileges of the upper/middle-caste and upper/middle-class Brown people and the denial of the centrality of the oppressive caste system in Indian society are yet to be reckoned with by the majority of privileged Brown people in India and in the United States. Today, more than ever, there is an urgent need for solidarity between progressive anti-racist and anti-casteist movements. Solidarity needs to be renewed between the others, between and among the marginalized and exploited. Discourses that justify neutrality and silence for the privileged and the dominant must be directly challenged, while silence must be recognized as an intentional strategy to maintain the status quo. New migrants are always in need of resources, time, and experience to learn strategies necessary to survive white supremacy. Within the professional world of academia, a small minority of successful, established Black and Brown people—who in many ways belong now to the Global North and who have often earned their academic degrees and skills from the so-called best universities—learn to master the strategies of careerism or survival. I feel the pressure to join these ranks all around me. However, for me, like many others who are caught up in the shifting roles of othering and marginalization within the academic world, it is not easy to disconnect myself from my own path and move where I originally do not belong. I am uncomfortably placed amid this process, and I hope to someday have my own separate space within it.

I would like to thank former students at the Multicultural Student Center, University of Virginia (2017–18) for inspiration. I would like to acknowledge my sincere gratitude to Hilbourne Watson, Jeb Sprague, Wendy Harcourt, Rosalba Icaza, and the anonymous readers at Meridians for helping with their suggestions and comments on this testimonial piece.

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