From Bad to Worse: A Point of Entry to Finally Talk About "We Too Sing America"

Sometime in the spring months of 1997 during my senior year of high school in rural South Carolina, I recall one day where a group of white students were yelling racial slurs. 
These words were vile. 
These words were horrendous. 
These words were threatening. 
And these words were not life-giving; if anything, the utterance of these words were dehumanizing. 

I looked around to see whom they were yelling at; when I saw that everyone in my vicinity was white, I realized those slurs were being directed at me. Thanks be to God that it was the end of the school day. I was able to go home, walk into my bedroom, shut the door, and weep. I never had the heart to tell my parents what happened that day; the school year was close to being finished, and I was ready to leave that place far behind me. Why make a bad situation even worse?

--

On September 11, 2001, I was working as a business analyst. That was a day I did not complete work on a project. The days before September 11th were spent preparing economic data on sites for a large scale manufacturing facility. When the second plane hit the World Trade Center, I remember the project lead telling the consultants and analysts to stop working. The project meeting with the clients was the furthest thing from our minds that morning. The office closed early; I recall sitting in my apartment by myself not knowing what to do, so I met with the person I was dating for dinner to talk about what happened that day. 

I will never forget my father calling my cell phone repeatedly that evening. When I was finally able to answer the phone, he told me to leave wherever I was, go back to my apartment, and lock the door. I remember my father’s words: “They will find someone to blame and they will blame you. You need to go home NOW.” While my father had a flair for the dramatic, I listened to his words. I paid my bill, my date walked me to my car, I drove straight to my apartment and locked the door once I was inside. While I didn’t always listen to my father, I thought, why make a bad situation even worse?

--

“Hey bitch, go back home to Osama!” 

These words were yelled at me in the weeks immediately following September 11, 2001. I was walking with my date in downtown Greenville, SC when I heard these words from a Jeep driving by. I tensed up, scared that something would be thrown at me from the car. My date and I watched, incredulous, as the Jeep drove away. I felt like I was whisked back to that day of senior year of high school. I returned to my apartment, locked the door, and wept. Why tell my parents or share this awful situation with loved ones and make a bad situation even worse? 

 --

It is July 2016. A bad situation has become worse.

I began with these vignettes because in Deepa Iyer’s “We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future,” Iyer’s preface begins with her point of entry to writing this book. While some say write from your scars and not your wounds, it’s hard to be objective and removed when the wounds still seep and those wounds attack your very body and being. And yet, I write from my wounds and that makes me want to scream many an expletive into this post. These wounds are still open; with the current state of the 2016 presidential election, I fear that wounds within many communities will be inflicted on many populations that are not regarded as “worthy” and “valuable.”

Why talk about Iyer’s book now? This is a book review where I could not remove myself from the contents of the book. This was a book that I could not simply breeze right through and speak about objectively. This was a book that I had to carefully and meticulously read. This was a book that dealt with my very incarnational identity as a South Asian American woman; when I read so much of Iyer’s book, I saw my life reflected back at me. As a Christian, I believe in the Word made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ; there was something eerie of seeing words in a book that wasn’t the Bible that were deeply entrenched within my own flesh. I cannot speak for all populations, but my life significantly shifted after September 11, 2001. That shift continues to the present day. I am increasingly aware of the brown skin I inhabit. But there comes a point where a bad situation has become worse, and action needs to be taken. Iyer’s writing talks about the struggles of black and brown communities; she also writes of collective actions that are being taken to fight for liberation for oppressed populations, because liberation for all is intertwined. In a lecture she gave at UC Berkeley in January 2016, she encouraged those in attendance to be disruptors of biased narratives. She also encouraged bridge building in a land that continues to promote and encourage segregation at insidious levels.

While I read Iyer's book in early 2016, I write about it now because my notes from completing the book state the following:

Iyer speaks to the “loss” of a “White Christian America,” and this loss terrifies people. Speaking about the loss of “White Christian America” in the racialized state that is the United States of America has those comfortable in the realm of “White Christian America” increasingly worried. The United States has always been racialized; enslavement and colonization are very much a part of the United States in which I live today, and “White Christian America” is an artifact of this history. This loss of “White Christian America” is now one of the mantles of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign of building walls between the United States and its non-white neighbors to the south (because there has never been mention of a northern border wall) and Muslims being detained in camps to prevent terrorist activity. Trump also promotes an isolationist attitude, where treaties and trade pacts will need to be renegotiated so the United States will be on the profit-earning side of a cost-benefit analysis. If a country has not paid up on a trade deficit, according to Trump, eff them, they are on their own. He is, in effect, trying to create the American version of the xenophobic-based Brexit (Brexit is another post for another time because I sure as hell have something to say here as well) and placing a large part of the blame and fear-mongering attitude onto the bodies of black, brown, and LGBTQ+ communities. Political civility has left the building.

We’ve lived in a country of continued systemic “othering.” That othering is now blatantly out in the open. Never mind that there are numerous South Asians, Muslims, and Sikhs who are American citizens; we are simply not American enough and will always be viewed as perpetual foreigners, but at the same time, have also wrought the benefits of whiteness. This is where a model minority mutiny needs to happen; if people of color buy into the system of whiteness and white supremacy, the system of whiteness and white supremacy perpetuates. Buying into the system of whiteness pits communities of color against one another, and the only winner in the oppression olympics is Satan. There is a need for disrupting the dominant and oppressive narrative and finding ways to participate in collective action that will disrupt this narrative without co-opting one another’s experiences and messages. This is a balance that I continue to learn about.

It is a land of betwixt-and-between. Iyer writes that to continue talking about racism and racial justice in the United States, “We must deepen the Black and White racial binary that has guided our understanding of racial justice in decades past... Lastly we must develop, organize, and support regional multi-issue, multiracial coalitions that center, organize, and mobilize communities of color, working-class and poor people, women, LGBTQ communities, and immigrants to aggressively push back against far-right efforts that seek to strip away hard-won rights and benefits” (159).

A bad situation has become worse. The time is now.