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Presence at the Saathis' conversation

Presence at the Australianama meeting

The Bouchard-Taylor Commission was a study held in Québec to examine national identity, secularism and interculturalism in the midst of reasonable accommodation debates. Although the Commission was praised by many non-white community leaders for being a strong first step towards mutual understanding, “the Commission ended up reinforcing the racialized hierarchies and exclusions that it wanted to redress.” (Mahrouse, 85) It did so through the definition of racism it employed as well as the dynamics of the dialogue at work.

Firstly, new forms of racism involve the “assumption of cultural or acquired inferiority” (Thobani, 159) as a result of one’s membership to a ‘backwards’ culture, thus positioning the majority-white members of society in opposition to migrants as progressive, modern and tolerant. Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor made the lazy mistake of applying the idea of racism as a violation of one’s rights “based on physical traits, typified by the the notion of race” (Mahrouse, 94) because they believed the concept of neo-racism would be confusing to their white audience. By doing so, they failed to address the inherent positioning of the majority as superior and instead perpetuated the arguments that implicit societal hierarchies are based on: “the incompatibility of world views [and] the inability of certain immigrants to adopt the liberal society’s core values.” (94)

Following, the citizen participation forums that were established to hear voices from both sides of the aisle revealed the French-Canadian nostalgia for la belle époque when their lives remained untainted by ‘cultural differences.’ Faced with this, “minority groups were being called upon to ‘defuse the angst’ of the majority.” (89) The Bouchard-Taylor Commission reproduced existing subjectivities by reinforcing the station of the Québécois(e) as innately belonging and placing the burden of labor on the marginalized migrant who must justify their presence and reaffirm their loyalty to the hegemony’s values. Indeed, the Commission made no effort to upend the hierarchical binaries that forge the assumptions that manifest and promote neo-racism.

The binaries associated with the Québécois national and the migrant, in particular, the Muslim, include modernity v. tradition, secularism v. religion, sexual liberation v. sexual oppression, gender equality v. patriarchy and West v. East (Bilge, 307). Gender-and-sexual politics and politics of belonging coupled with the mythical “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West have deemed Muslims as “inassimilable and dangerous to the nation” (304). In a world where feminism and queer rights are considered core Western values, the Muslim is viewed as a personified threat to ‘freedom.’ Be that as it may, the shift from classical Orientalism which “depicted the Muslim world/body as the site of sexual depravity” (307) to associating “the West with sexual freedom [and] the Muslim world with that which threatens this freedom” (307) is the perfect illustration of how the West leverages malleable constructs of identity to cater to the rhetoric it wishes to disseminate.

Fascinated with ‘other’ people and eager to collect curiosities, Victorian Era Orientalists visited Morocco, Egypt, Turkey and other Muslim-ruled lands to indulge in a foreign culture. Much to their surprise, married men took on lovers, women had female lovers and ‘sexual deviance’ was rampant in these societies. Interpretations of sexuality in Christianity emphasize the honor in chastity as Jesus was chaste, and only encouraged intercourse for the purpose of reproduction. Thus, European orientalists considered themselves superior to their hosts, Muslims were established as ‘backwards,’ and European polemical attacks on same-sex relationships were witnessed in Muslim lands. As some Muslims felt the need to prove that they were just as ‘pure’ as their colonizers, queerness started to be excluded from society. Yet, here we are today, as the West has decided to change its polemic again.

In a word, not only did the Commission fail to challenge the intrinsic power dynamics between racialized groups and the French-Québécois, but also perpetuated and normalized the existing hierarchies. This failed attempt to ‘accommodate’ the minority showcased how the colonial legacy and evolving cultural constructs continue to portray marginalized people, Muslims in particular, as incompatible with the dominant culture of so-called modernity.

Who is a member of the nation? In the Canadian context, policies previously introduced by the P. E. Trudeau government declared that any person who “demonstrated a desire to contribute in the national project” is a full citizen and sought to define the “acquisition of French- and English-language skills as adequate to the task of enabling racial and cultural minorities full participation within society.” (Thobani 156) Yet, this rhetoric proved to be dissonant as the foundational claims of British and French descendants could not be balanced with the fair inclusion and recognition of other cultural groups. Thus, Canadian multiculturalism was born: a trojan horse that tricked the world into believing that the nation was “at the cutting edge of promoting racial and ethnic tolerance” (144) while conserving the essence of the white settler colonial state by reconstituting whiteness as ‘tolerant’ in the face of “non-white people [that] were instead constructed as perpetually and irremediably monocultural, in need of being taught the virtues of tolerance anc cosmopolitan under white supervision.” (148) Narayanan learned the hard way that “[to] be Québécois is widely interpreted as to be a descendant of the white French settlers who started arriving in the 16th and 17th centuries” (Narayanan, 3) and virtually no form of self-actualization would shield the immigrant from being Othered in the white imaginary.

To maintain the positionality of the ‘founding races,’ Canada deployed culturalist tropes, stereotypes and claims of cultural ‘excess’ to ossify immigrants as inherently different and deficient as opposed to the national. Their “excess of culture” (162) is framed as a barrier to integration rather than the strength of Canadian diversity (as we so often hear), while being cast as culturally deficient and “fossilized as living remnants of the past” (163) portray people of color as incapable of accomplishing happiness and modernity without the guidance of the Great White Nation, a rhetoric reminiscent of that of the East India Company. Non-white people must be understood as intolerant and parochial for Canadian multiculturalism to succeed because this framing places whiteness as the arbiter of “the virtues of tolerance and cosmopolitanism” (148). By insisting that all non-white communities are stuck in their own cultures, Canadian society places the blame on its minorities for its lesser participation and recognition while sustaining the white hegemony as the default successful (and ‘tolerant’) state design. In the end, this split upholds the nation’s image as progressive and liberal, even as it preserves systemic inequalities and racial (cultural) hierarchies.

Sonia Das argues that one’s linguistic self-identification is shaped by the exposure they received over their trajectory. Her work reveals how “the choice to speak standard and nonstandard varieties of French, Tamil, and English hinges not only on personal prospects for social and geographic mobility, but also on one’s divided loyalty to anglophones and francophones.” (Das, 62)

In the second century B.C.E., Tamil speakers of South Indian and Northern Sri Lankan origin traveled between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, establishing themselves as high-class bankers and traders. Thus, they belonged to the most-affluent caste in those regions. Nineteenth and twentieth century Tamils, however, were no strangers to persecution. As opposed to their higher-class Brahmin counterparts, Tamil migrants were shipped to the British colonies where they faced countless trials and tribulations. Away from home, these indentured laborers were segregated from professionals of the same ethnicity. Meanwhile in India, Dalit Tamils emigrating from Tamil Nadu faced a similar reality as they were shunned from more lucrative opportunities by Tamil Brahmins. On the other hand, ‘anglophile’ Tamil Brahmins possessed the means to educate their children in private Delhi English schools. Fast forward, this trend persists in the diaspora as the group continues to focus on learning English as it “represents power and superiority.” (72) There is a colonial nostalgia attached to upper-class’ affinity for English. In India, Tamil Brahmins were not othered and did not endure bodily displacement from the majority of society, but instead benefited from social and economic mobility due to their favored caste. Even during colonialism, the Brown man was more esteemed if he was a Brahmin and was the first to benefit from the new ‘opportunities’ British rulers created. Consequently, their internalized white English supremacy is upheld in present-day Quebec through their choice of having “English as their lingua franca and [developing] only rudimentary knowledge of the civic language, Québécois French.” (69)

Lower class and lower caste status Sri Lankan migrants do not have access to the same financial resources and social network as Indian and/or higher caste Tamils. These restrictions are somewhat alleviated in places such as “Little Jaffna” in Montreal, whose inhabitants draw on their community, shared tools and resources, and social cohesion shaped by their collectivist culture. As one Tamil migrant says, “Wherever there are enough Tamils, there is a Tamil nation.” (64) When the author interviewed Pavalan, a middle Sri Lankan Tamil man, he expressed his disgust with professionals of his own ethnicity “who “show off” their English competence in front of less privileged, monolingual folk like his parents who, having had a harder time joining the middle class, [...] attach their family’s aspirations of social mobility to their children’s success, which, in Québec, depends largely on them learning both English and French well.” (79) Not only do Québécois Sri Lankan Tamils learn French for future success, but they do so in spite of the higher class. In the diasporic context, Brahmins can no longer easily assert their dominance over other groups of Tamils. Now freed from the shackles of the South Asian status quo, lower-class Tamils arm themselves with their knowledge of French and well-rounded-education to one-up their historic oppressor.

In a word, the complex experiences of South Asians in Montreal, particularly Tamils, reveal a web of divided loyalties and strategic linguistic mobility. For lower-class and/or Sri Lankan Tamils, casting a wider net across English, French, and their native tongue serves as a means to navigate and go beyond national and class-related divides. This has allowed the group to strive for and achieve greater social and economic mobility within Montreal’s unique linguistic landscape.

According to Atiya Husain’s study on the positioning of black and white Muslims in America, there is a disconnect between the bodily implications and assumptions associated with the white muslim’s appearance and notions of Muslimness that exist in America’s conscience. For black and white people, presenting as Muslims carries different significance than it would for south asians or arabs. This is in part because the “implicit racial meaning in Muslimness is non-whiteness/non-blackness, and the implicit religious meaning in American whiteness and blackness is non-Muslim” (Husain, 598). In an interview with the author, a white hijabi Muslim woman recalls how an American woman once “[thought] I’m from some foreign place where people don’t wash their hands properly.” (596) The subject reveals that she had not faced such assumptions prior to her wearing a hijab as this garment came “with an assumption of foreignness that does not match her racial identity.” (596) This suggests that Whiteness and Muslimness are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled within the American framework. Markers of Islam play into the racialisation of white people in the moments when they are perceived as Muslim. For this reason, white Muslims often choose to navigate this construct by “playing up their Muslimness, which means distancing themselves from their Whiteness” (599).

At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, a white Muslim man was asked about the role of white converts in fighting racism while at a conference held in a Ferguson mosque. In his response, he discussed the discrimination he also faced as a Muslim and attempted to “downplay his whiteness since he does not see himself “that way”.” (600) Similarly, second generation Iranian Americans view themselves differently from the narrative fed to them and internalized by their parents. Not only does “Aryan” carry racist and violent connotations, but the separation between their lived experiences of marginalization and their supposed “identity” as the “original” whites further fuels Iranian American youth’s rejection of their imposed whiteness (Maghbouleh, 57).

In 1990s Britain, political debates around racism were nothing more than a performative farce. In fact, Hutnyck reveals that the Palace of Westminster’s “plan was to get the CJA and its new powers through under cover of an anti-racist smoke screen which would gain multilateral support.” (Hutnyck, 62). Both the Labour Party and the Tories used the momentum of anti-racist discourse to garner support for the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which was essentially the “criminalization of youth, attack on political rights, expansion of the police force, etc.” (54) All in power seemed keen to ‘do something’ about the surge in racism to prove the seriousness of their concern over the plight of ethnic minorities. Yet, the solutions proposed always conveniently required more police powers. Under the pretense of maintaining order and protecting civilians against bigots, the CJA implemented authoritarian measures that would disproportionately target marginalized communities, including racial minorities, youth, squatters, travelers and ravers (64). Squatters and travelers were considered as groups that “seem set to drift outside the containment of capitalist market economics” (64), and attacking ravers meant attacking an anti-capitalist activity. In a word, both parties positioned themselves as anti-racists while aligning with an oppressive agenda.

Political debates on racism in the 90s prioritized control over reform and failed to address the systemic nature of racism in the UK. Increased police resources enabled control over marginalized and racialized peoples instead of being tools to ensure public safety. In her book “Freedom is a Constant Struggle,” Angela Davis explains how undue police power and the trend of “imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems–racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education and so on.” (Davis, 6) Expanding and reinforcing the police state is a political failure that British MPs share with their American counterparts.

Because of its emphasis on racial equality, the Ahmadiyya community led a successful missionary initiative amongst African Americans, which in turn played a vital role in shaping jazz music as we know it. African American musicians adopted the Ahmadiyya’s global perspective and Islamic spiritual practices as a form of resistance to systemic racism in the US (Turner, 112). As a result, artists like Ahmed Abdul-Malik & Yusuf Lateef captured the essence of both peace and resistance through their music by merging Arabic and bebop slang to create their own “cool” Afro-Islamic sensibility, a “coolness [that] came to be defined as a profound lived expression of experimentation with Islam—the style, struggle, consciousness, and peace of being a black Muslim in the United States.” (107) The integration of middle eastern instruments like the kanoon and the oud, as well as African sounds within their jazz compositions birthed an “East meets West”-style fusion genre that highlighted internationalist Black Islam (111).

Celebrated jazz artist John Coltrane was the grandchild of two reverends and husband to Naima, a Muslim woman to whom he credited his interest in spirituality. Despite being a non-Muslim, one can hear Islamic formulas in his music such as “and praise be to God,” and “A Love Supreme” sounding like “Allah Supreme” (translation of Allahu Akbar). Though all agree that Coltrane was influenced by his wife’s faith and the spirit of Islam brought on by the Ahmadis, some also happen to think that he may have converted!

Prompt: How do we develop tastes for food? How is food linked to migrant melancholia?

While walking home after daycare, my grandpa and I would stop by the local grocery store under Noor-e-Madina mosque in Parc-Extension. He would get calling cards and I would get kulfi. Pistachio or mango or strawberry or almond? I could never choose, so sometimes he got me two, one for later.

According to narrative theory, humans create stories to make sense of the world. These narratives are shaped by emotional connections we hold towards memories of people, places, food, and so on. The stories we compose today are translated onto the customs of our descendents. For instance, historian Sucheta Mazumdar explains how for contemporary Punjabis, eating makkai ki roti and sarson ka sag in the spring is more an ode to their rural roots as “sons of the soil” than it is a reflection of the levels of maize their community historically consumed (Mannur, 35).

The role of a migrant’s memories are no different. Ketu Ketrak chronicles how “the disinterest in food that I had felt during my childhood years was transformed into a new kind of need for that food as an essential connection with home.” (27) Tastes are developed through years of exposing our palette to various meals & cuisines, and our feelings associated with them. These feelings are exacerbated when the conditions in which they were born are lost. Bodily displacement from that in which one’s sense of self is grounded further exacerbates the migrant experience of dislocation. As a result, the migrant longs for that which is familiar, such as the tastes of home, in order to relive their connection to what is now a part of their imaginary.

For Madhur Jeffrey, “cooking “Indian” food stands in as a signifier of a connection” (31) with India. Even if mango chutney didn’t possess “any independent intrinsic value as comestible; its value inheres in its symbolic connection to an articulation of national identity.” (35) As trivial as the spread may be, the nostalgia associated with one’s homeland enhances the value of the cuisine associated with it.

Immigrant melancholia is characterized by remembrance and holding on to the traditions of the homeland, including cuisine. For this reason, Brits continue to claim that “cultural practices that were seen to demonstrate that Muslims isolated themselves and lacked appropriate political and religious moderation.” (Buettner, 164) As with football, the idea of “cultural citizenship” emerged and Muslims’ loyalties to England were once again questioned. Despite molding the UK’s now highly esteemed curry culture, British commentators in the 80s shifted all credit to their own “multiculturalism” and stripped the South Asian community of any agency.

In a word, food serves as an emotional and intellectual anchor to a far removed part of our imaginary, where our memories survive and the narrative lives on.

My sister & I had mango kulfi today. Inflation didn’t let us buy two, but nana would have.

For Bengali peddlers, Orientalism and the American fascination with the East were a double-edged sword. While the rise of American imperialism and class struggles between Americans fueled their demand, the rigid stereotypes upheld by Orientalism clashed with the everyday reality of these hardworking traveler merchants.

On one hand, over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ‘India craze’ played a fundamental role in the businessmen’s success. Bald notes that “Americans from all classes and walks of life were drawn to an “India” that was, in essence, a collective fantasy.” (Bald, 16) The increased demand for ‘Eastern’ goods was directly tied to the emergence of the US as a global superpower and the desire to mimic the practices of European empires (18). As the British and the French both long incorporated ‘Oriental’ goods as symbols of power and sophistication, the American elite began emulating European tastes by importing goods from India and the East to participate in these ivory tower trends. Additionally, upper-class white women were constrained by the domestic roles of the time. For this reason, they used exotic goods in their interior decoration as a form of symbolic mobility and “to assert their connection to a wider world.” (18) During the Gilded Age, upper-class women flaunted their wealth “in a society in which people’s identities and social standing were increasingly defined by what they consumed and displayed.” (18) Meanwhile, poor and middle-class often envied and mimicked them. As a result, Bengali peddlers found a successful market among class ascendent women who aspired to one day have the lifestyles of their wealthier counterparts. Particularly, they sold “exotic souvenirs, curios, and handicrafts to Americans on weekend day trips and holiday travels” (19) and gave the everyday American pieces of what “they imagined the upper middle-class and rich to enjoy.” (22)

On the other hand, Orientalist views contributed to the peddlers’ many hardships. In the American imagination, these merchants were the embodiment of Eastern mysticism and exoticism. A crude example of this lies on the pages of the Daily Herald’s May 25th, 1900 issue. In the article, the author mocks the appearance and behavior of a South Asian man he encounters with racial condescension (27-28). He wrote about his, and by extension, his readership’s, set of expectations and fantasies related to the ““mystic” and “stoic” Orientals” (28). As Bald remarks, “the article inadvertently recorded these Indian peddlers’ capacity both to use (as salesmen) and to defy such Orientalist ideas and expectations.” (28) Unfortunately, the limited and, more often than not, negative perceptions Americans had of South Asians could easily undermine their progress. By choosing to act as themselves and not perform their ‘Orientalism,’ the temporary enchantment with the exotic dissipates and so does their fleeting success. Strict and discriminatory immigration policies like the Asiatic Barred Zone Act show how the allure of Orientalism still could not shield minorities from exclusion and systemic racism.

For the melancholic migrant, language serves as a measure of identity. On one hand, Mohabir’s grandmother knew no ‘proper’ English and only spoke ‘broken’ Hindi. Whether it be the people she encountered in Toronto or the missionaries her family faced in the past, white society had convinced her that she was as ‘broken’ as her ability to speak in her ancestral tongue and treated her as such (Mohabir 17). On the other hand, through the Hindi teacher’s declaration of “Oh, so you’re not a real Indian” (29), we see that South Asians use language to appraise one’s legitimacy. That being so, the keys to the western Indo-Guyanese community’s acceptance into either group they are part of are held by other parties. Their communal fate and sense of belonging are permanently shaped by the other. Just as Mohabir’s Aji “must feel like Sita, exiled from her own home” (18), this reality exacerbates the Indo-Caribbean’s isolation.

Thus, language plays a deeply personal role in the melancholic migrant’s life. The hopes and imagined dreams of Mohabir and others like him were formed on the basis of an idealized world where they never lost their language and were allowed “to be colorful, too.” (26) For them, the stakes of learning their mother tongue are higher than the average student. The purpose of going to India and learning Hindi would be to mend the histories broken by indenture, to keep alive to memory of all “the things that everyone said were worthless,” (34) to tell the stories of the ancestors, pass them down, and add our own voice to the mix. At the Rang Collective’s conference on memories of Partition, Aanchal Malhotra spoke of her driving urge to collect stories untold as the generation of storytellers passed on. Similarly, it devastated the author to “think that these songs and stories would be lost for good” (34), an added weight that Rajiv’s peers did not have to carry over their six-week intensive program, let alone their lifetime.

One of the goals of Spaniard colonization of America was to build New Spain in their image. To achieve this, the colonizing entity must cleanse indigenous populations of the customs, beliefs and behaviors divergent from normative Catholic Spanish society. When word from Sotomayor went around about Catalina de Ibiza and her family’s “scandalous,” “notorious,” and “public” nature of their conduct at Mass (Cook 101), fear was instilled within the Spanish authority. This wicked behavior was displayed by members of the very settler community that was tasked with assimilating the indigenous population “who believe that what they do is what is good and right, and as a result good customs are corrupted.” (Cook 90) Not only did ‘Morisco’ behavior threaten the nation-building of emerging New Spain and the socialization of its inhabitants, but it was argued that “the immutability of characteristics like blood” (Cook 97) rendered Muslims, Indigenous South Americans and other non-white groups unassimilable. “In Spain, inquisitors collected information about local beliefs and practices, in an attempt to identify signs of relapse” (Cook 90) of recent Muslim converts to Catholicism, but the growing popularity of the idea of religious identity as an innate blood-transmitted characteristic exacerbated fears surrounding the acculturation Indigenous populations.

In the context of a society where public behavior, everyday interactions, modes of dressing, occupation, and later, skin tone became social markers between native Iberians and Moors, purity of blood further fueled the ‘us vs. them’ rhetoric and trickled down to colonial Spanish America. However, depriving groups from full citizenship and societal participation creates connections between them, as displayed by the Muslims, Protestants and gypsies described in Cook’s narrations. Similarly, solidarity between non-whites in the context of a racist social system brought Latina/o and African-American communities together, and facilitated conversions to Islam among Latina/os in 20th century America (Bowen 166).

According to the Commission for Racial Equity in the UK, the outdated notion of multiculturalism no longer serves the thorny nature of modern race relations and “integration based on shared values and loyalties is the only way forward.” (Ahmed 122) To be afforded full citizenship, the migrant must embody the pre-established ideals designed by the white nation.

In the UK, not only is football the main religion, but it “provides national ground” (Ahmed 122) and loyalty to it translates into loyalty to the state. Using it as a tool for ‘happy multiculturalism’ provides non-white citizens ‘happiness’ in exchange for approval. This idea is implicitly depicted in Bend It Like Beckham, where “the “playing field” which offers signs of diversity, where “whoever” scores will be cheered” (Ahmed 135) is a metaphor for level ground that possesses a magical equalizing power. In Melancholic Migrants, Ahmed critiques the binary opposition seen in the depiction of the migrant culture vis-à-vis Western culture. While the main character’s Indian home was portrayed as restrictive and demanding, the representation of British culture incorporated celebrity, freedom, individuality, and ultimately happiness. Through her journey with football, Jess met Jules, the friend who got her on the team, and Joe, the man she fell in love with. Jess’ attempt to achieve happiness and obtain her freedom were facilitated by her “intimate contact with a white girl and a white man. Freedom takes form as proximity to whiteness.” (Ahmed 135)

Meanwhile, Black American WWII veterans will testify that no amount of integration, not even directly standing in the line of fire for the sake of their country, allowed them to escape second-class citizenship and dehumanization. It was not until 1964, nineteen years after the end of the Second World War, that the Civil Rights Act finally outlawed segregation. Sixty years later, people with Black-sounding names must send out 15 resumes to receive one callback, 50% more than their white counterparts. For the ‘alien’ inhabitants of white-majority countries, it is likely that no amount of integration will ever be enough.

In “Terrifying Muslims,” Junaid Rana explains that identifying as ‘Moorish Americans’ was a means for enslaved Black Americans to attempt to “shift from racial identification to ethnic and religious identification that, they hoped, would shield them from discrimination and prejudice.” (Rana 40) Indeed, Islam has been used as a form of resistance since the earliest era of the transatlantic slave trade.

The very first Muslims on the North American continent were the men, women and children violently uprooted and sold into bondage at the hands of white powers. The Triangular Trade kept West African Muslims from maintaining their traditions, keeping their names, and disseminating their wisdom while forcing them to work within a system that did not allow them to know who they were. Nonetheless, for many, the sadistic conditions were not enough to drive them to forget what they had spent a lifetime memorizing and reciting. Abdel-Rahman Ibrahima, for instance, an emir from Futa Jallon, Guinea, was kidnapped during a military campaign and subsequently shipped across the second largest ocean in the world. Ibrahima told every man he met that he was a prince in his homeland and presented himself as a very educated individual. Thus, his ‘master’ positioned him as a foreman, a position of relative power that allowed him to regulate, plan and bookkeep. Similarly to Bald’s discovery of Black Southern men who performed as ‘Orientals’ to access better mobile and economic opportunities, Ibrahima used his Islamic education to access a position he could not otherwise have occupied.

Furthermore, given the promise he showed and his ability to write Arabic, the former emir was ordered to translate Christian scriptures into Arabic in order to spread Christianity among enslaved individuals. Instead, Ibrahima wrote the Fatiha! He used this opportunity as intellectual resistance to keep his identity alive in a context where he was made to forget. By accepting this mission, Ibrahima also benefited by being allowed to travel to spread the faith, meet people in positions of higher power and try his best to return home.

In the 1930s, economic displacement caused by both the Great Depression & Migration “formed the context for the success of Islam among African Americans” (Rana 41) who critiqued the practice of Christianity in the context of American plantation slavery that was still fresh in the collective memory. Not only did this movement separate Black Americans from the ‘master’s’ culture to reclaim their some part of their identity (since the first Muslims on the continent were Black Muslims in the 1500s), but it threatened “the idea of American exceptionalism, and Islam, specifically, has threatened the maintenance of a U.S. racial and religious order based on the idea of white Christian supremacy.” (Rana 42)

Unfortunately, African Americans identifying with Islam made the grave miscalculation of failing to account for white Christian America’s enduring hostility towards Islam. As we learned last week, “black people are always already marked as different/deviant/ dangerous.” (Yancy 4) Now, not only did Muslim Americans live under the negative cloud of association related to black people, but their villainization was exacerbated by the Oriental propaganda that is part of the American imagination.

For racialized bodies, navigating a white world means facing the reality that “all aspects of our lives—our institutions, practices, ideals, and laws—were defined and tailored to fit the needs, wants, and concerns of white folk.” (MacMullan 7) There is a limited breadth of progress that could be achieved through the work of minority communities before its deceleration, without mentioning the barriers and hurdles along the way. True liberation can only be achieved when those upholding the dominion are freed from “a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” (Baldwin 22) James Baldwin explains to his nephew how White America, through its expert dissemination of hegemonic rhetoric, was fed the idea that black men were innately inferior to white men. Although many knew better, “people find it very difficult to act on what they know.” (Baldwin 23) The civil rights activist presents whites as “innocents” having made an indolent and willful choice to remain unknowing by failing to exercise critical thinking. Similarly to the classical study of Orientalism, this has allowed them to avoid exploring the implications of their state-designed whiteness and how this construct has shaped race building in the west. The White Man’s worry of the status quo’s upheaval is nurtured by the belief that “your imprisonment made them safe [and they fear] losing their grasp of reality.” (Baldwin 23) Thus, James Sr. asserts that Black Americans “cannot be free until they are free” (Baldwin 24) and that we must “force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” (Baldwin 24)

In his collection of essays titled Look, a White!, philosopher George Yancy suggests “flipping the script.” James Baldwin’s letter to his namesake describes that “it was intended that you [...] perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man’s definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name.” (Baldwin 23) According to Yancy, this is the doing of a culture of dominant white normativity where “black people are always already marked as different/deviant/ dangerous.” (Yancy 4) Indeed, being called or viewed as a “N***o” has violent ramifications, as exemplified by Fanon’s interaction with a young white boy on the train and by the story of James Craig Anderson from Jackson, Mississippi (Yancy 4). Historically, whiteness positioned itself as neutral and normative, thus allowing it to go unquestioned. Inspired by Sara Ahmed, bell hooks and W. E. B. Du Bois, Yancy suggests a black counter-gaze, one that “recognizes the ways of whiteness, sees beyond its “invisibility,” from the perspective of a form of raced positional knowledge.” (Yancy 8 ) Not only does this allow white people to confront complex manifestations of themselves, but flips the script by marking white bodies just as black bodies have historically endured. This process is both a threatening and frightening one to many whites as it “dares to mark whites as racists, as perpetuators and sustainers of racism.” (Yancy 9)

In a word, Baldwin identifies the ongoing hindering role of whiteness in our cultural context as a result of the hegemony’s ages-old rhetoric, while Yancy recognizes the intimidating but fruitful work that awaits white society in order to advance the liberation of those they have long subjugated.

Said insists that the Orient is not merely imaginative as it is precisely its material culture and civilization that allows for the idea of the Occident to exist. Although the Levant and India represented “the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands [and] the spice trade” (Said 4) in the white imagination, the West has historically used “Oriental backwardness” (Said 7) as a premise for European superiority. “The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” (Said 5), and Western institutions have molded the academic study of Orientalism and popular conceptions of the East to feed and exacerbate this unbalanced relationship. Despite the continued use of this form of quasi-propaganda to uphold the hegemony, leveraging the “imaginative” Orient has had very real impacts on Americans of color. Edward Said expresses that “the life of an Arab Palestinian is the West, particularly in America, is disheartening” (Said 27) and that studying Orientalism “has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals” (Said 25). Even in the modern era of technology where knowledge is readily available, Western media “has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed” (Said 26).

Still, 19th century Bengali peddlers in America were able to appropriate a tool established for their subjugation to navigate the harsh realities of Jim Crow south. Bald writes of how their “replication of the servility of the imagined colonial subject” (Bald 51) and their “politeness, servility, and self-exoticizing airs did a particular kind of work” (Bald 52). Despite laws segregating transportation, their affective Oriental performance allowed them to move and provided them with greater mobile and thus economic safety.

J. J. Singh’s proposed legislation addressing Indian exclusion disregarded the so-called 3000 “undesirable aliens,” who were mostly farm and factory laborers. Instead, he advocated on behalf of the upper class “Indian businessmen who could not do meaningful business in the United States because they were restricted to short-term tourist visas” (Bald 3). By going to bat for India’s scholars, scientists, and engineers, Singh’s rhetoric appealed to the ultra-American value of neoliberal capitalism by laying out the economic benefits these people could bring to the nation. Indeed, Singh’s ideas heavily influenced the shift of US immigration policy in the 1940’s and 1960’s but “[while] it seemingly put an end to the exclusion era, the 1965 [Hart-Celler Act] essentially maintained the exclusion of working-class immigrants” (Bald, 5). The classism in Singh’s position is reminiscent of the excluding nature of white feminist movements. While discussing Nellie McClung in class, a classmate suggested that one explanation for such disenfranchisement within liberatory movements may be the various categories within a category. Women of color represented a far more marginalized subgroup, and thus far more effort would be required of white feminists in order to understand, integrate and advocate for them. Similarly, it could be argued that the exclusionary nature of Singh’s advocacy comes from a fear of further isolation and a desperation to “get whatever we can out of this,” although this cowardice contributed to the continued subjugation of his kinfolk, migrants whose “stories have disappeared from public memory” (Bald 5).

In a word, Singh leveraged the white man’s perception of the racialized working class to promote a group of privileged and educated Indians that better mimic normative white American behavior. In his song “The Blacker the Berry,” Kendrick Lamar takes a step back from African-American stereotypes and, contrary to Singh, reclaims the narrative instead of propelling it. He raps about how “[they] vandalize my perception” (Lamar 1:24) through “institutionalized manipulation and lies” (Lamar 2:27). In a metaphor, Lamar uses his blackness, which was historically hijacked and repackaged as wicked, to symbolize the evil character of white supremacists by saying “I’m Black as the heart of a f*****’ Aryan” (Lamar 3:40). At the end of the song, the rapper continues to apply black stereotypes to himself, but finally denounces himself as both a victim and an enabler of these beliefs: “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street. When gang-banging make me kill a n**** blacker than me? Hypocrite!” (Lamar 4:27)

Through his critique of John Champagne’s analysis of two black gay performances, E. Patrick Johnson exposes current queer academia’s lack of understanding and misreadings of black corporeal, and thus emotional, manifestations.

In his analysis, Champagne, a white queer theorist, declares that Essex Hemphill’s “bodily ‘‘experience’’ is anti-intellectual and [his] “black” bodily experience is manipulative” (Johnson, 132) when the black gay writer is unable to contain his tears during a speech. After his emotional reaction, Hemphill experienced responses of both sympathy and protest from the crowd. Instead of admiring the room’s ability for such rare self-reflexivity, Champagne characterizes this reaction as a “masochistic [...] declaration of white culpability” (Johnson, 131). Johnson uses this mischaracterization to illustrate the rift between the expressions of trauma inherent in non-white bodily performances and the modes of address accepted in white institutions, such as universities. Integrating one’s multifaceted human experience through “style is equated in such a setting with a lack of substance” (Johnson, 132). By failing to interrogate bodily “whiteness” alongside “blackness” and its emotional implications, Champagne is a victim of his own theory of anti-subjectivity and effectively “renders [himself] ‘‘overseer’’ of black cultural practices and discourse” (Johnson, 133). Johnson states that ideas of “acceptable” emotional embodiment should no longer be hijacked and governed by a hegemonic establishment, and then navigated within the confines of whiteness. In his critique, the author calls for a ‘‘confrontation with difference which takes place on new ground, in that counter-hegemonic marginal space where radical black subjectivity is seen, not overseen by any authoritative Other Whiteness claiming to know us better than we know ourselves” (Johnson, 133).

Likewise, in a publication by The Johns Hopkins University Press, José Muñoz denounces similar mainstream interpretations of Latino displays of emotions as “over the top and excessive,” which allude to “spiciness and exoticism” (Muñoz, 69). While normative expectations are fueled by dominant white, middle-class values and behaviors, American Latinos/as find themselves both unable to naturally mimic white normativity and having the true breadth of their identities limited by the clichés pushed by the media, society’s “chief disseminator of “official” national affect” (Muñoz, 69). Failing to access dominant normativity and rejecting performative racial normativity effectively excludes Latinos/as from full societal participation. Thus, Muñoz shifts the discussion to “look at whiteness from a racialized perspective, like that of Latinos, it begins to appear to be flat and impoverished. At this moment in history it seems especially important to position whiteness as lack” (Muñoz, 70). Both Johnson and Muñoz seek to regain control of their narratives and democratize each and every body’s right to affective liberty within safe and sympathetic spaces. Muñoz does so by proposing his theory of “disidentification,” whereby one must “work on and against the dominant ideology” (Johnson, 139) to alter the cultural logic from within hegemonic establishments, thereby fostering permanent structural change.