"From Expatriate Aristocrat to Immigrant Nobody": South Asian Racial Strategies in the Southern Californian Context

Diaspora 6:1 1997 "From Expatriate Aristocrat to Immigrant Nobody": South Asian Racial Strategies in the Southern Californian Context Rosemary Marangoly George1 University of California, San Diego The true challenge for both racial theory and racial politics is to find ways ofdisrupting the relationship and presumed fixity ofboth the universalist and the particularist positions. —Omi and Winant 157 In post Proposition 187 and Proposition 209 California, there is immense pressure on all Californians to take positions on issues such as affirmative action, immigration policies and practices, "color-blind" futures, and indeed on race itself. Discussion on such issues among the Indian-American communities in Southern California (of which I am a part) has brought to light a certain reluctance to acknowledge a racial identity for oneself and for the community at large. What is refused by nearly all upper and middle class South Asians is not so much a specific racial identity but the very idea of being raced. The only identity that is acknowledged is the cultural and ethnic one of being no more and no less than "Indian-American"; when pressed, the commonly offered affiliation approaching a racial category that is seen as acceptable is "Aryan."2 The lack of resonance that issues of race have in the Indian subcontinent compounds the tendency among first generation South Asians to refuse to racialize themselves in the heterogeneous U.S. In the post-independence period in the subcontinent, caste, class, religion, and region together provide ample markers of identity that result in intricate social hierarchies. These circumstances have resulted in a situation where, for most of the professional class of South Asians who entered the U.S. after the 1965 changes in U.S. immigration policy, racial identity is ultimately seen as a "nonapplicable " category in their accounting of themselves. What is also carried over from the homeland to this new location is a hierarchic worldview (with its attendant racial ideology) honed under British colonialism. In the current Southern Californian context, where the fury and force of the sentiment against "brownness" is in full swing, there is a further motivation to avoid self-identification by skin color or race. This is precisely why "color-blind" politics in California, manifest in Proposition 209 for instance, holds such a strong appeal» Diaspora 6:1 1997 to the South Asian community at large.'1 Such political stances allow for the sidestepping of issues concerning both skin color and race. In this essay I will examine some of the ways in which members of South Asian communities in Southern California fashion a refusal of racial identity for themselves as a response to the multiracial world they inhabit and as a response to the current mode of immigrant-bashing rampant in California. We need to acknowledge the extent to which such a racial strategy subverts the marginality and genericism imposed on "brown" persons in Southern California. Yet, when understood only as a marker of cultural identity, "IndianAmerican " becomes the sign of a community that opts for transcendence of color and of the racial heterogeneity of the U.S. locations they inhabit. For professional South Asians, the category of"IndianAmerican " serves as a way ofcarrying over the "invisible" privileges of class (and often of caste) that such persons enjoyed in the subcontinent . The "demotion from expatriate aristocrat to immigrant nobody" that novelist Bharati Mukherjee writes about in her 1996 essay on the "two ways to belong to America" registers some of the complex negotiations that elite South Asians perform as they make themselves at home in the U.S. In Southern California, however, one of the ways in which this purely ethnocultural self-identification gets disrupted is through South Asians' everyday experiences ofbeing mistaken for "Mexican." These "mistakes," however momentary, bring this racial strategy to crisis because such events force an acknowledgment of oneself as raced. Thinking through this particular community's reluctance to be raced requires that we keep in mind a host of seemingly unrelated issues: the impact of colonialism on immigration histories, class positions (in the India-subcontinent and in the U.S.), skin color dynamics, racism, and the unequal welcome given by the state to immigrants of color who would potentially occupy...