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Last altered May 29, 1996
Sunu P. Chandy
On Saturday March 9th, the morning after the very successful Queer Women of Color International Women's Day Celebration, I attended the 8th Annual S.A.S.A. (South Asian Students Alliance) Conference at Brown University. I heard about this conference from Nimish Parikh, an organizer of this conference, when he was attending a MASALA function the weekend before the conference. I went to the conference with other SAWA and MASALA members and we set up tables at the 'cultural fair' to distribute our information and talk to students about our groups. This went on from 12-2 p.m. and, meanwhile, there was a queer students 'mixer' taking place in another room.
When we arrived at the mixer, the discussion focussed on how the queer experience in India is different and perhaps in some ways easier than here in the diaspora; whether the problem for our families is that we are queer or that we are not getting married; whether for women the issue is that our families want us to be economically secure and that our families have a hard time imagining that outside a marriage; how two economically secure Indian men will still face homophobia; how queer identity relates with Hinduism; and the difficulties of organizing with other queer men of color. There was no real closure to the discussion but it was positive that the organizers of this conference set aside time and space for us to meet and begin these conversations.
Urvashi Vaid, who had given a speech the night before, also participated in this discussion and stated that more of us need to be role models for each other and be out as much as we can in mainstream South Asian communities. She cannot and should not be the only spokesperson for queer South Asians.
From 2-5 p.m. there were simultaneous panels on: South Asian Representation in Asian America; Classism: The Economically Underprivileged South Asian; Gender Issues and Domestic Violence; and South Asian Politics: Shades of Brown Faces in High Places. I attended the one on Politics and the one on Representation in Asian America.
The panelists on Politics were Sunaina Maira, Baiju Shah, Jay Jyoti Chaudhuri, and Somini Sengupta. Shah discussed a distinction between personal/civic activism and 'ethnic activism'. He identified the first as being involved with issues not necessarily tied to the South Asian identity politics, such as working against the death penalty or against domestic violence. I had a problem with this distinction because as we know, many of these issues are tied to the South Asian community.
I believe that South Asians should be challenged to work not only on 'South Asian' people's needs, but to see the interconnections between the discrimination we face and those that many other categories of people face in this country. For example, perhaps there aren't many South Asians facing the death penalty, but beyond a moral issue, the death penalty is enforced in a blatantly racist way, and this is the same racism that affects us as South Asians in this country. Thus, working on this issue, is advancing justice not only for one group of people, but making a stand for the rights of people of color and other marginalized groups in this country. This ties into the points made by Chaudhuri who works for Charlie Sanders who is seeking the Democratic nomination to run against Republican Senator Jesse Helms in NC. Chaudhuri works to 'court the African-American vote'. He also discussed the need to have affirmative action within the South Asian community, in that we need to make sure people from different countries, Indian states, and religions are present when we address South Asian issues.
The fourth speaker, Somini Sengupta, presented the fact that the ways that South Asians react/respond to the cuts in affirmative action in this country are varied and complex. In her family, her father has benefited from set-aside contracts for minorities, and yet her younger sister believes that she had a harder time getting school admissions because of affirmative action for Latino and African-American students. Sengupta herself stated that she is a firm believer in affirmative action and knows that her family as a whole has benefited from these programs.
It seems that, like her family, the South Asian community is divided on this question. We want preference because there is real bias against our skin color and accent in the workplace, but in the school settings, it seems to work against South Asians. Sengupta feared that the ambivalence or worse--the silence of South Asians on this issue--could be construed as acceptance of the dismantling of affirmative action programs. The ultimate questions she called for were: What kind of home do we want to help build? Who will be our friends and our enemies? Where are our values ? What is our ideology? Is it going to be about self -interest or about values? What about a sitaution where there are Mexican garment workers working for a South Asian owner? Will we fight for more federal $ for AIDS research? Will we be active in the NAACP? Can we take on Dinesh D'Souza? Essentially, she was provoking us to think about: What is a valid South Asian struggle? Because "To only do South Asian activism would be to do injustice to the complexity of our lives."
Sengupta ended with a Steven Biko quote stating that blackness is not about the color of our skin, but about our conscience. I was really impressed with the questions that she asked the audience to think about. Although her overall analysis was about the reality of the interconnectedness of our experiences with other groups and the necessity to work together, I found myself wishing that she had quoted a South Asian. While there are more and more visible people of color writers and activists, it seems to me that among people of color, African Americas have the most visibility. However, in the context of the prejudice that South Asians, as a group, have had against African-Americans, I thought it was important for her to show that people of African descent can be role models for us as South Asians.
During the question-and-answer period, there was a strong and lengthy statement made by a student from Madras, who was coming from studying in Australia, who felt ignored and dismissed by Indian-American students in this country. He felt that stronger connections need to be established between "ABCDs" and "FOBs" (American Born Confused Desis and Fresh off the Boats).
The panel on South Asian Representation in Asian America focused on the need for South Asians to self identify as Asians and work as part of Asian groups. This was interesting to me because I had only thought of this question in terms of other Asian American groups excluding South Asians. The panelists gave many reasons and advantages for this type of coalition work with other Asians, foremost among the reasons being the political climate against immigrants and people of color in this country. The speakers for this panel were: Madhulika Khandelwal, Rajini Srikanth, Anu Gupta, and Tito Senha.
Professor Khandelwal focused on the question of South Asians in Asian Studies. She is the only South Asian on the National Board of Asian-American Studies, and she works at the Asian American Center of Queen College. She described the birth of Asian American Studies as a field in the 1960's-70's as a result of minority consciousness in a post-civil rights period. It began as a protest against a certain depiction of America without the voices of Asian Americas. At this time, the Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, who had been here for some time, were at the forefront of this debate and movement. South Asians have been almost absent in this movement from the start. 'Asian American' took the place of the word 'Oriental' or 'East Asian.'
She described how, as a result of activism, South Asians came to be included as 'Asians' in the census only in the 80's. Prior to that, many South Asians had been checking 'Caucasian' or 'Other'. In that context, some questions that she left the audience with were: "Do we consider ourselves a minority? Is it necessary to work with other people of color? What is our population? Do we need coalitions and alliances? What is our role/place in the racial/ethnic scheme? Who's South Asian?" She also stated that we need to examine which South Asians are present and involved.
Rajini Sriknath teaches American literature at Tufts University. She described her experiences at the National Association for Asian-American Studies and the concern that there were so few South Asian speakers. Out of 75 panels at the National Association meeting, only one was focused on South Asians. She wondered if there was an active decision by South Asians not to attend or this was a reaction to the feeling that we were not included. She talked about the difficulties of finding just one spokesperson when given one 'South Asian spot' at the table. It was also important to examine the fissures among South Asians, for example, Bangladeshi women's concern about being marginalized among South Asians. She concluded by stating that South Asians do not want mere inclusion into Asian American groups, but active engagement and discussion of the consequences.
Anu Gupta is a medical student at Yale and Brown graduate who had been active with the Asian American Students Association while she was there. She spoke of the cycles of inclusion and exclusion as South Asians make attempts to involve ourselves in Asian groups and then drop out when other Asian groups take leadership. She listed the top reasons why South Asians don't see themselves as Asian: "because we're Caucasian, because it's too large of a group, because our South Asianess will be diluted, because they don't think of us as Asian, because Asian Americans don't do South Asian things, because then we are outnumbered at events, because we have nothing in common with other Asians, and because we don't even look Asian". Beyond these gut responses often given to her by South Asians, she challenged the audience to think about other issues of why or why not South Asians want to identify as Asians.
This idea of seeing ourselves as part of the larger Asian American identity was strongly supported by the last speaker, Tito Senha. He is a law student at CUNY and had been active with the Asian American Legal Defense Fund. His focus was on the political climate against people of color and immigrants in this country and stated that it was a luxury to even be having this discussion of whether or not, we as South Asians, want to be active in Asian American groups. The fact is that immigration policies don't care if you are brown or yellow and that the walls are being put up at the borders and at the airport. We need to be involved in progressive politics and create an agenda together. He ended by recalling what legal scholar Mari Matsuda said about Asian Americans occupying the racial middle between the whites at the top and the blacks at the bottom in the racist paradigm of America. In this position, Asian Americans can choose to identify with the white bourgeoisie and uphold racism or identify with other people of color and work to dismantle racism.
Overall all, the panelists were interesting but there could have been meaningful discussions if the audience was more interested or mature in its thinking on the issues. I don't want to be patronizing, but as an older student, it was a bit frustrating to hear basic questions such as 'Why even have these sorts of categories such as 'Asian'? Furthermore, the audience seemed to be more interested in getting their tickets for the evening semi-formal, than engaging the panelists. However, there were individual students who asked thoughtful questions and hopefully progressive students will be involved in planning the next conference. The funniest thing that I learned from Nimish is that the organizers weren't necessarily trying to hold a political conference but they were reacting to the critique that South Asian students' groups often only focus on social events and parties.
This conference was definitely a step in the right direction, even though it was reactionary. It was exciting to see a variety of South Asian activists, who are committed to working through politics and working in Asian American groups to create an America that is different than the one current political forces are promoting. It is encouraging to see that undergraduate South Asian students are drawing from the experiences and analysis of progressive South Asian activists who have gone before them for this feeds our hope that work by progressive South Asians will continue.
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Last altered May 29, 1996