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6 Analyzing Assignations and Assertions: The Enigma of Brown Privilege
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6 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Analyzing Assignations and Assertions The Enigma of Brown Privilege Bharati Mukherjee, a well-known Indian American novelist, published an article in which she wrote, I am less shocked, less outraged and shaken to my core, by a purse snatching in New York City in which I lost all of my dowry gold—everything I’d been given by my mother in marriage—than I was by a simple question asked of me in the summer of 1978 by three high-school boys on the Rosedale subway station platform in Toronto. Their question was, “Why don’t you go back to Africa?” (Mukherjee 1981, p. 38) Why is Mukherjee disturbed by being mistaken for an African woman? Why is she upset about being told to go back to Africa by three teenagers at a subway station? Her reluctance to be seen as a person of color is a theme that surfaced often in my interviews. Most of these Indians have faced varying levels of racism and discrimination but have been able to carve out a place for themselves in the American middle-class suburban culture. They usually are perceived as the model minority and are not given the kind of negative reception in their communities that is usually reserved for other working-class, poor migrants. Instead, that these participants want to be seen as a group that is close to white culture and their distance from “blackness” is evident in the ethnographic data. This chapter describes the different ways in which Indians use assignations to locate their selves in their new world, the American suburb. On one hand, they strongly identify with their Indian ethnicity, but on the other hand, they distance themselves from their ethnicity and frame their cultural identity in terms of a universal human condition and universal human nature. Migration, by its very nature of movement, has significant implications for how Indians view their personal and collective identity through the categories of nationality, ethnicity, and racial identity. According to Shukla, “Even if an ambivalence that already existed comes to fore or is newly articulated, the affective dimension of being Indian is changed by the diaspora and by being located in and through the processes of racialization , ethnicization, and nationalization” (2003, p. 10). How do Indians , as both a collective group and individuals, understand their racial and ethnic identities in their new homes? What processes of racialization and ethnicization do the assignations and assertions discussed in the previous chapters reveal? How can we explain the contradictory status of South Asians as “ambiguous nonwhites” (George 1997; Kibria 1998) and the ways in which this ambivalence about racial identity is demonstrated? One way to understand these responses to migration—voices of assignations and assertions—is to situate them in the model minority discourse of the diaspora. I use the dialogical model of self to explain the ambiguities regarding the formation of racial identity in middle-class Indians . More specifically, I show how voice as an analytical concept allows us to understand the multiple, shifting, and often contradictory positions on the racial and ethnic identity formation of the professional, elite Indian diaspora in the United States. The discourses of racial identity in the Indian diaspora also suggest that we need to rethink traditional notions of immigrant adaptation and acculturation in cross-cultural psychology. Traditionally, much of mainstream psychology has been occupied with developing universal, linear models and theories of immigrant identity, acculturation, and adaptation. For instance , cross-cultural psychologists have studied topics like acculturation and acculturative stress (Berry 1998), socialization and enculturation (Camilleri and Malewska-Peyre 1997), and bicultural identity (LaFromAnalyzing Assignations and Assertions ❙ 185 [44.204.218.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:19 GMT) boise, Coleman, and Gerton 1998). This body of research, though commendable for bringing issues of immigrant identity to the table, has largely presented migration as a series of fixed phases and stages that do not account for new immigrants’ culturally distinct and politically entrenched experiences. The ongoing negotiations between the voices of assignation and those of assertion give us an alternative model for understanding the process of migrant acculturation. This dialogical model of acculturation illuminates how middle-class Indian migrants negotiate their hybrid sense of self in the context of cultural difference, racial politics, and increasing globalization and transnational communication (Bhatia 2004). Between Assignations and Assertions of Racial Identity A certain kind of exceptionalism has permeated the narrative of “South Asian–American racial formation” (Koshy 1998, p. 285). The narrative of exceptionalism feeds basically...