The Others: Mixed Race Women of South Asian Decent in the United States
by:
D. Reddy
© D. Reddy, 2003,
All
Rights Reserved
Abstract:
In this paper, I draw from the available literature to discuss a group largely invisible within both majority and minority consciousness: multiracial women of mixed white and South Asian ancestry. I am interested in how two axes of oppression, specifically the prevailing western discourse on race and the prevailing South Asian discourse on gender, intersect to affect the life experiences of these women, causing them to be excluded and “othered” by both sides. Although this paper cannot speak to the experiences of all biracial South Asian women, it does quite accurately capture what I have personally experienced as a member of the group in question. As such, my voice stands strong throughout its pages.
Table of Contents:
My Story
Introduction
Racial Identity: Choice and Constraints
Gender and Racial Purity
Sites of Othering
Conclusion
References
The Others:
Mixed Race Women of South Asian Descent in the United States
Compared to my mother’s blue eyes and pale complexion and my father’s black hair and dark brown skin, I sometimes feel nondescript: skin, hair, and eyes all a medium brown. I’ve been told I look Latina, Native American, Indian, white, Pacific Islander, black, and Hawaiian. But what I am is multiracial—half Indian, the other half mainly white; although my mother takes great pride in her slight Native American ancestry.
Knowing to expect the question, “What are you?,” I experience a bizarre satisfaction in selecting my answer. To a white person, I reply “South Asian” and perhaps as a parenthetical, “actually mixed.” To a South Asian, I answer “biracial—half Indian, half white.” And I used to have an entirely different response for those of any race who I found attractive: “multiracial, a little Cherokee and Sioux, also English, Irish, French, and Basque, and my father is Indian, you know, from India.” You see, I knew what exoticization meant before I ever heard the term.
Although recent studies indicate that the mixed race population in America is currently increasing faster than at any other time in history, relatively little academic attention has yet been paid to multiracial individuals. As a whole, they provide a provocative challenge to hegemonic western conceptions of race, and yet, each specific mix is unique, making theoretical generalizations problematic. Certain commonalties of experience, however, do seem to extend across racial boundaries, as most people of mixed race are profoundly affected by their exclusion from the dominant racial paradigm of the United States.
In this paper, I draw from the available literature to discuss one particular group, largely invisible within both majority and minority consciousness: multiracial women of mixed white and South Asian ancestry. I am interested in how two axes of oppression, specifically the prevailing western discourse on race and the prevailing South Asian discourse on gender, intersect to affect the life experiences of these women, causing them to be excluded and “othered” by both sides. Although this paper cannot speak to the experiences of all biracial South Asian women, it does quite accurately capture what I have personally experienced as a member of the group in question. As such, my voice stands strong throughout its pages.
Negotiating a racial identity is usually a complicated process for multiracial individuals. In theory, there are an abundance of options—identification with one of several races, identification with some, identification with all, or identification as multiracial. However, in practice, racial identity is not simply a matter of unconstrained choice. As Susan Koshy notes, racial identity is formed through a “tension between assignation and assertion” (1998: 206), between what race people consider themselves to be and what race other people assign to them. And within America, multiracial individuals are usually not provided with the option of multiple allegiances.
Historically it has been expected that each person should have only one race. Americans tend to believe that races are empirically distinct and fundamentally different; as such, assignment to a race is also an assignment to a social identity (Root 1996: 192-193). Within such a rigid schemata, there is limited room for blurring of the lines. For this reason, it is difficult and often painful for a person to identify with multiple races, especially if one is a minority and the other is not. Thus, even though individuals with multiracial heritage are “born within a web of overlapping identities and group affiliations,” they “are pressed to disconnect those linkages to focus on one” (Dasgupta 1998: 82).
It is important to note, however, that the race to which a multiracial person becomes assigned is not random. The United States has a long history of adherence to the rule of hypodescent, which Root defines as a “social system that maintains the fiction of monoracial identification by assigning a racially mixed person to the racial group in their heritage that has the least social status” (Root 1996: x). By this rule, a black person who has a child with a white person will have a black child, and a Latino/a person who has a child with a white person will have a Latino/a child, and any minority at all who has a child with a white person will have a child that is a minority (Funderburg 1994: 13). This rather ingenious ideology serves dual purposes: first, discouraging interracial marriage, as status can only be lost, never gained as a result, and second, preserving the “purity” of the dominant white race. In this vein, Stephen Satris argues that the American racial system is actually “not a matter of classifying people according to their predominant ancestry but rather a matter of screening the population for those who will be admitted into an exclusive ‘white’ group” (Spencer 1999: 17).
Multiracial individuals also have the additional option of identifying solely as mixed race. Yet, despite recent pressure to add “multiracial” as a category to the census, many mixed race people find this term insufficient as a marker of identity. As mentioned above, race often implies culture, but the term multiracial, does not. Gitanjali Saxena, for example, an activist and scholar of both Anglo and South Asian ancestry, appreciates the term’s political importance, but argues that she cannot relate to it personally:
I don’t check off [the mixed race] box. I check off South Asian, and behind that box, I write “Indo-German,” because for me mixed race is not a community. It’s not a cultural community and it’s not a racial community, because we all come from completely diverse racial groups. . . . In terms of the mixed race people that I meet, I can understand the issues, what they might be facing when facing their own communities, I can empathize, but I can’t identity with that (Camper 1994: 40).
Thus, for multiracial women with white and South Asian heritage, negotiating a racial identity may be complicated, but there is also a “right answer.” While these women may retain a certain cultural bifocality, they will most likely be seen as South Asian. Physically and culturally marked as a minority, it is impossible for them to be white.
“No, don’t worry. I’ll talk to my mom—she doesn’t control me. I can date someone who’s not Indian if I want to.”
-a boyfriend, in response to my concern about his mother’s opposition to our relationship
“I didn’t know you were Indian!”
“Well, she’s not exactly Indian.”
-a conversation between an acquaintance of mine, upon noticing me at an Indian cultural event, and my friend, answering for me
Identification as South Asian, whether through assignation or assertion, does not necessarily translate into immediate or unfettered acceptance into the minority community. Living in a racist society can cause subordinate groups to internalize the oppressive belief that race should be a divisive categorization, and in turn, to develop restrictive guidelines as to who can and who cannot be legitimate members (Root 1992: 5). South Asian American cultural “purists,” for example, invoked this reasoning in discriminating against the biracial children born of Punjabi-Mexican interracial marriages in California (Mankekar 1994: 264). By looking at race as a category through which people could and should be excluded, mixed individuals seemed relatively inauthentic and thus unacceptable. According to Gloria Anzaldúa, it is:
the internalization of negative images of ourselves, our self-hatred, poor self-esteem, [that] makes our own people the Other. We shun the white-looking Indian, the “high yellow” Black woman, the Asian with the white lover, the Native woman who brings her white girl friend to the Pow Wow, the Chicana who doesn’t speak Spanish, the academic, the uneducated. Her difference makes her a person we can’t trust. Para que sea “legal,” she must pass the ethnic legitimacy test we have devised. And . . . woe any sister or any part of us that steps out of our assigned places, woe to anyone who doesn’t measure up to our standards of ethnicity (1990: 143).
Thus, through similar processes, multiracial people often experience oppression both “as people of color and by people of color” (Root: 1992: 5).
While exclusion based on insufficient cultural authenticity can affect both genders, within the South Asian community, women are uniquely disadvantaged. The legitimacy requirements differ according to gender, and because women have a higher standard to which they are held, it is that much harder, if not impossible, for multiracial women to make the grade.
Standards of purity and authenticity are elevated for South Asian women because through Indian nationalist and South Asian American bourgeois discourses, the female has been constructed as the carrier of tradition. Historically, as nationalists in the subcontinent struggled to beat the west at its own game while still retaining an identity that was uniquely “eastern,” a dichotomy emerged between the material and the spiritual realms. The material was the cold, hard reality of the outer world, the stage on which India had been defeated by imperialist powers, and the stage on which India would now change, modernize, and compete. The spiritual, however, was the inner soul of the East, unique, superior, and untouched by the ravages of colonialism (Sangari and Vaid 1999: 238-239). Down the rocky path towards first world status, the spiritual, at least, would remain constant.
This distinction well served the purpose of soothing the national psyche in the midst of a crippling identity crisis, but to actually maintain the dichotomy in practice, a division of labor was required. Based on gender ideologies already in place, it was decided that women would now bear the responsibility of preserving the spiritual realm and men would accordingly take on the necessary duties of the material world. Women, then, were given the most important task in the nationalist agenda: “to protect, preserve and strengthen the inner core of the national culture, its spiritual essence.” While men modernized, women would stay loyal to Indian “culture” in order to ensure that “no encroachments by the colonizer” [would] be allowed in that inner sanctum” (Sangari and Vaid 1999: 239).
Today, middle-class South Asian immigrants face many of the same anxieties that plagued Indian nationalists. By coming to America, these individuals planned to achieve material success, yet in this foreign environment, they live in constant fear of “losing” their culture (Dasgupta 1998: 113). Therefore, a virtual recreation of the material/spiritual dichotomy has occurred in the United States, and South Asian American women, like their sisters at home, have been invested with the role of spiritual caretaker (Dasgupta 1998: 114).
Within this framework, then, it is clear than multiracial women, especially those with white blood, are the greatest fear of the South Asian American bourgeoisie come true—the physical proof that their inner sanctum can still be violated by the west. Because women represent “the purity, the chastity, and the sanctity of the Ancient Spirit that is India” any dilution of “Indian womanhood constitutes a betrayal of all that it stands for: nation, religion, God, the Spirit of India, culture, tradition, and family” (Dasgupta 1998: 172). A multiracial South Asian female, irrevocably tainted, cannot preserve culture, nor can she pass it on. A multiracial man could have sufficiently pure children with the proper wife, but there cannot be authentic offspring when the woman, the tradition-bearer, the child-bearer, is polluted.
As such, multiracial women are left without a place in the South Asian American community. Other South Asian women are constrained by their roles as culture preservers; multiracial women are never given the opportunity to fulfill them. By their birth, they have failed. For this reason, they are perpetually excluded, as the story of Shanti Thakur, a biracial woman of white and South Asian ancestry, reveals:
I was thrilled [about visiting India]—finally a chance to discover “my culture.” . . . I imagined being embraced like a lost child by my relatives in India and long, intimate talks with my grandparents. But once there, I was seen as the “other” . . . who could never appreciate the wealth of Indian culture (Camper 1994: 348-349).
Of course, the South Asian community in America is not a monolith. For example, there is a relatively small, yet increasingly vocal progressive element within America’s South Asian communities. Unfortunately, biracial South Asians, especially those of Anglo descent, may receive no warmer a welcome from this group. Conscious of the perils of racism, the stigma of color, they may regard the half-white woman with suspicion and with anger about her greater access to the world of privilege. As Nancy Brown notes, biracial women “are always accused of trying to disclaim the person of color within” (Chideya 1999: 46). However, because the more progressive South Asians are often less adamantly aligned to any one set of beliefs, there is greater room for the multiracial South Asian woman to find a home.
“You look Indian, but I guess you’re less prude than them, huh?”
-an admirer, of sorts
“Your
father is Telugu? (read dark-skinned) Damn,
then, you should be so grateful that your mom is white!”
-various people
The previous few pages analyzed the discursive exclusion of multiracial women from the dominant South Asian American community. In practice, however, a biracial woman with South Asian roots is unlikely to be completely turned away. Rather, she may be able to participate, but always as the “other,” her difference continually reinforced whenever possible, wherever she is vulnerable. Her sexuality and her physical appearance are such sites.
Across racial boundaries, multiracial women are commonly distanced through references to their sexuality. According to Carol Camper, mixed raced women are almost universally seen as sexual degenerates. She writes:
It is if our basic degeneracy as women of colour is magnified by White ancestry. Our so called “Whiteness” increases our “beauty” along with our awareness of it, driving us to a frenzy of bitter abandon so agreeable and piquant to our . . . male pursuers (1994).
For mixed race South Asian women, preconceived notions about multiracial promiscuity are likely to be compounded by prevailing South Asian attitudes towards western women. Within the bourgeois mindset, the South Asian middle-class woman, pure and chaste, is defined in opposition to the western woman, who is seen as essentially sexually free (De Alwis 1995: 107). Thus, these mixed race women are twice the whore, first because they are multiracial, and secondly because they have Anglo blood.
Exoticization is inexorably intertwined with sexualization; but it is sometimes mistakenly seen as the opposite, rather than just the opposite side of the same coin. It is a term most often used to refer to the specific way in which women of color can be found attractive by the white male—as the “exotic” other. Yet, just as multiracial women experience a “squeeze” of oppression, they can similarly be exoticized on both sides, by whites and by those in the minority community who have internalized the racial and color hierarchies. As Camper, a self-identified black woman of both black and white descent, describes:
It was when I was a teenager, with a Black American boyfriend, that I discovered the hierarchy of skin tone. I seemed to be prized by him and his friends because of my “Red” colouring. My light skin, freckles, green eyes and looser hair meant that I was sought after, exoticized. After messages of ugliness and worthlessness, exoticization was okay by me. So this is who I became. I was the voluptuous, café au lait sister. The gypsy/Creole woman, big breasted, big afroed courtesan, welcome in any man’s bed (1994).
As such, although exoticization can give multiracial women access to a sexual power, it is only accomplished through distancing her, through making her not quite as human as those within the group. As Camper concludes, “Then I was tired of being exoticized. . . . It didn’t get me anywhere but into bed, where I was a slightly more desirable piece of dirt” (1994). Yet, with or without their consent, mixed race women are likely to continually face tactics such as these, serving to remind them of their “inauthenticity.”
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