The one about the bindi

I have been asked a few times to write about bindis - can white women wear them? Should we? Or should we err on the side of caution and never wear anything from other cultures? Do the rules change if we are Hindu? Or if we're married to an Indian?

So many questions. The problem is that I'm not really qualified to answer them. I can only tell you that I sometimes wear them in certain situations, why I do, and why I don't in others.

I don't wear them on the regular just because I can and it's a free country.

I do wear a bindi when I go to the temple and when I go to certain Indian festivals and cultural events - Durga Puja? Yes! International Day street fair? No! University's India Night? Sometimes. It depends on the context.

I also wear them in India because in the area my husband is from, it is ubiquitous. The day after my wedding, my mother-in-law gave me a small packet of bindi cards; I did not wear them right away as our wedding was in the US but I made sure to wear the ones she gave me daily when we went to his home. It is one small thing that can help to put his family at ease, a marker that I accept and embrace his culture (he makes no secret of the fact he accepts and embraces mine). 

So why don't I generally wear them in the US? Aren't they fashionable? Aren't I connected to the Indian community here? Aren't I married to an Indian? To tell the truth, it is exactly for these reasons that I don't.

Apparently the bindi has been "on trend" for about a year now. I am not terribly on the up-and-up regarding such things; my utilitarian approach to fashion is limited to finding things that look good on me, aren't dated, but will last me twenty years; and to check and see if skinny jeans are over yet. But generally I have seen that when something becomes "trendy," a lot of license is taken with it. Fashion is both art and business; a couple years ago when biker chic was all the rage, you could find rivets on everything from handbags to shoes, none of which need rivets in the first place. It started as something artsy and novel, and then suddenly it was everywhere because it sold. The same has happened with bindis. The predominantly white fashion industry took a very visible marker of Indian tradition and culture and removed it entirely from its cultural contexts. Perhaps because it isn't as jarring to the average white person as, say, a leather mini and pasties accessorized by a white tulle Catholic wedding veil, bindis became accessories to cutoffs and see-through shirts, not just on the ramp but on the streets of Brooklyn and Seattle. And somewhere, gestalt in the world of fashion design died a slow and painful death.

As someone with a self-described utilitarian sense of fashion, I could not get behind the bindi trend for the simple reason that it makes absolutely no sense. But then there is a question of the morality of the trend. I find it odd that someone who would likely never wear fur because it hurts animals would wear a bindi in such a way that it hurts an Indian woman. (It can and does; I can link you to narrative after narrative after narrative.) Is this the cost of my self-expression? I think this is one trend that I can't afford to partake in.

Just one example of this: Have you seen some of the pictures in the bindi tag on Tumblr? Vacant-eyed, nubile girls wearing little more than a bindi with #exotic and #indian tagged...the orientalist stereotype of the oversexed, dark, exotic other is pretty played out in 2013 but these girls are jumping right on the "exotic=sexually available" bandwagon without even realizing it. I certainly do not want to reinforce a stereotype of a "bindi-wearer" as an object of lust, especially when I know and love many women who wear bindis as an expression of their culture or their faith. I am not interested in making their lives any more difficult.

So yes - the (white-dominated) fashion industry has taken the bindi, stripped it of context, and reduced it to a sign of exotic Otherness. And the ambassadors of this trend? Gwen Stefani, who has silent Japanese girls follow her wherever she goes? Selena Gomez, who doesn't even know the bindi is Indian in origin? Not exactly my role models. 

I said earlier that there's another reason I don't wear a bindi in daily life, and that is because I'm married to an Indian and have many Indian friends. This isn't counterintuitive. My Indian friends, with the exception of a religious few who wear kumkum, not sticker bindis, generally do not wear bindis themselves, except to temple or cultural events. What reason do I have to do any different? There's another reason too; I do not wish to invite unfavorable comparisons between me and my friends - "Andrea is more Indian than you! You have become so westernized." "It is nice to see a foreigner embracing our culture that others choose to reject." I have heard these things said in my presence. Awkward. Not every Indian woman wants to wear a sari, bindi, sindoor, glass bangles, toe rings. Many have fought their families, school principals, and surrounding culture to leave these things aside. Am I, by my choosing to embrace certain aspects of Indian culture, making it more difficult for the Indian women I know to make their own choices? I will be happy to remove my bindi in solidarity with them.

This is not to say that I think that white people should stay away from other cultures entirely. I do wear bindis in certain situations. I also choose to wear a wedding ring, loha, and sindoor, and choose not to eat beef, in the interest of carrying on family traditions and making my family members more comfortable. There are those who will not be okay with this; I deeply regret this but consider my commitment to my family to be paramount. I believe that there is a place for cultural sharing and syncretism, and that place is within community. Intercultural families, religious communities, close circles of trusted friends. And this sharing happens naturally, just as you would share information on what wine to serve with chicken or the best cloth diapers for your baby. It's other-centered, relationship-centered; not self-centered. The more involved I got with my local Indian community, the more I learned about various aspects of Indian culture from Indians and not from Wikipedia, the less inclined I was to just participate in the sparkly, pretty parts of the culture just to do it. Those parts come in context - for me, it is as the White American wife of a not very religious Indian Bengali, living in a small college town and all the good things and problems therein. 

A final criticism some will have is that this is a tempest in a teapot; this is an election year in India, the US government is shut down, and people have a lot more to worry about than what carefree white girls are wearing on their faces. I disagree; I think that first of all, white people have done a lot of taking and appropriation and we need to recognize that fact. We are products of our history and as such, even this issue of something as small as a dot requires a need for understanding on the part of us white girls, doing things that may not come naturally -- listening to the narratives of those whose culture we have embraced in part, learning about the context of that culture through a living community and true relationships, and accepting that even as we are individuals who make our own choices in life, those choices do affect others and we need to be aware of the consequences and our impact. In this light, we may not always get to wear whatever we want. And we may not always be able to please everybody. But pleasing people was never the goal; it's not about us. It's about how our actions show respect to others who generously share their culture with us, and how we can do our part to bring about more justice in this world. 

(Note: much of this was inspired by, and indeed written first in, a series of comments I made on Reddit in October 2013.)

Why it doesn't matter that I might have a Native American ancestor (and why it does)

Many white families have a family legend of sorts that a far-off female ancestor was a "Cherokee princess." Mine does too, although to our credit, the word "princess" has never been mentioned. The Cherokee did not have princesses.

This relative is, by varying accounts, either my great-great-grandmother Hannah, born 1851, or my great-great-great-grandmother Susan, born 1829. Great-Great-Grandma Hannah has been described by living relatives as "full blood Indian," but other written histories of the family have noted that her mother, Susan, was Cherokee Indian. Beyond her, there are no records.

Because of the early dates, my relatives are not in the Dawes Rolls or any other archival records of Native Americans that I have found. There are other records though -- records showing that regardless of whatever my family members say, Great-Great-Grandma Hannah was listed as white in the census. So even if my family was Native American, they've been passing for white since the early 20th century and receiving all the privileges thereof. And in case you need to brush up on your history, that was not a very good time to be a "colored person" or an "Indian."

A lot of people, myself included, have gone on genealogical searches to find that long-lost Indian relative. We think it will explain our high cheekbones (got those) or our olive skin (not that though). And there is also the goal of Triumphant Documentation - the proof that will turn our family legends real. The name in the Dawes Rolls that shows, among all the families who say they have Native ancestry, that we make a legitimate claim. Perhaps there is also the idea that it will lend us a certain "minority cred" or an absolution of self-imposed white guilt - "I'm part {insert non-European ethnicity here} so I can't be racist, I can't have white privilege," et cetera.

But if we are even 1/8 Cherokee, or Peruvian, or Mongolian, aren't we still 7/8 European in descent? Does this one ancestor in our past (who may or may not have been matched willingly; love marriage is a relatively new phenomenon) negate our whiteness? That's the one-drop thinking of the racists of the past and I don't subscribe to it. I have grown up in White American culture. I guess you could even call me a WASP even though polo shirts don't look good on me and I've never summered at Nantucket, or however you're supposed to say that.

But this search has not been in vain. I have learned incredibly interesting things about my family history, including:

• My family goes back at least ten generations in the US on both sides
• Both my maternal and paternal lines (mom's mom's mom, etc. and dad's dad's dad, etc.) come from Ireland Way Back In The Day
• My family history is almost all English and Irish, with some French via Quebec in more recent days, which may or may not explain my love affair with Canada
• I had ancestors who were mercenaries in the Civil War; they decided to fight for the Confederacy because it paid more
• I had another ancestor who led a rebellion against the Confederacy and got hanged for it
• It is true that cousins married each other in the 1800s
• Tales of mystery and intrigue that will remain in the family and not on this blog

I have gotten in touch with family members I never even knew I had. (When your grandfather is one of nineteen children, this is really not very surprising.)

And just as importantly, if not moreso, I have learned about issues facing the the Native Americans of today, and keep myself informed. I visited Tahlequah, Oklahoma twice - in 1998 and 2000 - and saw what life was like in the Cherokee Nation. I learned more about the Cherokee and about the issues they faced, from people who didn't have to do genealogy work to know their heritage. In more recent years, I have learned about the Idle No More movement in Canada and the US and have read about current events and issues that affect the Native American community closer to where I currently live.

I have been hesitant to involve myself too much, as I don't think I know very much at this point and want to educate myself more on the issues before becoming involved, as the goal is not "look at me, I'm one of you" (because really, I'm not) but rather "how can I be of support, quietly, in the background?"

I, like most people, began this search in search of what I could get. I wasn't looking for college scholarships or tribal lands, but maybe a sense of connection, of belonging, of being able to say that my claim to Native heritage was correct. But if indeed I ever did have a Native American ancestor, I suppose the best tribute to her memory is what I can learn, and bolstered by that knowledge, what I can teach.

"Accidental Racist" is accidentally racist

And honestly, I'm not that surprised.

I get the point that Brad Paisley is trying to make. The Confederate battle flag is a part of Southern culture. For better or worse, it just is. But does wearing it make him a racist? He's offended that people might think that. He's just a good ol' boy, tryin' to do no harm. And so he wrote a song about it.

I am not a scholar in critical race theory, but I have found the following things present in the song that do not help his argument that really, wearing the Confederate flag isn't racist:

• Defensiveness ("And it ain't like you and me can rewrite history," "walkin' on eggshells")
• White guilt ("Caught between southern pride and southern blame")
• I have a black friend, and he approves, so it's okay ("If you don't judge my gold chains, I'll forget the iron chains")
• Reductionism and lack of context ("They called it Reconstruction, fixed the buildings, dried some tears" -- Reconstruction was about way more than fixing buildings and drying tears, and there's nary a mention of Jim Crow, which set race relations in the South back even further than before the Civil War, besides that slavery thing)

And when I see the above things, I realize it's the same tired old argument, the same tired old white guilt that people feel proud of, defensive about, frustrated by, or all three at the same time.

I also know the importance narratives play when trying to decide if something is racist (not if someone is racist; the two are different things.) And while I understand that the Confederate battle flag is a part of Southern heritage, I also understand that there are people who are offended by or who feel nervous when they see it. It's even mentioned in the song ("I see that red flag and I think you wish I wasn't here"). Both narratives are important. But even while trying to do research for this post, I found a lot more hits for the "the Confederate flag is part of our Southern culture" narrative than for the "this makes me uncomfortable" narrative. I have a hard time believing that this symbol doesn't have deep negative meaning, at least for some. But why don't I hear their opinions? Why is that narrative reduced to one line in the song?

I hear a lot of white voices --including mine-- surrounding this issue; those who support the flag and those who do not. But where are the voices of people of color? Why can't I find them with simple Google searches? It seems Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's question of whether the subaltern have a voice is still extremely relevant today. I cannot make an informed decision until I hear the narratives of those who are supposedly affected by the negativity inherent in the symbol.

But until then, Brad Paisley is not telling me anything I don't already know about the fact that white guilt exists and that it does absolutely nothing to confront the issue of racism. It just states his position and despite the inclusion of his "black friend" LL Cool J, does not seem to invite dialogue on the issue, but instead exhorts people to leave the past in the past and try to see this symbol so often construed as negative with the positive connotation he puts on it as a white Southerner instead.

Hand-Pulled Rickshaws of Kolkata

"You can find every kind of transportation in Kolkata," he said to me proudly, as if I had the Richard Scarry book Cars and Trucks and Things that Go in front of me and was checking off each vehicle inside. If I had, I would have had to make notes in the margins of the ones that Richard Scarry did not include.

Rickety trams. Trains departing Howrah Station. The metro slinking underground; the autorickshaws plying their routes. Ambassador taxis and Maruti 800s and the extremely occasional Mercedes. Three-wheeled cycle rickshaws, bullock carts, and men carrying dozens of chickens suspended upside down on either side of the seat of their bicycles.

And the one you will not find in any other metro area in India, the hand-pulled rickshaw, saved from extinction in this city that clings to its past just as the rickshaw pullers clung to their age-old profession in the face of their possible ban. Whether a ban has actually been put in place I do not know, nor does it matter, since they still fill the Kolkata roads regardless.

I saw many jarring things on my first trip to Kolkata. Having lived in Delhi for nearly a year, the poverty no longer moved me, but the hammer and sickle painted on the side of buildings did. The urgent monsoon sky did. And these men, thin, gaunt, darkened by the sun, often barefoot, certainly did.

Anirban Saha has done a series of photographic sessions of these rickshaw-pullers. He portrays them in black and white, in sharp focus against the blurry sped-up background of modern Kolkata. The images are poignant, but viewing them brings back the same feelings of uneasiness at class distinction that I had when I first encountered them. Intellectually, I understand their importance to the day-to-day life in the city. I understand that they remain in Kolkata by choice and not entirely by compulsion. But for someone who grew up in an egalitarian society, watching one man be beast of burden for another is uncomfortable. Children riding to school does not affect me in the same way as the fat man in a business suit, riding in broad daylight when he could easily walk. And I know I could never sit in one.

Perhaps this is what makes the most uneasy about the entire situation. It is a world I encountered, but not my world. As a foreigner, I cannot enter into that sphere. Availing myself of a ride is an image that smacks of colonialism and flies in the face of my generally-egalitarian nature. And if it were I who were taking the photos, instead of the talented Mr. Saha, it would be nothing more than poverty porn. This has little to do with skin color. He, as a lifelong resident of Kolkata, has interacted with this world from his childhood, perhaps even rode to school with a classmate or two in such a rickshaw. His eyes and his camera lens see as perfect sense what I see as cognitive dissonance. And his photos focus on the task at hand, on how the past and present coexist, not objectifying the bare feet or the wiry bodies. He is able to photograph these men and their occupation in a way a disturbed or impartial foreign eye cannot.

I encourage you to go take a look at his photos and give your own impressions.

Racism still exists; it's just invisible, like air

Today a controversy rippled its way through the twittersphere. I'd rather call it by its other name - a "teachable moment."

It concerns the show Radiolab, on National Public Radio. A few weeks ago, they published a podcast on "Yellow Rain" - a substance that fell from the sky on Laos during Vietnam.

And this podcast was very poorly received. The production team and host made grave errors throughout the entire process, from the way the interview was conducted to the editing to the way they responded to criticism in post-production. The host, Robert Krulwich, issued the linked apology, then the podcast was re-edited so as to remove some of the more offensive elements, such as muffled laughter toward the end of the broadcast.

So deeply hurt and offended was one of the interviewees, author Kao Kalia Yang, that she penned an article for Hyphen magazine to tell the story in her own voice, entitled "The Science of Racism: Radiolab's Treatment of Hmong Experience."

Wait, wait, that's a heavy word! Racism? They couldn't be racist. They were only trying to report both sides of the story! No slurs or tired old caricatures of Asian people were used in the reporting of this story. The words "model minority" were never uttered, not once. On top of that, the show is hosted on NPR; how can racism exist in that bastion of liberal media?

But then how could this podcast have been received so poorly by the listenership? If there's one thing we should know in 2012, it's that if a person of color tells you that something is racist, you listen to them. You don't just dismiss their experience of the situation and move on.

The racism in this incident was not the overt kind most people think of when they hear the word. No, there were no racial slurs. No hate crime was committed. No one said Asians were an inferior race. But throughout, racism was present as a white/Western-normative narrative. It contrasted two accounts of the same event -- the white experience in the laboratory versus the Hmong experience in Laos -- and unconsciously placed the white experience as the superior, or correct, experience. The fact it was unconscious on the part of the host and production team (as implied by Mr. Krulwich) simply serves to underscore how ingrained this sort of racism is in our culture.

Let's take a few examples.

First, the hosts - Mr. Krulwich and Jad Abumrad - appear to subscribe to the Western liberal notion that the science of today holds all the answers. This is often in direct contrast to "the religion of yesterday holds all the answers," which is an extremely debatable topic that will not be discussed here. It is definitely a good idea to use published scientific studies to back up your claims, but we have to remember that those studies may at times be incomplete or even wrong. Five hundred years from now, our modern science will look absolutely primitive to those who come after us. The hosts made the choice to prioritize the results of the study by Meselson and Seeley over the experience of the person sitting in the room with them, taking a black and white view that if the science was right, Mr. Yang must be mistaken. The interview, which purportedly was a chance to hear the story from the Hmong point of view, turned into an interrogation and attempt to convince Mr. Yang (and Ms. Yang) that their experiences were invalid in the face of evidence. It is an inhuman way to treat another person who has suffered so much; why were the Yangs not given respect in this regard?

And Maitri rightly points out that it is not actually scientists who use this argument, but people who wish to get some political gain out of it. What kind of political or social gain could Radiolab have gotten from telling this man to his face that he must be wrong?

Another thing to consider is the culturally-bound fear of the alternative narrative and of the unknown. As an American in Kolkata for the first time during the last days of the 33-year CPI(M) government, I found myself face to face with a hammer and sickle painted on the wall. Although I was very aware of the various political parties in India, including the Communist party's influence in West Bengal, I still found my heart beating a bit faster and a fleeting thought "Where have I landed this time?" ran through my head. I was still young when the Cold War ended, but I remember it well, and I remember the fear that people had. The hosts, who are almost certainly around my age or possibly older, would remember this fear as well. So if it turns out that chemical warfare was going on, as Mr. Yang's retelling of the events that transpired points to, then Reagan and the United States were wrong in standing down. If the "bee poop" conclusion had not been reached, chemical weapons might have proliferated. Bad things might have happened. And now, after all this time that we thought the yellow rain was harmless material, what if we were wrong? It seems a thought that, subconsciously, our hosts are terrified to entertain.

As Ms. Yang points out, everyone who participated in this story was highly credentialed, but somehow, Mr. Yang was only referred to as "Hmong guy" and she as "his niece," despite the fact that they were the key interviewees for the segment and were both extremely qualified as well. Listening to the podcast, I bristled when I heard Mr. Yang referred to "Hmong guy." It was such a disrespectful term for someone of his age, not to mention his credentials as an official documenter of the events which took place in Laos. We do not refer to Amartya Sen as "that Indian dude" or Stephen Hawking as "the disabled guy." How can "the Hmong guy" be okay in this context, and how could it have been invisible as to make it into the final edit of the podcast? The constant use of the term "bee poop" to describe a substance that Mr. Yang says killed crops, animals, and even people also falls into the category of thoughtless use of language. Whether it is a benign substance, a chemical weapon, or something else entirely, a more clinical and less flippant term could have been used.

Finally, the ridiculous statement that Ms. Yang "monopolized the discussion" drives the point home better than anything else. As Ms. Yang herself points out, it's really hard to monopolize a discussion when someone else is in charge of the topic, the questions, the tone of the interview, and the final editing. And I do not think it inconsequential that a white man was the one in charge of that, either. Do I think that the production team for Radiolab are all a bunch of raging racists whose business attire is KKK robes? Certainly not. However, this incident shows us very clearly how easily people of color can be treated disrespectfully, seen in terms of their race instead of their accomplishments, and then blamed for the whole thing.

So many things discussed here at length, yet no one even saw it as improper until it was too late. That should not be surprising, though, if you look at it through the lens of institutional racism. It is a blind spot that exists, whether we like it or not. We unconsciously privilege the stories of white scientists over Hmong refugee historians because it has become habit. We don't even realize it when we edit a two-hour interview into a thirty-minute podcast that vilifies those who experienced terror for refusing to believe an explanation that negates their whole experience.

Realizing it when it happens is the first step. We can't undo centuries of acculturation into ways of thinking that perpetuate racism overnight, but we can know it when we see it (and kudos to all of the listeners who saw it for what it was and pointed it out.) Then, the next steps are to recognize the patterns, figure out what we can do to break them, then do those things.

Simply respecting others for who they are, and respecting the stories and experiences they bring to the table, goes a long way to breaking those patterns. If it's overwhelming to look at the entire world in terms of historical and current ethno-cultural balances of power and privilege, then respect and willingness to learn from others is a good place to start.

One of those girls

I've gotten used to that feeling now. It's the Inward Cringe. The eye rolling, slightly sinking feeling when a politician doesn't know the difference between Muslims and Sikhs, a celebrity thinks it's okay to use brownface, a movie star shoots a film about India and converts to Hinduism as a result, and most recently, when a magazine prints a feature full of embarrassing cultural appropriation.

And it's weird that this makes me uncomfortable, because I'm not even Indian. Or maybe it is because I'm not Indian. I'm married to an Indian citizen, have lived in India, and have been acquainted with Indian communities in the US for over a decade. And every time one of these stories pops up, I'm a little embarrassed and frustrated - how come people don't have even basic intercultural knowledge when it comes to South Asia? - and at the same time, I wonder if I am perceived in the same way as Julia Roberts or Anja Ploetz -- as "one of those girls." A cultural dabbler; a dilettante; the girl who, wearing a sparkly salwar suit in the convenience store, tries to strike up a conversation in Hindi with the Sri Lankan working behind the counter; someone who flippantly talks about how Americans don't really have a culture so is it so wrong if I like yours? It's so spiritual. So colorful.

I feel I have to justify myself in some ways, so here's my story, in short form: I'm married to an Indian, who I met because I was learning Hindi and he thought it was weird. I was learning Hindi because I had recently started singing in it. Singing in Hindi happened because a few of my friends from India would listen to their CDs in my car and I learned some of the words so I could sing along, then one of them entered me in a talent showcase and it spiraled a little out of control to the point where I had 1-2 singing engagements a month. Plus, I wanted to learn Hindi so that I understood when these same friends were talking about me. :) They taught me to cook, we'd hang out together, we'd go to cultural events together; making Indian food and wearing bangles to appropriate events quickly seemed normal to me, not weird or special or exotic. We'd make vada pav and then go watch an independent movie at the Angelika in jeans and halter tops, or we'd go for a Diwali celebration dressed up in sarees and then have dinner at an Italian restaurant. I was brought up in multicultural cities and understood that "different" from one point of view was "normal" from another one, and that nothing was really "different" once you got used to it. Cultural mix was just a part of life.

And when I was singing, I tried to be especially careful. I knew I didn't understand everything, and I wanted to make sure I was appropriate, not appropriating. Even when in Indian dress, I refused to wear bindis for the longest time, mostly because of the impression Madonna and Gwen Stefani gave of white women wearing bindis. It was not until I was at an engagement and a woman huffily stuck a bindi on my forehead in the bathroom that I actually wore one on stage. Eventually, my rule of thumb became "do appropriate things when appropriate." And to do this requires a lot of listening and not very much talking, a lot of observing and as little "look at me" as possible. It requires humility, gratitude, and the constant need to 'check your privilege' and realize that you can be both a guest and a part of the group all at the same time. It requires building relationships, building trust, and - this is the tough one - being okay with however others choose to view you.

But I still bristle when someone asks me "why I am into Indian culture" because even though Indian culture is a fairly major influence on my life, culture isn't something you're "into" like knitting or river rafting or the complete works of Justin Bieber. I know this, but I don't know that other people know that I know this. And although I certainly accept that I can't change anyone's first impression of me, I still do not want to be viewed as that silly dilettante, as one of those girls. I've spent ten years deconstructing stereotypes, trying to not become a stereotype, and every time something like this hits the news, it seems it's back to square one. It's almost like I have to say something about Julia Roberts, Gwen Stefani, Anja Ploetz, in order to distance myself from them, to prove that I am somehow different from them.

But at the same time, am I?

What do I know about Anja Ploetz other than what the editors of New York Magazine decided to include in their 100-word article? What do I know about the blonde girl in the magenta sari at the farmers market?

Does being married to an Indian or living in India or having a basic understanding of intercultural communication make us superior to those who do not have that kind of connection?

Does it give us the right to judge?

Is it appropriate to try to distance ourselves from those we perceive as dilettantes?

Does it give us the responsibility to educate or deconstruct stereotypes?

Let me know your thoughts.


(This post is in part inspired by Jessica Kumar's article "Conversion vs. Covenant: White Hinduism - a Religion of its Own?")