Being Brown in America

When you are brown in America, you are always fumbling to find your place. One moment you feel like things are upbeat and in the next moment, you run into Visa issues and have 3 weeks to leave the country. Do you even have a place or is finding your place contingent on knowing that you could be asked to leave any day? What then is your place? Today I want to talk about these things.

If you, like me, didn’t grow up in America but consumed all the American culture — movies, music, history, et al .— chances are American culture fascinated you. I remember devouring all of Bob Dylan’s music every night of a week when I was in undergrad back in Delhi. It showed me the power of music. The days were long, but the nights were magical. I also remember starting to watch The Sopranos on a Monday evening, and finishing watch the show — 86 episodes in total close to an hour each — in a couple of weeks. I felt close to Tony Soprano and adored Paulie. Shows like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire helped me understand a little about America. I also read about America’s violent history and how that history — the American revolution, the slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement — shaped its present. For a long time until I arrived in America, the country remained close to me, yet so distant. I knew that someday I would go to America, and that distance would reduce. Little did I know back then that moving to a place doesn’t automatically reduce the distance.

One needs to go through the whole process — starting with booking a visa appointment, to booking the flight ticket, to packing the things for moving to a new country, to beginning to realize that things might never be the same again, to understanding that you need to always remember where you came from, to going to the airport to catch the flight, to saying goodbye to parents at the airport, to boarding the flight, to reaching America and going through the immigration process at the airport, to actually arriving at your new home in America, to settling in your new home — to realize that the distance that one felt at a point in the past has morphed into a new kind of distance — a distance that you always carry in your heart, one that always catches you off guard when you are trying to find your place in America.

The whole process doesn’t end up with settling in your new home. The process of settling here is always a work in progress. After a few months of living here, as you begin to get a hang of the place, and an impression that you have settled in comfortably, one evening as you are on your way to get groceries, someone looks at you and shouts, “Fucking foreigners”. You feel like you can never settle in, that settling in here is a delusion you had all along, and that you should always be prepared for the worst. A few months later, you land a job that pays you a decent wage, and you begin to wonder if you have found your place in America. You meet some cool people at work, and they accept you for who you are. It’s a good feeling to have and you want to savor it till you can. One day at work, you meet someone from your own country, and you talk about your home, and reminisce about the old times. Many a time, you are the only POC in the office meetings. You realize that simply speaking up what you think might not be enough to make yourself heard. You then try to reduce your thick accent, trying to sound more American. And then you wonder, does sounding like an American make me an American? The answers aren’t easy to come by. Gradually, you begin to contribute to office meetings and your talent doesn’t go unnoticed.

You begin to lead two lives — a public life in which most of what you do mirrors what Americans would do, and a private life in which you secretly crave for everything back home — and you spend most of your time trying to make sense of things by trying your best to reconcile the two lives. The public life is necessary because it allows you to blend in the American society and rewards you for your talent. The private life is all the more crucial because it helps you connect with your memories from childhood, and allows you to ruminate on the differences between the public life and private life. You dream about the days when you will live with the people who know you best, in the process knowing it fully well that that might never be possible. You think of the days when things were much simpler, and ache for things to become how they were back then. Night turns into day, and you put on the robe and go out and live your public life again.

Being brown in America entails being in a state of flux. From the initial days at university looking for an on-campus job and then an internship followed by a full-time job, you are always on the move. Many companies reject you outright saying they don’t sponsor internationals. Some others are little more accepting in that they at least accept your resumes, without ever getting back to you. You eventually zero in on a group of companies that has had a track record of sponsoring internationals, and you apply to the jobs at those companies. Finding a job is an excruciating process that almost every international student goes through. It entails waking up every day to a slew of rejections in your mailbox, and still trying nevertheless to find that one opportunity. Even after one lands a full-time job, the struggle doesn’t end. We all know the struggles around immigration. Living in America as someone who is brown and did not grow up here involves making a lot of sacrifices. Those sacrifices are essential to carving out your ‘place’ here, or at least a semblance of it.

I have seen so many brown people reducing their accent, taking courses on how to sound like an American, in the process trying to act more American. While I can understand where they are coming from, it involves a fatal assumption that you need to undergo a complete transformation to assimilate in the American society. I believe that your talent can shine through without changing who you are. People who care about what you sound like don’t matter anyway. Even if we reduce our accents, do what we think makes us more American, how do we change the color of our skin? We will always be brown, and realizing that is essential to moving forward.

Moving to a new country involves excitement, and a lot of compromises. While we are making those compromises, it’s easy to forget who we are and where we come from. Most of us ‘make it’ in America, and lead a life that is deemed successful by the society. Some of us end up moving back to our home countries close to our family. Whatever we do, we should always remember that our lives are inextricably linked to the color of our skin, and it should serve to make us feel grounded wherever we are. The color of our skin then becomes a force, a beacon that guides us wherever we go.