S/O Desi Culture

This past weekend was actually a really great weekend. The Indo-American Association of Iowa held its annual Spring Festival on Sunday, a dance event meant to give the Indian community an opportunity to showcase their dances and just an opportunity to get together again. It’s always lots of fun and I’ve been performing in these shows since I was 5 years old, I can’t imagine not performing because they’ve become a huge part of my life! This time I was dancing with a dance group and I choreographed a separate dance for my sisters age group as well.

This time it was a little bit different though, I asked two of my friends from school (both white) to come and watch the show. I was a little hesitant to ask, I’ve never really tried to bring my white friends into the Indian part of my life but I took that risk anyway. I was honestly terrified of what they will think. Indian’s are made fun of for our “weird” accents, we aren’t always familiar with American social rules, and overall we’re kind of an awkward bunch sometimes… But that’s okay because our dances will still knock your socks off! 🙂

The day started out smoothly enough, I woke up around 9:30 am to begin getting ready and I was completely done getting myself ready around 11:00 am, which is when I began getting my sister ready. All of my sister’s friends were coming over around noon to get their hair and makeup done and I had asked my friends to come over to help curl hair, so the curls would all look uniform on stage and thank god for their help because doing makeup and hair for 10 young girls is a lot harder than it seems! Once we were done I dressed my friends up in churidar suits, traditional Indian outfits, in an attempt to help them fit in a little better. I think they looked great and all of my friends and the Indian adults thought they looked great and everyone appreciated their attempts to fit in but of course, it was a little weird having 2 random white people show up at an all-Indian event. It definitely took a little bit of time but the community warmed up to them eventually and everyone enjoyed having them there.

Even though everything was going smoothly, I was a different story… As I’ve already mentioned, I was a wreck from the beginning. I remember one time during AP Psych we were discussing personalities and we brought up the idea that people have different personalities depending on their social situation (aka I’m a different person at home versus school). This was the same thing for me but almost on a larger scale. I was bringing my personality that I have around white/whitened people (aka school) to the Indian part of me. I wasn’t sure how to act, I was very conflicted almost the entire night because I had certain social expectations to meet for the Indian community but I also had unwritten social expectations to keep up with around my white friends. And then there was the issue of them feeling uncomfortable, I did my best to make sure they never felt too uncomfortable and all but of course, a little bit of discomfort was inevitable.

This was my first time bringing two very important worlds of mine together and overall I think it was a huge success. My friends are amazing people and they didn’t come with that aura of judgemental superiority that a lot of other people have, they came to learn and experience and for that I am grateful. I’m glad they enjoyed themselves and it was really nice to finally have friends who are interested and curious about who I am and where I come from rather than how well I can conform to white society. For once I felt like I could be myself around my white friends rather than make excuses for why my people are “weird” (compared to white people). I had an amazing time and s/o my friends for being 647382 times better than literally everyone else.

 

This is Me, Checking My Privilege

I’m privileged. No, really, I have a LOT of privilege. Adding on to my post from last week, privilege exists in so many different ways. This just means that I have certain advantages over other groups of people.

For example, I come from an upper middle class family, I have never experienced financial insecurity and I’ve never had to worry about whether or not I’m getting dinner tonight. I’ve never needed to get a job and I go to a great public school that offers so many different opportunities, both educational and extracurricular. The first time this hit me was the first annual meeting of Iowa Youth Congress(IYC) this past October. There’s a selection process and eventually the board of IYC picks the most qualified people out of the applicants to represent the youth of Iowa in a mock legislative process. Once 2 or 3 bills are chosen we begin lobbying and are often successful in getting our bills passed! But anyway, so many students from all over Iowa came together in Des Moines for our first session, and I got to meet so many other people that came from so many different backgrounds. There were people there whose schools only offered 1 or 2 AP classes and there were some schools that didn’t offer any at all and this was just such a strange concept to me because at Valley we have so many AP classes I can’t even keep track of all of them!

Of course, I’m privileged in many other ways as well. I’m cis and straight, both of which give me a ton privilege.  Privilege doesn’t mean that I’m happy and content with my life 100% of the time, it doesn’t mean that life doesn’t suck sometimes but my life doesn’t suck because I’m cis and straight. People that don’t conform to the gender binary/trans people/LGBTQIA+ community face hardships because of their sexuality/gender, see the distinction? Another way to look at it, white people can definitely have a difficult life, but their life isn’t difficult because they are white.

I didn’t ask to be privileged, I was born into a life of privilege. Of course, I face hardships because I am a woman of color but when we look at the different intersections of privilege it’s probably safe to assume that a black, homosexual, disabled, trans woman would have it a lot harder. This is another reason that oppression can’t be fought in the same ways for the same groups of people, the different intersections make it impossible for there to be a one-and-done, band-aid solution.

Privilege, Let’s Break it Down

 

‘Privilege’ is a really popular buzzword that you’ll hear thrown around a lot when people are talking about social justice issues but what does it really even mean? The concept of privilege is difficult for some people to understand, especially those that are seriously benefitting from their privilege, but maybe I can shed some light on why privilege is such an important thing to understand.

To start off, let’s define privilege as unearned social benefits that are given to people based on the groups they identify with or are born into. Of course, there’s no one easy way to define privilege because it works on so many different levels like race, sex, sexuality, gender, able-bodiedness, financial status, and there are so many more different intersections! This just shows that privilege isn’t something easily defined, someone that’s oppressed in one way can easily be very privileged in a different way.

Honestly, the easiest way to define privilege is that it’s the exact opposite of oppression. People often only see newspaper headlines saying things like “another trans person was murdered” but often times no one sees the other side to this. Why was another trans person murdered? Because they didn’t fit the social model, they didn’t conform to the gender/sex they were assigned at birth. People that grow up and continue to identify with the gender they were assigned to at birth don’t face this constant fear of not being accepted, of being hurt or killed for not conforming, THIS is an example of privilege.

Buzzfeed made a video specifically about the issues of privilege and how the most privileged people tend to be the most clueless about their privilege because their environment isn’t constantly pushing them down, over and over again. VIDEO In the video you can see that the only people that even talked about privilege at all were the people in the back rows, the least privileged people, while the students in the front stayed quiet because all they could see was that 10 feet between them and their goal. The video ends on the note of recognizing how you are privileged over others and using your privilege to help the people that aren’t as privileged.

The other issue with privilege is that it means that the privileged definitely have power over the unprivileged groups. Privilege doesn’t work on individual experiences at all. The whole idea of privilege is that it’s institutionalized, which means that women, people of color, people with disabilities, etc can’t have institutional power. Let’s take women’s suffrage as an example. Sure, great women were given the right to vote, but who gave them that right? White men. It’s important to ask the question of why were white men in a position to be handing out rights to women? Why were white men in a position where they chose when and how to give women the right to vote? This shows how institutional power works. Sure, I might have the right to vote (when I turn 18) but who gave me those rights? White men.

As Phoenix Calida(a sex worker from Chicago) wrote:

“Privilege simply means that under the exact same set of circumstances you’re in, life would be harder without your privilege. Being poor is hard. Being poor and disabled is harder. Being a woman is hard. Being a trans woman is harder. Being a white woman is hard, being a woman of color is harder. Being a black man is hard, being a gay black man is harder.”

Instead of just recognizing the ways in which you are oppressed it’s important to recognize the ways in which you are privileged, that’s what it means when people tell you to “please check your privilege” because, like for me, even though I am a woman of color, I’m a straight, cis, financially stable, able-bodied, woman of color which puts me in a place of privilege. Now it’s just a question of how I’m planning to use that privilege.

This blog post wasn’t an attempt to make anyone feel guilty, of course not, rather it was an attempt to get you to recognize what privilege you have and use that privilege to help fight the structures that uphold oppression. No one chooses to be born into privilege but all of us can choose to fight back against the system that allows privilege to exist because just like I didn’t choose to be born into privilege, other people didn’t choose to be born into a world where they have no privilege.

 

Daaaamn Britain, back at it again with the Bullshit

One of my previous posts addressed the problems regarding underrepresentation of nonblack people of color in the US. Whenever there is some sort of misrepresentation of black people in the media we see a lot of backlash and anger from a good portion of the community, not just the black community but we just don’t see that kind of backlash when it comes to other races. For example, Coldplay’s newish song, Hymn for the Weekend, was filmed in India but it was honestly offensive. A lot of people won’t agree with me but let’s go a bit deeper. They show a little boy covered in blue paint near the beginning of the video but no one really knows what that signifies, unless you had previous knowledge about it. The little boy was dressed up as Lord Vishnu, the Hindu god that is meant to protect the world from harm but of course, it wasn’t relevant to Coldplay or anyone that directed the video to educate the public about my religion. They have people dressed up as Hindu gods popping up at various points in the video but there’s no real reason as to why they need to be in the video!! They’re just using my families religion for their video’s ‘aesthetic’ rather than meaningful representation. Another problem is their representation of Holi. The video for the song was released on January 29th, almost a good 3 months before the actual  celebration of Holi, probably proves they don’t actually care about representing Holi, just the aesthetic of it. Also, it probably reminded them of the color runs that are usually held here, even though that’s just not it… Another big issue I had with this video was the fact that they had freaking BEYONCE come to India to be featured in it when there were plenty of Indian that probably would’ve been a better option. No one cares about the cultural appropriation in this video because Beyonce is ‘literally a queen’ and ‘bae’ but why are we ignoring the fact that they asked Beyonce to be featured in it while they asked an Indian actress, Sonam Kapoor, to make a tiny appearance at the end of the video for not even 10 seconds. It upsets me that the cultural appropriation in this video just wasn’t a big deal to anyone because they literally took my religion AND my culture and turned it into an accessory, especially considering the fact that Coldplay is a British band. The British were in my country for so long and now they’re back to use me as an accessory? Yeah no, British band, nama-stay out of my country please.

 

Curiosity vs Ignorance

White people can be pretty annoying sometimes. I know that people are going to look at this post and freak out saying “OMG NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE” but saying that doesn’t help anything, it honestly just makes you look dumb. Yes I’m aware that not every single white person has acted upon their internalized racism but every single white person has definitely benefited from the system that continues to oppress nonwhite people. Sorry if my words hurt your feelings, but I will always put institutional oppression of marginalized groups above your feelings.

I think curiosity about different cultures is different from plain ignorance. In the book there comes a point at which Ifemelu simply says she doesn’t really like dogs and immediately people jump on that wondering if that’s for ‘cultural’ reasons. That would be an example of ignorance rather than curiousity, just because we look different than your average white person doesn’t mean that everything we do or feel represents how our entire race feels. We actually see this more than you’d think. Whenever a person of color is the ‘first’ of their race to do anything, (i.e. first black president, first Indian governor of a US state, etc) they have a lot more on their shoulders than just another white person. Anything they do, any mistake they make will most probably be blamed on their race so the pressure is ten times more than it would be for another white person. We’re forced to represent our entire race and frankly it’s kind of annoying. I wish we could just represent ourselves, without worrying about the consequences it might have on our entire race because it’s not that big of a deal right now but for people of color in higher, more important positions it’s extremely stressful because everyone is watching them, waiting for a mistake.