The only good Injun...
I’m going to start off this entry with a disclaimer, or an excuse. Or, rather, make that a disclaimer AND an excuse. You can decide which is which.

First of all, I read an article some 10-15 years ago, I think it was in the New Yorker. Maybe it was Amitav Ghosh’s article about the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Ghandi. Or maybe it was later, about hindu/muslim riots following the destruction of the Babri Masjid, I don’t recall. And I’m too wrapped up in writing this entry, now, to search for the proper reference. In any case, anybody who has spent any amount of time with me has heard me make reference to it a million times, because it had a lasting impact on my analysis of race and ethnicity.

This article I read cites a theory by some social scientist who asserted that groups of people that share many characteristics will hate each other much more intensely than a third party from a “totally unrelated” race/ethnicity. Think, for example, of Serbs and Croats, Jews and Arabs, Indian Hindus and Indian Muslims, Hutus and Tutsis, Japanese and Chinese. The violence that these groups inflict on each other is so much more intense, macabre, and personal than in wars between, say, the US and the Phillipines.

Maybe this is not the case, indeed, or maybe there are reasons like centuries of conflict—the burden of history—but the reason given in this mystery article is that groups that are “similar” to one another HAVE TO espouse a hatred of one another in order to ASSERT their own distinct identity. See, to me, a Jew and an Arab looks the same. I might confuse the two. And you—you can’t tell the difference between an Indian and a Pakastani when you look at them. So, in order to not lose their unique cultural identity, they have to say, “Me? I’m not Pakistani. Don’t call me Pakistani. I HATE Pakistanis…” etc.

That’s one point before I start.

The other thing is that I’m very self-conscious about writing narcissistic, navel-gazing blogs that mean nothing to you, my readers, so I have decided to write unflattering things about myself.

Well, I recently got my course reader in the mail for the first class that I’ll be taking at USF. The class is on first-person, autobiographical writing, and I’ve been looking forward to starting the reading ever since I saw Sherman Alexie’s “The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me” on it.
So I read the essay and it talked about being Indian (Native American), as Alexie is wont to do, and it got me thinking about my own identity and stuff and about my first writing assignment, which I suppose this blog may turn into…and then I found myself waiting in line at Amy’s Ice Cream behind a big group of South Asians.

So there I am, standing in line while Chickpea goes to the bathroom thinking, “I hope these ice-cream scoopers know that I’m not one of THEM, these suburban, cookie-cutter people.”

And then I look over and make eye-contact with the guy in the group who is about my age, though in much better shape, and I think “I could take this little Guju punk. Who does he think he is, looking at me like that?”

And then the cute girl all decked out in the latest Banana Republic gear walks past me and I struggle not to check her out because I can’t give her the satisfaction of knowing that I’m checking her out.

And Chickpea has STILL not returned from the bathroom to literally serve as a buffer in the queue between us (Sorry, Chickpea, I did indeed use you as my token talis[wo]man) to mark me as being separate from them, and I think, “Maybe, if I stick close to them, the ice cream people will think I really am a part of their group and will ring me up with the rest and I’ll get free ice cream…”

And then she returns. And we order our ice cream. And the big group of Desis leaves. And the ice gream guy rings us up, and just to make sure that he knows that I’m “cool,” I ask him about Rachel, the girl who usually works there whom I have done political work with.

What a bastard I am! Why do I care what the ice cream scoopers think about my ethnic/racial/religious identity? Consciously, I don’t. And maybe that’s not even it. I mean, I have desi friends who I am happy to hang out with. I think it has more to do with my judging them as being “suburban middle-class” and not wanting to be associated with that. And because we look similar, I expect that it’s easier for me to get lumped together with them than if they were suburban middle class white folk or latin folk or Vietnamese folk or black folk.

So today, as I was mulling this over, I realized that I wouldn’t have this problem if I’d just wear a turban—but then people would associate me with those SIKHS, and who wants THAT?!?