When I was growing up in suburban Maryland, I had two best friends in elementary school. One friend, Michael, was half Chinese and half German American. My other best friend, John Samanda, was Ghanian American. The three of us were very close until my family moved away. Our teacher, Mrs. Tootle, was African American and had marched in the civil rights movement 30 years earlier as a young girl. In a classroom as diverse as the UN, race mattered little to us. But as the son of immigrants from South Asia, race was always a part of the complicated set of identities we were forced to navigate. For their part: my parents insisted I make friends with all people no matter their race or origin. “God created us equal,” my mother used to say, “so treat others as your equals. Arrogance belongs to Satan alone.”
My childhood was different from many children of South Asian heritage. Pakistanis in particular have a very difficult time with questions of race and skin color. A country forged out of imperial necessity by the departing British, its ruling class was and remains very light-skinned. However, a majority of its population was not. In 1971, Pakistan would commit genocide against its own citizens when the country’s darker-skinned Bengali population demanded equal rights and an end to near-apartheid by the ruling class. India would step in to stop the Pakistani Army’s bloody rampage, and the independent country of Bangladesh was born in the aftermath.
Having a black friend while belonging to Maryland’s tight-knit & largely upper Middle-class Pakistani community was an act of sacrilege, though several of us would keep our standing within the community while choosing to ignore this racist rule. Many Pakistanis would shun their children from developing such friendships, and when I was in high school, teenagers who chose to ignore these instructions from their parents were ostracized and excluded from community and cultural gatherings. More than once, I have heard Pakistani parents discuss other Pakistani children “hanging with habshis (“tribals” though the word literally means Ethiopians) whenever it was discovered they had black friends. When a family of half black and half Pakistani young people joined the community, it took years for the scandal to die down. To this day, few children of Pakistanis marry or date individuals of black heritage and African origin.
When I went to college, I learned about the impact Malcolm X had on Muslim America, and how his time in Mecca changed his views of the world and race relations for the better. I also learned that I too had benefited more times than not from white privilege even though I am not white. The notion of “model minorities”, often contributed to the “acceptance” I often received from white colleagues and classmates throughout my life. While my decision to remain a Muslim has always caused friction and dismay among political elites (especially in Maryland, which is part of the Old South), my race and ethnic background have often been either willfully ignored or acted as pluses. An employer once remarked to me that my lighter skin tone meant I was easier on the eyes than a lot of “darker” immigrants. I was appalled (and quit) the next day.
While I cannot think of anyone of minority heritage who has not had a bad run-in with police at least once in their lives over something trivial and often not illegal, I can recall how many times I was let go or given a mere warning when officers realize I’m not black or Latino. Pakistani immigrants often refuse to caucus with Muslims of black heritage in mosques, and will deliberately exclude them from religious ceremonies like Ramadan Iftars and Eid celebrations. This was on full display while I studied in Baltimore, where on one side a Pakistani-controlled mosque in the suburbs continued to build larger and newer facilities, while only a few miles away an inner-city mosque founded by Malcolm X himself struggled to find ways to keep their lights on. The Pakistani leadership of the former would push out an Imam in the 1990s in part for suggesting race relations improve, as Islam forbids racism as a cardinal sin.
As someone who has faced bigotry and prejudice in his life, but also benefited from its nuances and wrongful categorizations, I have stayed quiet during our recent demonstrations in an effort to learn from black leaders and activists what it is that I can do personally to advocate change and an end to our country’s deeply ingrained culture of structural racism. One thing I’ve decided to do is to finally call out Desi Culture’s advocacy of racism as a cardinal virtue of its existence. I begin that journey today.