American Performances
It was 2018, spring or summer or fall. I went with a friend to see “Fairview” at Soho Repertory Theatre in Manhattan. She works in theater and knows which plays are important, I trust her. We spend many hours deep in conversation before and after plays, usually over drinks, about what we saw or will see on the stage. Also we talk children, school, marriage, mental health, life. Our friendship thrives on a lack of small talk, she is in fact awkward at it, like me. Most people in my life are like this. Our small talk includes strategy sessions on how to overturn systems, laugh crying at the depressing and ludicrous things, while always making time for why does your hair look so good and where did you get that lipstick. I used to think if women could roll like this, if we could spill enough awkward and funny words over drinks, I could be seen by them. But what has become clear is that only when I finally reckon with how I see myself, could anyone else hope to truly know me.
“Fairview” broke the fourth wall of theatre, actors addressed the audience directly at one point. The actors, all Black, performed the moments surrounding a family dinner scene in a crisp unstained living room draped in the clean beige and pastels of a certain kind of arrival. The dialogue by playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury both undid and played with familiar tropes of the sassy Black aunt and good Black mother. There are reasons why stereotypes and tropes persist in the popular imagination. They are easy for our brains to process, we relax in their presence. For most of the play, the brains of the predominantly white audience eased, there was sense to be made of things, we laughed easily on cue. The patterns were recognizable. Until the final moments of the play I believed, as I have for most of my life, that I was separate from all this, from the whiteness I had even arrived to the play with. From an inability to comprehend Black complexity on this stage. In the play’s final moments, one of the actors turns to us, asks that the lights over our seats be turned up. She speaks directly to the audience about the regular consumption of Blackness in the arts, her Blackness by us in this play. We were being asked to deconstruct the act of being entertained, being entertained by her, by her Blackness. Heart rates quicken, we are frozen in our seats, awaiting, getting ready to make the good, moral choice. Perhaps confusing it for the good, moral work.
Here is where it gets a bit hazy, trauma memory takes over. She asked us to participate in an experiment with her. All those who identify as white (or maybe she said those who view their lived experience as one that benefits from whiteness? Or maybe she said if you don’t consider yourself to belong to a marginalized race?) to come up onto the stage. I sat confused while my friend stood and squeezed past me to get to the aisle. A panic set in. Where should I go? The request posed was not just ‘white people come up to the stage.” It was presented in the negative. If you were not a beneficiary of *hazy* because of your race, then stay seated. Clearly the space in the audience was to be reserved for a group but did I belong to it? I thought my lived experience as a first-generation Indian-American categorized me as white-adjacent in comparison to the African-American experience that I had been watching in that play so I went up on stage hoping I was making the anti-racist choice. If not that, I hoped it was the lesser evil of two highly uncomfortable choices. Mainly, I desired anonymity amid the confusion of that moment.
I ended up being the only non-white person on that stage. The actor then proceeded to engage the remaining Black and brown bodies who were seated in the audience in a love poem. Just for them. For the bodies that looked more similar to mine than anyone on the stage with me. It was an achingly honest moment crafted for that small percentage of theater goers who often feel invisible. Whiteness was being told you don’t matter right now. Whiteness was put on a stage to consume. I could only feel myself sinking into nothingness on that stage. I wanted to disappear. It brought me back to so much of my experience growing up in white America. Wanting to just fade away into a sea of whiteness.
Afterwards, at the much needed drink post-play, I think I was in denial, saving face in front of a concerned friend, my brain could not at that time comprehend the magnitude of the moment’s meaning. To this day, I haven't asked my friend what she saw that night. Maybe she too saw me as basically white, but not quite. To her credit she has always listened, tried to understand me, as few have over these last few years. The years where I try to account for/to recover what it is exactly I have lost. But even saying I have lost something implies that I committed an act, misplaced my identity, failed to pay attention. Something was taken from me by this place that taught me I was not meant to be fully seen. Even in this essay I must remember to not politely take responsibility for my own oppression, for my erasure. The work is constant when you are countering a constant societal pressure to be unheard.
Where we are in America is every Asian story must still begin with this. There is no universal immigrant assimilation story in America. My story began in Forest Hills, Queens where I was born. I don’t recall noticing white people very often in my childhood, I barely conceived of my race really, I was just playing with kids who looked like me or didn’t. If there was a time and place I ever belonged fully to, it was being a little brown girl to freshly polyestered immigrant parents in Queens in the 70s, 80s. Then around age 9 we moved to the suburbs.
The mispronounced names followed by the willingness to shorten the name to Ray, Nic, or whatever nickname works best for you to not have to learn anything about us. We grew up multilingual, going to temple on the occasional holiday, eating Indian food and immersed in the homes of others like us. There were the national conventions we attended where I saw for the first time in this country, halls full of people assembled together speaking my family’s language, Marathi. The organizers of Bruhan Maharashtra Mandal of North America must have known the importance of getting us all together in one space, how powerful that would be to children who almost never heard their mother tongue outside of their home. It was becoming harder to separate the protective white-facing exterior I wore to school and shopping malls, from my actual flesh and body. But at these conventions, where the kids would tease each other for everything (as kids do), we never gave shit over what we had to do to survive whiteness.
While our parents did what they could to keep us connected to their roots, we brown children growing up outside of big cities, going to schools where nothing felt of us, poured ourselves into the lifelong project of studying what our parents and family could never give us. Acceptance into the dominant white culture. Of course the fact of spending time with those who looked like us mattered, the comfort mattered. It was just always so fleeting. A momentary respite from the daily work.
The assimilation of the immigrant experience in America coupled with the complicity of the mass media in portraying only the dominant white culture, gives all those who grow up here the mistaken notion that there is one culture. Those of us on the outside of that whiteness know better, but it is true that only one culture is allowed to breathe in all the air and exist in the full range of art, music, film, literature from tremendous to mediocre to shitty. White culture has a large and ever-forgiving audience made up of most of this country. Most of the world. It can just keep churning. There is always a buyer.
Regarding even the very language we speak, Jaswinder Bolina in his essay Writing like a White Guy from his book Of Color, speaks about how even this language of privilege that I speak to you with now, has a sort of idealized blank slate-ness coveted within whiteness. This language that I can reasonably approximate means you will read my first-generation story but not others.
“…the privilege, in this case, of not needing to consider what others are forced to consider; of not needing to address questions of race, gender, sexuality, or class except by choice; of not needing to acknowledge wherefrom one speaks and instead professing to speak from a blank slate. It’s the position of no position, the voice from nowhere or from everywhere, and in this it is Godlike.”
“Our academic and cultural institutions, along with their literary canon and its language, have historically been the possessions of a largely wealthy, heteronormative male whiteness. Writers who aren’t those things, if they are to enter the academy and its canon, are asked to assimilate into diction, syntax, and grammar that don’t coincide with perceptions of their identities. They are asked to deracialize, desexualize, un-gender, and un-class their language at the outset, and promised that the better they approximate whiteness in so doing, the nearer they’ll be to a universal art.”
My goals and dreams were all crafted from the building blocks of whiteness. It is troublesome enough when you are white, but what does it do to you when you are not? When the culture that you think, write, read, love in is white, hetero, privileged? In addition you are a child of immigrants, so you do your duty by them and reject everything that threatens the life they built by leaving everything behind. They worked hard to get you to this place. They got out of the chaotic street vendor life of color and dust to the order of FIRST world hushed secrets passed among neighbors about the new family on the block. Where the suburbs spoke quiet space among manicured lawns walking that subtle line between uniformity with just enough variation to see that humans lived there.
We weren’t really supposed to spend that much time in our suburban house, in that heavy quiet place. But our little piece of suburbia became a loving sanctuary for the four of us, my little brown family. Outside of our home unpredictable racist things might happen, never often enough to seem like our life’s story, but jarring to the point of crafting little trauma islands inside that I ignored for most of my life. Instead of constantly walking off these tiny islands into a sea of anxiety I am fitting them all together and creating a nice big cohesive trauma that I can at least lay my head on properly. So I can make sense of my land.
A taste of the unpredictable racist things in list format: “Dothead”, road rage directed at my dark-skinned father, white neighbor asking 10-year old me to clean his house, assumed to get jobs because I’m Asian, assumed automatically booksmart/hard worker but not creative/artistic, men being really into me because fetishization, speech class in suburban elementary by myself in a room with rubber bands on my tongue, father abusive towards family because of all he endured and didn’t say, cross burned into our lawn the second day we moved to the suburbs, taking the school bus was a nightmare, the first time a white boy in high school had a crush on me in band class I assumed he was making fun of me because why would anyone have a crush on me, your relaxation in my model minority arms.
In our Indian community, a cloud of competition often hung in the air. Everything was measured against. We had become exceptional at the “race,” at the exams, at blocking out anything else. Community was there to compare notes on our progress, whose daughter was in medical school or son in law school, until some of us had to push forward and separate from the pack. Did we bring people up with us as we climbed or mostly marvel at those who forged ahead without looking back? Where were we climbing to? The striving was constant.
So then at 43, when you see the New York City public school system where your children attend, for the segregated, chronically underfunded institution that it is, you find yourself at a counter-protest facing your previous selves, perhaps angrier versions of your parents, perhaps all the uncles and aunties you grew up with. The protest was organized during a pandemic by PLACE NYC, an organization populated with many white and Asian parents. At a time when people across the country were protesting for Black lives, this protest was organized to ensure that during all the chaos of remote public school instruction, their beloved SHSAT (test to get into 8 specialized high schools) and “gifted” programs would remain intact. But the protest was not really about schools, kids or even tests. It was to ensure the systems are maintained, their path to the promised land of the privileged clear. Supremacy, white or brown, requires those at the bottom to remain stuck. We need the systems in place that we spent our whole lives studying to matter in whiteness. What are we if we cannot excel, surpass all the other brown? All the Black? What are we if we are not special? Just people who maybe moved generations to a land that never saw us beyond what use we were to them? Did our parents, their parents, make a mistake coming to this land? Perhaps all the striving, test prep in India that trains Indians to get into good universities in America, maybe all of it displaced something else? Some other kind of learning? A kind of loving? No never that, let’s keep the house up just a bit longer, say PLACE Asian parents.
White supremacy is not uniquely American. Caste discrimination and colorism have flourished in India for generations. We were ripe to be courted by whiteness while it also colonized the country and corrupted us even further in novel ways. We wore our beautiful clothes to greet and be interviewed for the role of model minority when Americans came asking because the British had long ago planted that colonial seed of striving for whiteness. We had been teaching our girls for generations their place was in the home, second to brothers, our education was secondary to marriage, a good marriage proposal by a fair-skinned, wealthy man who hailed from a high-caste family was second to nothing. So adjusting to American patriarchy was nothing at all.
Sometimes when I’m tired of thinking, I watch mind-numbing TV. Indian Matchmaking is what the computers recommend to me and I oblige. It’s a basic dating Bachelor-inspired reality show set in America. The sex has been exchanged for a backstage pass to the (only slightly seedy) baser side of Indian culture. The first time I watched as much as I could take, 1.5 episodes, before having to pace and shake it off. (I eventually finished the first season.) It is basic reality fare including surprisingly touching clips of interviews with older Indian couples who had arranged marriages 30-50 years earlier sitting on the respectable far sides of their living room sofas, talking about how the gamble they took has endured. I recognized every character, they were pieces of me, my parents, my family and friends. The lawyer from Texas whose mother’s only desire was for her daughter to be wiped clean of her family’s immigrant story of shame, divorce and abuse, left with only ambition and disdain. She seems genuinely shocked to hear that one of her dates, also a lawyer, actually likes being one. The children of Indian immigrants so often fall prey to this country’s endless appetite for eager workhorses to achieve its capitalist nihilism. Then there was the self-assured light-skinned Mumbai-based man-boy, secure with the keys to the family diamond business, serving flaming cocktails and tiny morsels of molecular gastronomy to his guests via the family’s silent darker brown underclass on brilliant white rectangles. Everything in service of the whims and hobbies of the monied class. He had always been raised to understand his royalty, and that only something others could not easily attain was worth his time. The matchmaker, experienced in this dance, knows he will have to reject many women before settling on a match who he believes to be out of his reach. Sweet Nadia, the Guyanese woman from New Jersey, a dancer, who searches for an Indian man even though some portion of the Indian community quietly laughs at the notion that Guyanese still think they are of Indian descent. They are Indians who were taken as indentured servants (many of them of lower castes) to the then British country in South America generations ago as workers (to replace the slaves) in sugar plantations. It’s class and caste that lives on for generations which separates her from American-born Indians who live down the block. She nervously tells the matchmaker that one of her criteria is an Indian man who will accept her Guyanese heritage. Imagine. Her ancestors’ history of indentured servitude still relegates her in Indian communities to a lesser brown. What is this hell named you ask? Let’s call it age-old casteism, racism, white & brown supremacy. It is what compelled me only a few years ago to step on a stage not meant for me. To assume I had more in common with whiteness than brownness. Everything I had ever been told was that I was exceptional brown, not like the others, not white but not NOT white. So I went where I thought I would blend in, standing out finally in my nonsense. Honestly thank all the damn gods for that play.
To grow up in these two worlds means you know everyone’s shitty secrets. You learn how to love despite. Driving through the Holland Tunnel arguing with my father on the last Thanksgiving I would ever spend with him. Trump had been raising all the nationalist alarm bells on the migrant caravan approaching our borders. This man who raised me and was a dark brown immigrant himself claimed these South Americans/Mexicans/wrong brown were not coming here the “right” way. He had done it the right way and so should they. He couldn’t see the hypocrisy, the racism, the alignment with evil. So I raged while my mother silently prayed for the two of us to stop. I didn’t speak to him that whole night. To be honest, if he were alive I’m not sure what he would make of my life. I let the racist pieces of him lie in rest, so I can remember I was loved deeply in the way he could manage. Now I can conjure up better parts of him. Only after he was gone, could I see that a lifetime of raging with someone requires a continual returning. A coming back to each other despite ourselves.
What about a few months ago, moving from a white neighborhood in Brooklyn to a historically Black one with my Indian mother and two half-white kids? Introducing myself to my Black neighbor who decisively countered Oh no, I don’t mix. I awkwardly apologized, back-stepping to my car, while she in an oddly friendly voice told me It’s ok, you couldn’t have known. I wasn’t white but I was close enough to the idea for her. And you know what? I understood what she meant and sort of respected her choice. White people have been coming into her neighborhood for far too long and fucking things up. Chances are I’ll prove on some level to be harmful just by my mere existence. On my good days I understand this, do not take it personally, and try to do the best I can.
I’ve experienced backlash from white parents in my children’s public schools when they realized I was not in fact one of them and didn’t care to align myself with their interests. I confused them because they couldn’t understand my social justice motivations when it seemed as though I had already arrived, been accepted, could leave all that behind. The wary distance of Black and Hispanic parents who see me as often aligned with whiteness and understandably do not trust my activism also leaves me weary.
There is a term gifted to us by Indian-born Indians that I remember from my younger days, ABCD or American Born Confused Desi. We are confused because we are not Indian enough. We are confused because we are not white enough. Neither here nor there. American born, belonging to no place. Never enough. We study whiteness from a young age, study it for survival, watch it, duplicate it. We watch and listen in ways that give us insight into its dimensions and privileges that actual white people could never have. Sometimes we are uniquely able to comment on how destructive it can be to the individual.
However other times we study whiteness and our devotion to the American caste system means we are uniquely suited to upholding the tenants of the Empire (see the many South Asians of high caste status anointed to the Biden Administration).
I was often confused growing up. I’m a grown-ass woman now so I understand nobody really knew anything and mostly people pretended or unfortunately actually did think they knew the answers. I now fully appreciate the true gift of being in a state of not knowing for most of your life. The certainty is what will kill you. There is a flexibility and openness one can have being not quite from this place or that.
In case my pandemic-fueled deep-dive into self confuses anyone, I love my Indian roots. They have always reminded me to keep family close. Even when family fucking annoys the shit out of me. Because the years change the relationship, deepen our understanding of each other, and allow us to always have a steady place to fall into when everything else falls apart. My Indian roots remind me of the need to say things plainly; I learned this in my family, in which we yell and fight and insult each other with love. There is no kindness in polite culture. What is not said is usually the cruel thought. My Indian roots also taught me that there is a culture I belong to regardless of language, religion, or country. These roots go deep, touching ancient knowledge.
Young Desis clung to each other in college and in each new job where we caught eyes across the room. It mattered little how we grew up or what our parents would think of each other because you were Pakistani and I Indian. As the large amorphous othered group that whiteness in America collected us under, we often came together in ways our own parents never could. Their nostalgia for the motherland was often entrapped in the cult of national identity. But we, ecstatic to have found again that brown respite from whiteness, taught each other how we did things in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, India, Guyana, Trinidad but also in Central Jersey, London, Queens, California, and Australia. In doing so, we untaught borders from our minds.
What I learned from my relationship with my father was that the moment you don’t engage, don’t critique, don’t fight back, that’s when hope and love for him/ for myself would be dead. We had a distant love held together by his devotion to my children, filled with eruptions of heat and anger. We told each other who we were constantly, disappointed each other, and kept coming back after the worst of it. When he finally died I stopped punishing myself or him for saying difficult things badly to each other, to others. I created another island in my body made of all the times where we came back to each other.
Over the course of a life, many of us will find ourselves on a bright stage of our own creation whereby a lot of our bullshit is revealed. We will want to hide it. Disappear even. It may shatter us, cause us to lose friends, jobs, relationships, and money. We may be cancelled. And yet.
Resham Mantri is a writer and mother of two (plus dog) based in Brooklyn. She holds degrees in computer science and law. She has published interviews with The Creative Independent and has a Substack.
