Black and white in Indian America

No country in the world is obsessed with race like the us. The “land of the free and the home of the brave” cherishes its melting pot myth, but is better described as a checkerboard, because almost every city, town and neighbourhood fosters invisible borders to perpetuate segregation. Like India and everywhere else, one divide is money and privilege. But in the US, even more significant is the bizarre conceit that “black” and“white” Americans belong to two different races, which has played out with disastrous implications for citizens across the ethnic spectrum. Now in 2018, through the prism of Donald Trump’s post-post-racial burlesque, there is the spectacle of ambitious Indian Americans scaling political heights on both sides of this flimsily conceived divide.

This is the story of Nimrata Randhawa (now known as Nikki Haley) and Kamala Devi Harris, two immensely talented women with roots in India, who now represent the Republican and Democratic parties respectively. But there are more intriguing differences because Haley represents the conservative South, with political aspirations inextricable from “white” racial politics. She has conspicuously crossed the colour line in one direction. Harris is grounded in liberal California, where her mother’s Tamil ethnicity has long been subsumed (at least in the public eye) to African-American identity, which she lays claim to via her father’s Afro-Caribbean roots in Jamaica. Conservative whites love “our Nikki”, who became the first female governor of

South Carolina

.

But when Kamala Harris was elected to the Senate in 2016, it was portrayed as an African-American breakthrough. All this is extremely weird, but also the logical fallout from America’s schizophrenia when it comes to race. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to “free white persons of good character”, which meant European-Americans with ostensible roots in a handful of countries in the north of Europe. But ever since then, to suit prevailing whims and expediencies, the term, “white”, has steadily expanded to include Irish and Italians, then Jews and Arabs, and latterly, many South American migrants. In fact, there is no such thing as “white”, or any scientific basis to this blinkered race construct.

For example, genetic surveys have demonstrated that most “African-Americans in America have significant European ancestry, and much the same is true vice-versa (particularly in the “racially” charged South).

With Indians, the situation becomes even more ridiculous. In 1909, Bhicaji Framji Balsara became one of the first migrants from the subcontinent to be granted official citizenship after fighting through two courts. The judge who relented, also lamented the precedent would “bring in, not only the Parsee…which is probably the purest Aryan type, but also Afghans, Hindoos, Arabs, and Berbers”. But in 1923, the pendulum ticked the other way when Bhagat Singh Thind argued all the way to the Supreme Court that he, too, was “a high-caste Aryan, of pure Indian blood” adding, “the high-caste Hindu regards the aboriginal. Indian Mongoloid in the same manner as the American regards the Negro, speaking from a matrimonial standpoint”. Thind failed.

But before and after him, Indian migrants who found a way to pass for “white”, assimilated into one America, while a similar cohort of countrymen became absorbed into cosmopolitan black communities, like those in Harlem and

New Orleans

. Eventually, the Luce-Celler Act of 1946 allowed for 100 Indians to migrate each year and become citizens, before even those onerous barriers came down in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Today, Indian Americans number at least four million, besides another 5,00,000 undocumented migrants. But time still stands still in the American political arena, which retains exactly the same bankrupt binary that has persisted since the country was made up of only 13 states. Nikki Haley and Kamala Harris live in the 21st century, but when it comes to identity, their only choice is black or white.

The writer is a photographer and widely published columnist. Views expressed are personal.