Brown White Black

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  For Jill and Shiv, my beloveds

  All-American Ethnic Girl

  It’s a choice each time I stand in front of a Sharpie-wielding barista: “What’s the name for the order?” It should be a simple enough question, one that generates an automatic response. Except I always pause. Giving my actual name tends to result in puzzled looks (as if I’ve somehow said my own name incorrectly), name butchering (everything from “Nisheeta” to “Natasha”), and additional questions (Where does that come from? What does it mean?), when all I want is a cappuccino. So I can give my name or I can just make one up and be done with it.

  But as tempting as it is to invent a name or use my wife’s—Jill—I love my given name too much to pretend that it’s something else. I’m one of the few people I know who has always liked her name. Nishta Jaya Mehra. It’s assonant, rhythmic, melodic, and, yes, unique: even among Indian kids, there aren’t many Nishtas. Because I love my name, I refuse to not use it. I refuse to have it be ignored, to have it go unsaid, to let people call me “Nina” or “whatever you said your name was.”

  My mom says she first heard the name—traditionally transliterated from Sanskrit as “Nishtha”—as a teenager and decided, If I have a daughter, that will be her name. It translates to something like “dedication” or “intense devotion,” which is what it took for my parents to conceive and my mother to successfully carry me to term after three miscarriages and many years of expensive, exhausting fertility treatments. To some, that may feel like a lot of weight to carry, but I don’t mind having a name tied to a character trait like dedication. It suits me, though it’s hard to say which came first, the name or the temperament. My name also dovetails with the sense of destiny that my mother believed I was fated for. It would seem my name is the origin for my belief in the power of narrative frameworks.

  * * *

  Now that I wear a bindi, people tend to connect me to India right away, but that wasn’t always the case. My skin tone lends itself to speculation, like a parlor game people think is fun (not to mention appropriate) to play. I’ve had a lot of Spanish spoken, presumptively, at me; I don’t speak any Spanish. Like many women of color, I’ve been asked, “Do you work here?” at Gap and the grocery store; I’ve never worked retail. “Are you his nanny?” white children will ask when seeing me with my son; the brown women they know are nannies and babysitters.

  I was born brown in a city divided into black and white. Throughout my childhood, Memphis was a shockingly segregated place, a city full of shorthand codes about who belonged where. The rules were never explicitly stated, but I grew up with an internal map where boundaries were clearly delineated. Barbecue joints, grocery stores, churches, parks, debutante balls—there were black ones, and there were white ones, and that was it.

  As a brown girl, I had a hard time knowing how to navigate my hometown. My parents could not advise me; they were themselves relative strangers to Memphis and its racial codes. They had immigrated to the United States in the late sixties from India and settled in Memphis in the early eighties. They moved into a lily-white suburb, on a block where we were the only brown faces, and sent me to an elite private all-girls’ school within city limits, rendering my world almost exclusively white, black only around the periphery.

  Because of the way Memphis is set up, it was possible in my girlhood (and still is, though harder now) to spend my time interacting only with white people, in predominantly or exclusively white spaces, despite the city being majority black. I was a resident of a white world, but I never felt as if I belonged in it, nor was I sure that I wanted to. I came of age not feeling fully at home in either black or white spaces. I had no comfort zone, no set of known or boundaried territory, no institutions or precedents related to my life, no mentors or public figures who looked like me, no mirror. Instead, I received funny looks that I tried in vain to convince myself were my imagination whenever I left my house and endured such a regular rotation of casually racist assumptions, questions, and insults that I still vaguely dread interacting with strangers in public. Even though Memphis’s strange racial dynamics didn’t apply directly to me, I got tangled up in them. When you are the anomaly, everyone feels free to comment.

  People in my hometown often assumed I was mixed race, since my mom is fair skinned and my father had dark skin and I fall somewhere in between. Depending on the person and how they learned the truth—that my parents were both Indian immigrants and I was their biological child—they would seem either disappointed that I wasn’t the product of a mixed-race marriage or pleased that I belonged to a category they considered to be “better” than the one they had previously assumed I belonged to. Both of these reactions were problematic in their own way, though at the time I couldn’t have articulated why. Still, I was clear on one thing: no one knew what to do with me.

  When I was about seven or eight years old, my mom and I were buying shoes for me at the Stride Rite inside Oak Court Mall, at the time considered a “nice” place to shop (read: mainly white, with some black employees). I was standing in the aisle when a white boy, maybe a year or two younger than me, pointed me out to his mother and used the word “nigger.” My own mother was out of earshot, so when she returned and saw me crying, I had to explain why. My immediate feeling was a visceral, white-hot shame—I’d never heard anyone speak that word aloud before, let alone at me. I knew it was a very, very bad thing to say, and I felt ashamed for having triggered the saying of it. It was also clear that this word did not belong or apply to me; I’d been insulted, but not properly. I remember covering my face with my hands while my mom insisted we continue to try on shoes, trying to move past the incident. As I recall, no words were spoken between my mother and the boy’s mother—though I seem to remember his mother shushing him in mild embarrassment and alarm—and this made me angry. I resented being made to act as though nothing had happened and was indignant that my mother hadn’t confronted the boy’s mother and made some kind of impassioned, dramatic speech about equality before whisking me off in the style of all the 1980s-era books and PSAs about Standing Up to Injustice! I’d been exposed to.

  When you’re a kid, your ability to comment or reflect on your own experience is limited. You take things at face value; your experience feels inevitable, not subject to critique, question, or comparison. Still, you learn quickly that your otherness will never be forgotten, even if you manage to forget from time to time what it is that people see when they look at you. Though by many measures I thrived in a white world, I also clearly saw the disconnect between the stated values of American society and its actions in a way only an outsider can. Even if I didn’t have the language for what privilege was or what it might mean, I could see that my white classmates moved through the world differently from the way I did. They were raised not to see color, so they didn’t think about the fact that when they invited me to their country club birthday party, I would be the only non-white guest and the only non-wh
ite person there who wasn’t an employee. Even if it did occur to them, they had no way to appreciate what kind of position that would put me in because they’d never been in the minority in any public space, not once in their entire lives.

  The white, upper-class Memphis that I knew existed inside its own bubble, its own self-sustaining world with its own set of rules. Preppy was the only acceptable way to dress, and the popular girls all got David Yurman bracelets for their sixteenth birthdays and had boyfriends who wore deck shoes and popped-collar polos. There were a handful of acceptable college football loyalties, and two or three acceptable places to register for wedding gifts, but a wedding reception at the University Club was basically a no-brainer. Memphis money is old and big on tradition: white-dress debutante balls, the Cotton Carnival, the whole nine yards. Concern for or about the “rest of” Memphis arose only when the bubble was threatened, say with the issue of school redistricting or a perception of “unsavory elements” suddenly appearing in neighborhoods previously considered safe.

  Most of the rich white people I knew had at least one important black person in their lives: their housekeeper. The love and devotion to these individuals was real but did not extend to a broader demographic concern. And all too often, a relationship that was inherently imbalanced (employer to employee) was considered a shining example of one’s own tolerance and open-mindedness.

  * * *

  My alma mater, St. Mary’s Episcopal School, now boasts a minority enrollment of twenty-nine percent, but growing up, I was one of a few handfuls of brown or black girls. Over the course of twelve years, all of the classroom teachers I had were white; the adults of color I remember encountering on campus were maintenance or cafeteria staff.

  My counterpoint to this white world was the rich soil of chosen family where everyone was brown like me. Before my birth, my parents had built a community of fellow Indian immigrants all transplanted to Memphis, where they began to raise families. My “uncles” and “aunties” (as I called them) and their children were—and still are—who come to mind when I think about my family, even though I’m not related to a single one of them. This chosen family constituted my other life, my evening-and-weekend self, the girl who ate food with her hands and wore salwar khameezes to temple and didn’t eat meat on Tuesdays as part of her religious observance. I did not show up as that girl at school because it didn’t seem wise to do so. Compartmentalizing became my coping mechanism, one that I would again employ as a young adult, when I realized that I was queer. I didn’t know the term “code-switching” back then, but I sure was doing a lot of it, moving back and forth between various behaviors: identity as assimilation, identity as flag-waving, identity as shame, identity as shield, identity as weapon.

  As a nerdy brown girl with thick glasses and frizzy hair, I didn’t have many models for how to be brown inside my particular social context—I had to serve as my own guide. There were no Indian cultural icons to speak of and barely any Asian ones; what did exist landed firmly in the category of stereotype. Sixteen Candles ranked high in the rotation of beloved films for high school girls of my generation, but the character Long Duk Dong made me profoundly uncomfortable, as I feared that I would somehow be implicated by his cringeworthy accent and behavior. Other movies that featured prominently at weekend sleepovers—Steel Magnolias, The Cutting Edge, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Dangerous Liaisons, The Princess Bride—featured no characters of color whatsoever. This meant lots of improvisation on my part and a fair amount of guessing—could I dress up as Cher from Clueless, or would everyone automatically assume I should go as Dionne, who was black? Did I have to model my outfit after one of the nameless Asian girls who appeared in the background of the film?

  I discovered quickly that friends and even many teachers would adopt whatever tone I set in regard to my difference: Was it a big deal? Not that big of a deal? Could we joke about it? I had to offer instructions but do so in a way that wouldn’t offend anybody. Many immigrant kids are made explicitly aware of this context and its attendant responsibilities—what you do reflects on all of us, so you have to represent us well. To do so requires constantly checking yourself against the standards of two cultures, neither of which you belong to completely. This is a form of the double consciousness that so many people of color naturally adopt, and it is exhausting, even as it becomes second nature. And when you live inside of a social matrix where you are one of the few (if not only) members of your tribe that the mainstream will encounter, it becomes even more necessary for you to show up, in your brown skin, a certain way.

  For nearly all of my years at St. Mary’s, I took that responsibility seriously—working “twice as hard,” as my mom had instructed, to prove that I was “just as good.” Because I was eager to learn, conflict averse, and self-motivated, school worked for me; I was good at it. Those same traits made it tricky for me socially, when I took at face value the need to explain or contextualize myself for others, to cheerfully say, “That’s okay!” when fellow students, or even faculty members, did things like mistakenly assume my family worshipped idols or that I would have an arranged marriage. I cultivated my identity as Very Helpful Girl, always willing to give others the benefit of the doubt, always happy to share about my culture even as I started to resent being treated as a one-woman diversity show. I learned to anticipate implications that I might have received something—a spot on the mock trial team, an end-of-the-year award, admission to a competitive college—because of the color of my skin. As deeply as I resented the notion that I had not fairly earned the academic success I worked so hard to achieve, I learned quickly that to question these judgments, to object or draw attention to them in any way, would be viewed as unforgivable ingratitude. “Ugh, you’re so lucky,” a classmate said as we discussed our college applications. “They’re going to see your name and let you in.”

  * * *

  I have long had a complicated relationship with my Indianness. As a young girl, I was proud to be brown, proud to share my culture with anyone who expressed curiosity about it. I liked having something that set me apart, that made me interesting by association. Of course, “interesting” is not the same as “cool,” and in middle school I learned how “interesting” could quickly translate to “different” and become a liability. As an only child, I didn’t have any trailblazing older sibling to look to for wisdom or a younger one to advise or navigate these complexities with.

  Because I was a kid who fiercely loved her parents, I didn’t want to feel ashamed of or embarrassed by anything associated with them, but I still did. It felt cowardly and disloyal to wish that my mom would pack sandwiches or Lunchables instead of leftover tomato rice for lunch or to be annoyed when my dad sang Hindi songs while taking long baths on Sunday afternoons instead of playing golf. On some level, I loved those things about my parents; I found them endearing. But I was also always thinking about how their quirks looked to others, how they came across to my white classmates. I stuck out in all the wrong ways, and my brownness was one part of that. My parents were older than almost everyone else’s; my mom worked outside of our house (while the vast majority of my classmates’ mothers didn’t); I was not even a little bit athletic and never played a school sport; I genuinely liked school; I was one of very few only children I knew; I seemed to connect better with teachers than I did with my peers. But while some of those things shifted—whenever my classmates got to know my parents, they found them as endearing as I did—my brownness was immutable and impossible to hide. In second-grade art, we were tasked with making clay angels that were put on display in the cafeteria, and mine was the only one, out of dozens and dozens of angels, that wasn’t blond. She had long black hair, just like me.

  There were no modes of representation other than the ones I created for myself, pieces I would collage from the broader culture and rework to make them fit. There were no Indians anywhere—not in books, on TV, or in magazines. Not being represented occurred as a complete inevitability, but I didn’t seek out
representation in traditional Indian culture because it felt even more foreign to me than the white American culture I wanted so desperately to see myself in.

  The first mainstream movie that felt even remotely connected to my own life was Bend It Like Beckham, which was released when I was twenty-one years old. Though I’m not British, Sikh, or a soccer player, it was still the closest thing I’d ever come to seeing someone on a big screen who vaguely resembled me, and the experience was so moving that I cried. I saw how I missed out on so much of the rich inner lives of my parents and my friends’ parents, because I saw them the same way the white broader culture did, discounting them because of their accents and otherness. How shameful that I had never considered my own story to be movieworthy, to discover as an adult that the uncles I’d thought were goofy and uncool performed complicated brain surgeries and lectured internationally, or to realize that I’d underestimated my gossipy, talkative aunties, only to learn about the multiple degrees they held (because American universities wouldn’t accept their “foreign” master’s degrees when they’d immigrated) and the three or four or five languages they spoke. It’s a raw deal to internalize the stereotypes of the very culture that never embraced you fully.

  When I graduated from high school, my yearbook superlative was “All-American Ethnic Girl.” And the worst part is, I’m the one who came up with it. None of my white classmates felt the need to designate themselves the “All-American Girl” in contrast, or by way of complement, which is what makes it so interesting to me that no one said anything about my choice or encouraged me to drop the “ethnic” and simply go with “All-American.” Adding “Ethnic” was a preemptive qualifier, a way to prevent anyone from questioning my worthiness to the title. Claim it before someone can attack you with it or use it against you; that was my strategy. I was still operating under the assumption that I could construct my own identity and make my own place in the mainstream, that this was something I both should want and could somehow achieve. I’d get people to see me for who I really was. I’d be the one to single-handedly hammer nuance into a lexicon of extremes.