By Radha Lath
For the first time, we have signed up for a CSA farm share. Once a week, my husband goes to pick it up, and then we have to put in some time to scrub all the dirt off everything, especially the greens. It’s mind altering how good everything tastes when it’s fresh and local. We do shop at the local farmer’s market every year, but something about finding ways to use up stuff you might not have picked out yourself is very character building. We had exactly zero thoughts on how to use garlic scapes, but my idea was to make a paste out of them, and use it for cooking, just like garlic paste (except a vibrant green) from the Indian store. Going to see how that works out, now that we have a jar of the paste in the fridge.
We get a little overwhelmed at times. It’s mostly sort of rabbity food in early summer, what we call Stuff White People Eat, which makes us snicker. How many red radishes can one brown family get through?? Even with salad dressing clinging to it, it doesn’t taste like…anything. Being from Singapore, I am thinking of using them to make carrot cake, which is not a dessert at all, but a savory breakfast dish called chye tow kway, and which usually has white radish, sambal, garlic, and fish sauce. I am seriously going to try a vegetarian, red radish version of this. If you’re interested in an update, I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Tonight, I used a beautiful, fat cabbage to make a South Indian dish called kootu. It came out amazing, all coconut-ty, and so smooth yet crunchy. Maybe for the next Hindu festival, I’ll have the kids fan the deities with Swiss chard. The leaves are so delightfully enormous….I really hope my mom is not reading this! 😉
Sometimes I am ashamed of living well in my home while so much is happening in the world, this year alone. It feels like we have been living a nightmare for four years. In addition, no sooner did my cohorts of Indian origin and I begin to talk about the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens in India, and how they unfairly impact Muslims, and undocumented peoples, then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, exposing all the ways in which our societies do not nurture the most marginalized amongst us. Governments scrambled and blustered, healthcare workers faced impossible risks, common folk tried to keep up with the updates, alternately in denial and terror, and all the while, the virus marched around the world like a sci fi villain. And now the Black Lives Matter protests are forcing us to confront any residual resistance we may have to reckoning with police brutality towards Black people, and with the bone-and-roots-deep racism that prevents this country from seeking truly meaningful solutions. At this moment, if we are not vehemently for change, we are certainly not neutral in our impact.
But we have to be careful of not leaping too far ahead. Lace has been telling us this gently but firmly since the beginning. The drama of the protests is not some magical backdrop before which we enact our fantasies of instantaneous saviorism. People who are organizing these protests and effecting shifts in their communities did not just charge out into the street. They have been activists and thinkers for years; they have strategized, and strengthened themselves, and formed ties with others, and the results are what we are seeing in so many cities. Protests don’t have to be beautifully orchestrated; and it is racist at its core to judge how Black people express their centuries-old rage. But everything I’ve read points to the fact that a lot of hearts and heads are continuing with their deepest engagement right at this moment in history.
It isn’t an accident that people keep fretting that the protests are worsening the spread of COVID. These traps of thinking are laid by the bigotry we hold onto like toddlers cling to their mothers’ hands when it is time to say goodbye at daycare. Why is it so easy to posit law enforcement as keepers of order, Black protesters as flagrantly irresponsible, and hordes of non-BIPOC thronging the beaches, flocking to salons, and crowding the bars as good souls just trying to enjoy some normalcy? Because we love these frameworks. They are the structures we know. We parroted such rhetoric about the world in our history and social science assignments, and our teachers gave us good grades. We lauded the civil rights activists of the 60s in hindsight, but nitpick every action taken by Black Lives Matter organizers today. We were the Marxist wannabes in college, but now secretly hope that socialism doesn’t take away our Fios accounts.
Every time I see a Black or brown person living their life, getting some fresh air, picking up their food from a restaurant, sitting on their front stoop and chatting with their neighbors, I am charmed by these acts of resistance. Especially now. There is something powerful about doing things because we want to. Because they serve only us. Why should everything we do be a service to others? Why should everything about our words and cultures and responses right now be so that mainstream America can feel educated or nourished or transformed, or even just reassured that we don’t all hate them? I get tired from all that at times, and need to just be in my brown skin, with my brown family, hanging in there while a pandemic robs my son of autism interventions, and wanting some hard won pleasant times. I imagine that must be multiplied a thousandfold for Black people.
As I make sure my family eats these wonderful rabbity greens, I wonder if many of us would do better to pause in the desperate urgency we feel–to do, help, share, step up. I say this because there is so often a difference between what it is we are saying we want to do, as opposed to what could actually happen if we unclenched. If we allowed some reflection, maybe we would finally understand how even our well meant activism can cause the ’slosh’ that Lace warns about. We might bring less of our mess into spaces that need us, but not necessarily in the ways we want to be needed. We might need less endless guidance on how to lessen our harmful impact on the communities we say we want to stand with. We could stop being the “well read racists” that Lace spoke of, who absorb and parrot, but fail to move to consistent, meaningful engagement.
Reading is an act of consumption. I am called on, through the act of reading, to move beyond my self appointed job of professional account keeper of human rights and wrongs. Reading, consuming, demands that I become part of the food chain, that I nourish in turn by translating my education into actions that share power, rather than ones that edify only me, and build fortifications only for me.
Lace suggested that my piece for this month should be an expansion of some comments I wrote on her Vox interview, which really reiterated powerfully her intentions for Lace on Race. Absorbing it brought me back to when she first started the page, and I struggled to keep up with the readings, and also what was being asked of me. I believe it was not so much that I could not grasp the ideas as it was that the boulder shifting was exposing too many tender parts. It showed me that one of the greatest stumbling blocks in allyship is how much resource guarding I do, while saying over and over that I am here for whatever is needed.
There are the obvious resources that I hoard—time, for one. In the chaos of daily life, I am tempted to shove to the back burner everything that requires deep engagement. But if I want to do something badly enough, I plan for it. I add it to the checklist. And it becomes part of my internal journey.
Then there’s financial resource hoarding. I should not need anyone to tell me that being intentional in my financial engagement is important. In the past few weeks, I was feeling “clenchy” about my monthly commitments. I decided to follow that thought with intellectual curiosity, rather than bat it away. And I realized that I was actually worrying about the bigger picture, whether the election will bring more grief. Also, hah, I was able to set aside some money to buy myself a birthday present, so I went ahead and admitted that my other clench was because I wanted to be the Queen of June. These aren’t invalid clenches, but they are interesting ones: they highlight how easily I might give into despair, how I still run back to easy (retail) solutions to the worry and ennui that are my constant, unwanted companions after months of seclusion.
But there is also the hoarding of mental blocks, isn’t there? Specifically, I am thinking of whom we ask to lead us, or whose leadership we accept as authentic. On the issue of representation, it trips off the tongue so easily to make claims that representation doesn’t matter, if you already see people who look like you in positions of power. I have been sitting uncomfortably with ideas of who looks like a leader to me, by default. Whose values I seek to emulate. How recently in my own life I have worked on changing those default ideas.
I shudder to recall times in the past, when I did not understand the dynamics of race relations in this country properly, and I allowed individual interactions with Black people to intimidate me into backing away from this type of self education. A huge part of that was the dangerous fragility of casting such interactions in terms of “not being comfortable with someone’s mode of communication.” Feeling that unspoken demands were being made of me, and I was incapable of intuiting them. I want to try to talk about these incidents some day, because they are fairly standard examples of how poorly we as immigrants prepare ourselves to live with true engagement in this country, all the while benefiting from the civil rights which Black people won for all of us.
Which brings me to how racism shapes the immigrant experience. We are terrified of white racism, and having to deal with white America is a full time endeavor, whether that is workplace dynamics, schoolyard bullying, the horrors of special education, neighborhood politics, police interactions, and so much more. Why do we not build ties with other minority groups? Other people have said it better, but the reason is that we are steered in many ways towards allying ourselves with whiteness. We define what it means to live here through that lens; we seek out neighborhoods to buy homes in based on so many factors that do not at all involve forging connections with Black and other minority communities. We want the access and safety and accolades that come from making choices that posit us as model minorities.
And if we cannot relate to that default, we seclude ourselves in our own immigrant sub-communities as much as possible–socially, at the very least. White America so often makes me feel alienated, and the double whammy of being a brown autism family renders us erased, yet visible in unwanted ways, so I end up dealing with “Americans” only when I must, preferring to be secluded the rest of the time with my weird brown family.
Nothing is ever only about politics, is it? When I previously engaged with writings on race, I would find myself shifting in a positive direction, and then apprehension would make me pull up short. Why did I purposefully stop at the proverbial precipice of change? I believe it is because I was not deeply invested enough in change that was asking of me that I uproot a deeply seated belief—a belief that I, as an immigrant, had better not weigh in too much on American ways of life. After 9/11, I became wary of how I was being asked to participate smilingly in my own mistreatment. It happens every time a brown person enters an airport, every time we go into government buildings. People are still scared of what we might do, even nineteen years later. And if we don’t smilingly oblige, give up the rights that few others are being asked to give up, many more red flags go up, and we might never be able to return to our families. So we comply. And are degraded by every such interaction. Passing through European airports, and returning to American ones after a trip home, is a frequent exercise in such degradations. We are exhausted, red eyed, and jet lagged, but must never let our smiles falter, even as we are led to the back rooms where further scrutiny of our persons and belongings occurs, and we are asked why we traveled home, as if we should ever have to explain those things. And while we perform the walk of shame to those back rooms, no one will meet our eyes.
This country will never stop demanding more from us. I have been told in various ways for years: “You have to understand why we might not trust you.” And the result was that I was mentally checked out, dissociating from issues of my identity for years. I ask myself now: why did I allow racism to prevent me from forming different ties with this country? Why did I let white America define for me what it means to live here? The answer is so simple now: I gave up power because it was the only way to prove that my brown skin could be innocuous. “My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist,” goes the famous line in the Bollywood movie*. Not coincidentally, the movie is about an autistic Indian Muslim man, Rizwan Khan, whose adopted Hindu son is murdered after 9/11. His wife, the boy’s mother, screams at him that she and her son should never have changed their last names, for perhaps then, her son might not have been a target for his bully boy schoolmates. She tells Rizwan to leave, and he, needing a goalpost, says Where should I go? Go, she shouts, find the president of the United States, and tell him—My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist. And he does, traveling for ages, his skin color, religion, and autism behaviors constantly being exploited as flimsy justifications to enact Othering on him by Americans who meet him. So I say: there is no end to the proofs that will be demanded of us.
But tiny shifts were happening within me. My feelings of rage and hopelessness were being transformed into better stuff. Parenting autistic children, and seeing how they cannot meet societal demands to act more safe, nor can they fit into the Indian model minority framework—it rewired my whole being. I saw, finally, that the toxic xenophobic, ableist, transphobic stew served up with stultifying regularity was not a necessary diet. I did not need to feed my family from this food pyramid. Assimilation is NOT a necessary way of life. Demands that we assimilate are toxic, and I make no apologies for saying this. People who expect this from us cause trauma, think they are making a reasonable demand, and never want to be held accountable. I do not want to eat from that Thanksgiving table. My RSVP ’no’ is always in the mail.
The granular work, as Lace calls it, is what most fosters survival. It is not as heroic in appearance as the obvious external work, but it is the bedrock of change. When BIPOC communities ally and come together, it uproots white supremacy far more effectively than if we work only on repairing our relationship with whiteness. Because that’s like going back to a tyrant and saying Please stop being a tyrant, and change into someone I can trust. The tyrant only knows how to still want to be in charge of everyone. And that is where highly educated, upper caste brown immigrants (as many of us are) have to be honest with ourselves, for pre-colonial and colonial power structures have trained us well–isn’t that what we have wanted too? To live happily in that kingdom where nothing huge would shift, and we could become the courtiers and ministers and royal treasurers?
If all I do is merely refuse to uphold white fragility by refusing to nod along when discriminatory behavior happens in front of me, it seems to be enough to cause consternation. That is my clue that my role as a brown person has been scripted for me, and I am expected to participate in the suppression of Blackness.
If I forever exist in the crevices, because the bully behavior of overt and covert racism invites me to live in those crevices in exchange for safety, then I am denying that I actually do have power. And that I have been using and misusing it all this time, but seeing only that I had none.
I am reminded of how often people look for a cookie: Pat me on the head for doing anything at all to help. Why aren’t BIPOC more grateful for my gestures of solidarity? Don’t they understand how much harm I COULD cause them, but am refraining? Let me into the club, dammit.
Every single one of those asks is a deep cut.
In “Pirkei Avot: A Social Justice Commentary,” I encountered the oft-quoted teaching by Rabbi Hillel:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
Rabbi Dr Shmuly Yanklowitz, in his commentary, references Carl Jung, reminding us that we must confront our demons, for they will lead us to light. The pain of facing our darkness is nothing compared to the “pain of avoiding introspection.” While we should feel a “radical impatience” to tackle injustice, we cannot only focus on the external:
“We must learn to keep our soul alive and growing, because there is no task more holy than cultivating our inner light. It inevitably shines on others.”**
And that’s what we are learning here, isn’t it? How the work we do on ourselves is the most effective antidote to racism and other forms of injustice. It is an act of radical love to break down our own internal resistance.
But it is the rabbity produce, harvested from the soil of self reflection, and thoughtfully chewed, that will sustain us, not the cookies of token ingestion.
Radha.
Sources:
*My Name is Khan. Dir. Karan Johar. Perf. Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol. Dharma Productions and Red Chillies Entertainment, 2010. Theatre Screening.
**Yanklowitz, Rabbi Dr. Shmuly. Pirkei Avot: A Social Justice Commentary, edited by Rabbi David E.S. Stein. Kindle E-book. CCAR Press, 2018.
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