Pop Stuff: Is Racism Skin Deep?

Hasan Minhaj took the stage at the White House Correspondents Dinner in the face of an administration that might rather see him across the border

The politics of our tumultuous Trumpian times are being redrawn as nationalism collides with inclusion. The contours might be defined by the recent wave of newly elected leaders but the shading began long before as the other ”˜big’ conversation, the one about race and identity finally bubbled, protested, rioted to the surface. Our times are marked by an unprecedented level of dialogue around what it means to be brown, black, South Asian, Native American, Middle Eastern, anything that counts as ”˜other’ when faced with a still predominantly white/ruling class. The despair of the white working-class notwithstanding we are at point where like a breath held in too long there is an outcry against lines drawn over centuries of colonization, imperialism and slavery. But I wonder if our fight back in the public sphere confronts the symptoms more than the root.

My own brushes with racism have been just that, slight. Despite going to school in London and making New York home, the worst I had to contend were a few hastily murmured post 9/11 slurs, an ex boyfriend who referred to me as an ”˜authentic Indian’ and the passers-by that assume I’m the help when I’m babysitting my friends’ kids. I’m fortunate. I haven’t been refused a job, strip searched at an airport, married off to the highest bidder or gunned down in the street because of my skin.

If racism isn’t ubiquitous, color coding is. Color agnostic by nature, nurture shifts the lens. As a kid, I became aware that my lone black plait bobbed in a sea of English roses. When we moved back to India my grandma cautioned me about swimming lest I became too dark. I saw fairness creams in the corner store and ”˜chikni heroines’ pitted against ”˜dark vamps’ on the screen. Later, from my African American roomies in college, I received an initiation on everything from weaves to the perils of interracial dating, and from Dr. Cornel West in the classroom, I understood the forced double consciousness of generations enslaved. When a close friend in New York, a black actor, told me that the best thing about moving to Los Angeles was not having to deal with cabbies driving by him, my understanding was implicit, indignation seemed naïve.

Three years ago, Black Lives Matter put a microscope on police brutality. Marginalized voices have since grown progressively louder and last month Hasan Minhaj took the stage at the White House Correspondents Dinner in the face of an administration that might rather see him across the border. In India, the long rampant hypocrisy of the ”˜I’m brown but not black’ attitude has seen its most open criticism after recent attacks on Africans. We’re braver about making a noise and this heightened awareness is celebrated as a crucial step to extinguishing prejudice.

The irony is the ideal of a color blind generation lies in an ”˜un-awareness’; where debating a black James Bond is superfluous and where light skin becomes an ordinary feature, not an asset, of a newborn. The current conversation around race is imperative but what would the world look like if color coding, the message of the nurture factor, was that while our actions necessitate the discourse, the truth is that we are all just shades of black.

Soleil Nathwani is a New York-based Culture Writer and Film Critic. A former Film Executive and Hedge Fund COO, Soleil hails from London and Mumbai.