Being a Light-Skinned Brown Woman in a Post-Trump World

I recently returned from Europe and one of the first things I felt relieved about coming back home to New York, was the diverse array of faces around me, as I walked out of the air-conditioned confines of JFK. A teacher, writer, activist, journalist, fashionista, my myriad roles often require morphing myself and my ideas of race, class, culture, religion all the time. Traveling to the EU for my research and my husband, who had ubiquitously made Spain his home allowed me to step out of the bubble of Manhattan and explore another world. A world steeped in history and often enmeshed in age-old ideas of belonging and acceptance liberally embroiled in a cultural identity that was resolutely still sticking to its homogenous conception. Being a New Yorker, our identities had been so muddled with histories of violence and forced integration that we had given up all forms of categorization. The only constant we could accept was to keep an open mind about people and their origin stories were concerned: we never asked where they came from but how far they were willing to go. As a New York State teacher, I taught my students to agree that we all have prejudices, but to never air them, to never make others uncomfortable and to assert our individual ethnic identities in this world with sensitivity and subtlety.

I live in an idyllic town of New Jersey twenty minutes out of the city — neatly manicured lawns, pretty little houses, garden parties in summer, angelic kids romping about in the park, and not-so-skinny good-old American values thrown around by the adults. Needless to say, as I would run on Sunday evenings around town through the election months I’d see avid Trump support signs, and Hilary enthusiasts side by side. My beautiful town of Rutherford was divided in a stolid expression of political sentiments. Born of Indian-heritage to a family that required our education and upbringing to be steeped in old world principles that paid homage to a time gone by, women in my family were brought up to fit anywhere in the world; they spoke with eloquence and elegance at the same time — as they drove home their ideas succinctly and effectively, their charm never faltering even in their moments of political incorrectness. As the rest of the country languished under incidents of violence on women, the men in Calcutta remained somewhat reverential to women. After all, their biggest festival honored a goddess, not a god.

In my daily commute to work through the Lincoln Tunnel, I have remained an inquisitive observer of the changing social mores. The faces around me transformed over the years; South-Asian men filled the seats and their wives working for software companies that mushroomed around the tristate area. But, how did the larger American society view these recent entrants to the immigration roster? Even with my limited knowledge about the country sometimes, I can say with certainty that not all Indians are the same. The women are radically different. Some are sensuously beautiful, some plain gorgeous, some stifled under tradition and conservatism of husbands and in-laws escaping to a world they think they can breathe free in.

But, freedom is an elusive concept and even when we have somewhat achieved it, we remain oblivious to its state, unable to grasp at its essence. I suppose most of us measure freedom with happiness and the ability to fulfill our needs. So, I question often our identity as a manifest of our religious and cultural freedom and the questions it brings forth.

Given the largest refugee crisis that we are facing now, a Muslim identity that has been muddied under acts of violence. As a practitioner of Hinduism who visits a church more often than a temple, my religious beliefs have been shaped by my educators more than my parents whose bohemian ideas (later changed to far conservative norms) provided no anchorage to my spirituality. Left to my own devices, I took advice from the nuns who taught me to the prayers we recited morning and afternoon that religion was beyond an ephemeral subject. And, yet it had begun to contour our lives with violence and border crisis, especially as a child of the 90s and 2000s and living and working in an America fraught over politics of culture.

Defending my identity often becomes a difficult and irksome task, something that I cannot express well whether to friends or family. My identity has become a question of faith, color, nationality and religion, and oftentimes, despite having no relationship with any of these, I have had to defend them in order to defend myself.

While the English language is my bread and butter, and besides being the language of my soul and my beliefs, it also allowed me cross over to other realms in terms of understanding identity. But, my identity has always been defined beyond the vocabulary of one language or culture; it has broken one boundary and crossed into another. Schooled in the idiom of Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth, their tempered notes making me believe that I was actually perhaps growing up in suburban England — the magic of studying English Literature and Teaching in New York City is that one learns it from the perspective of others. My relationship with the English language had been framed by a postcolonial understanding of its British legacy, and American classics schooled in the dictum of a postmodern understanding and my numerous colleagues, professors and later students whose relationship with the language morphed by the power it exerted in their lives. Yet it was those balmy summer afternoons in Calcutta, when the mothers had tea-parties under lemon-scented trees, when I sat devouring the classics that made my life’s difficult choice. That cultural understanding of the language has stretched beyond its literal borders to becoming a choice in life that would mark me forever.

As the youngest editorial person in the Times office, I felt guilty of belonging to a liberal elite and yet annoyed at the labels that were applied to me. I nursed the dream of working one day at the Conde Nast office at the legendary 4 Times Square, and it was precisely four years later that I walked into the hallowed sanctums of New York’s fashion mecca. It was overwhelming and unbelievable; mostly because there was no one around me who vaguely resembled me. I was like an exotic foreign object who could string sentences together and didn’t get her Viviers and Cartier’s mixed up. Needless to say, I was affectionately received and even accepted. In those days, I picked up an essential fact of my life; this would be repeated time and again for a long time, me having to make a place where nobody like me existed. In a city steeped with material indulgences, everyone was interested in what one made of themselves.

We have always seen that as a normal occurrence in New York — the outsiders are always becoming insiders, and admired for it? But, I would have never thought that the train of socio-political events would in few years come to challenge the very idea of the great city. The President of United States in his many effusively verbose speeches drove home some points we were even too shy to repeat to ourselves in private. The identity of an American came to be divided by zip-codes, colors and accents.

I never wanted to become an English teacher. The decision came to be almost forced upon me; a teacher was never powerful except in the metaphorical sense. Nobody took them seriously, certainly not like lawyers, doctors and investment bankers. Nobody realized that to become a certified high school teacher English Teacher in New York City one not only had to take English Methodology and Adolescent Psychology, but also three humungus license exams to obtain the final certification. It was sleepless nights and tireless labor of writing papers (which I loved by the way). My 4.0 from City University of New York became a burden that wasn’t worth it.

The dichotomy of never being able to make my family understand the perils of being caught between two worlds as they basked comfortably in their safe zones, ordering servants to remove their shoes was something that still bothers me on mornings.

I often cringe and then happily admit born and bred wand surrounded by certain privileges that I happily sacrificed to an adult existence in the savvy confines of New York city, studying, teaching and building an independent life. What I have come to accept with some equanimity is the fact that my chequered identity would be understandable to a select few perhaps some South Asian philosopher whom I met at the Harvard Club over a drink, and that the moment I step out of the Manhattan bubble, my accomplishments might be reduced to the lowest common denominator. While I miss the careful insouciance and flamboyance of a former life where certain privileges were given and taken, but now being an anonymous face somehow in a city mired under socio-political undercurrents of misogyny and doubt, it’s something that makes me question my decisions.

I wish one day the question of who I am will cease, and the eyes that often scan me from head to toe, trying to ascertain my ethnically ambiguous character will look into my eyes. The world that I created inside my heart as a free, educated, independent woman will judge me just by my actions, my hard work and my resilience against a turbulent and changing world that isn’t often the easiest on women. And, then perhaps I can safely think of bringing another young woman into this world, secure in the knowledge that she will not be questioned, judged or interpreted by where she came from but who she can be.