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I don't think I grasped the power of cultural recognition, the value of full cultural citizenship, until last night.
When the next vice president of the United States acknowledged her "Chittis," the Tamil word for her mother's younger sisters, I felt a flood of emotion.
When the next vice president of the United States acknowledged her "Chittis," the Tamil word for her mother's younger sisters, I felt a flood of emotion.
I can hear Tamil come through my television if I put on a channel or film marketed to Desis. But even with 70 million Tamil speakers in the world, it's a small slice of the South Asian content that reaches North America.
I felt a similar rush of recognition during the episode of Master of None when @azizansari cast his parents and set the episode in Chennai.
So why do I care so much? I lost my ability to speak Tamil decades ago. Every chittapa, chittama, and uravinar (cousin) immigrated to the United States and everyone speaks English. My daughter knows maybe ten Tamil words, most of them food-related.
And when in India, no one speaks Tamil to me. Because of my size and skin color, they address me in Hindi, Punjabi, or English (many assume I am from North India). No one believes that I match my name. So I should feel alienated from, not rooted in, Tamil Nadu.
But seeing a woman about my age, who spent her childhood traveling back-and-forth to Besant Nagar, the same town my grandparents lived in, to walk on the same beach with her grandfather as I did with mine, appear on my television and so comfortably embrace that story ...
... well, it gets to me.
It's not like I have felt the pain of structural racism in this country like Kamala Harris has. But I have felt the sting of the lack of recognition.
It's not like I have felt the pain of structural racism in this country like Kamala Harris has. But I have felt the sting of the lack of recognition.
In my childhood I had to explain that my father was not Black, not Native American, not Arab, or not Iranian. Sometimes I had to do that under threat. Bullies called me "Sand n_____." They called my father "n_____." They called my mother "n_____ lover."
But we could always escape. We lived well. We traveled the world. If we suffered any effects from cultural expectations, it was that too much was expected of us. And we knew that half a world away our family was among a caste that had dominated and exploited others for centuries.
This disjointed position in the world -- the oppressors in India; the disregarded or disrespected in the United States -- made me sensitive to such matters. So I intellectualized my complicated identity. I was not "half" anything. I was both. It was multiplication, not division.
Anyway, I haven't sorted it all. All I know is that it hit me hard and I don't know why. I felt a rush of ethnic pride that I thought I was beyond. I fashion myself a savvy cosmopolitan, unmoved by the passions and myths of roots.
Maybe I'm not. I have a lot to think about.
