Rebecca Kumar & Janaki
*Exclusive Interview with Vijay Prashad PART 2*
I spent most of my childhood in the American South. Soon after I was born in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1984, my parents moved to Arlington, Texas and after several years we moved to Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In grammar school in Texas, I was the only student of color at all. In Mississippi, I was the only student of South Asian descent. I did not have many friends – white, black, or Latino. Once I was invited to a classmate’s house to play, but I was not invited back. That classmate surely told her parents that “Rebecca” was coming over to swim in the creek. When they found that “Rebecca” was also a “Kumar” with brown skin, who, when asked “what church do you go to?” shamelessly replied, “I don’t go to church, my mom has a temple in the hallway closet” they immediately put a stop to the risky relationship.
When I was fifteen my parents divorced. My father stayed behind in Mississippi and my mother and I moved back to New Jersey to live with my grandmother. I was a junior in high school when the twin towers were attacked. Just days after 9/11, my history teacher offered me, the only South Asian student in the class, a bit of post-event advice; she told me that if she were me, she’d “spike her hair blond for a while.”
I was first introduced to Vijay Prashad’s work when I was in college, in 2005, as a participant in Youth Solidarity Summer (YSS), a weeklong summer camp dedicated to ongoing struggles for social justice particularly in the South Asian community in the U.S.. YSS did more than simply provide a space for me to be with other South Asians my age. Indeed, that was not first time I had been in a space with young South Asians. While in high school in New Jersey, unlike my grade school experience, I was an active member in the local Hindu youth group. We danced to Bollywood marriage songs on Diwali, we had Indian fashion shows, and we talked about religion and Hindu values. YSS, on the other hand, provided a space for me to be with like minded brown folk who were invested in challenging all the stereotypes that I had been subjected to.
Against my high school history teacher’s insistence to white-wash myself and assimilate and against the Hindu youth group’s insistence that I ‘celebrate’ being Indian by wearing a sari once a year and keeping quiet about gender norms in our own community, YSS offered an alternative way of negotiating my identity. I found I wasn’t alone in my feelings of marginalization because I never fit into any easy category: “terrorist,” “model minority,” “good Indian girl,” the list goes on. Without YSS, I wonder if we would even have Brown Town – the result of former YSSers who will not stand for the continuation of these stereotypes.
Vijay Prashad’s book, The Karma of Brown Folk (2001) which asked, “What does it mean to be a solution?” and encourages the important recognition of the black civil rights movement, ending with a call for solidarity was my handbook for my young adult life. Recently, he’s published the rejoinder, Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (2012) which revisits the ways in which the intersections of race and imperialism affect South Asians in the US especially after 9/11. In this book he powerfully points out the ways in which“Multiculturalism is over" in the U.S "but not racism.”
In the second and final installment of our interview, Vijay Prashad answers some questions about what the upcoming election means for South Asians amidst “Uncle Swamis” like Monica Mehta, Nikki Haley, and Bobby Jindal. -- Rebecca.
Brown Town: How do you understand issues of “solidarity” and “justice” with regard to what seems like the most visible South Asians in the US political sphere (Monica, Bobby, Nikki)? For example, the recent Monica Mehta/ Melissa Harris-Paris debate which provided a strong example of the ways in which South Asians feel disconnected to other groups of color, especially African Americans. MHP’s question “What is riskier than being poor in America?” fell on Mehta’s deaf ears. Similarly, Nikki Haley has recently made decisions to cut government funding for programs that support victims of domestic violence and rape in South Carolina, dismissing victims as "special interests". Do you think Haley's funding cut is indicative of the fact that many South Asians still refuse to acknowledge that violence against women in our particularly community is quite common? That is, for Haley it actually not a “special interest case” but she, herself, makes it one. Or does her funding cut speak to broader issues of solidarity and justice in the community?
Vijay Prashad: I think that people like Monica Mehta, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, and so on, are a necessary product of the kind of context I laid out above [See question 1 in Part 1]. If you deny the historical ties between our advancement and the Civil Rights movement, and if you deny the ways in which we are state-engineered and not naturally selected – it is possible that you might adopt an ideology that suggests that you have succeeded on your own, and that since you made it on your own, through your own hard work, why should others be given advantages? It requires a great deal of historical white washing to end up with this kind of harsh political position. There will be more such people emergent in our community. No question. They are welcome to their politics. We have to fight them on the politics. To my mind, there is no necessary politics for desis, but on the other hand, that this kind of conservatism is prepared by our amnesia about our own histories.
But the fact is that even if these are the most noisy speakers (thanks to the megaphone of the corporate media and the corporate political parties), they do not fully represent South Asian American life. They are a demographic minority. I try to bring this out in Uncle Swami, that there are many people from the same kinds of class background that had other orientations, other temperamental politics, eager to find ways to revive those histories, to create a politics of solidarity.
I think Nikki Haley’s cut to domestic violence programs is not an indication of our community’s silences. It has everything to do with the agenda of the Far Right, carried forward by the Republican Party. It is very hard to understand Nikki and Bobby if you try to do so in the cultural and political worlds of South Asian America. They are best explained by their adherence to the GOP agenda. That is where it comes from. This does not mean that sections of the South Asian American community are uncomfortable with a frontal attack on domestic violence. But the fact is that our community has also supported many feminist organizations, whether Sakhi or Apna Ghar, Manavi or Sneha. This is an open debate, one that was taken into the public by the work of these feminist organizations.
Brown Town: How to feel about the upcoming election? How is it different than the last? What does President Obama represent for you? What would it mean for South Asian Americans if he won? What would it mean if he loses?
Vijay Prashad: US politics is extremely claustrophobic. On the one side, you have the Republicans: their political ideology is one part doctrinaire pro-corporate policies (big handouts to corporate fat cats and no regulations on their business activities), and one part messianic social suffocation (constrained rights for women and gays & lesbians, old fashioned racist ideas). Slowly, since 1964, the Republicans have become the party of Money and White Men, and its general ideological orientation has turned to lunacy. This provided a great opening for the more sensible corporate leaders, for whom the Democratic Party could be a vehicle for neo-liberal economic ideas without the social suffocation. It was after Jesse Jackson’s 1988 run that the social movements lost their political strength within the party; they are now simply vote banks, not decisive actors in the internal democratic work of the Democratic Party. The neo-liberals through the Democratic Leadership Council moved to “modernize” the party after the 1988 election. They streamlined its decision-making and tethered its program to neoliberal ideas like balanced budgets, welfare reform and financial growth (on the economic side) and fighting crime and more prisons/police (on the domestic repression side). In European terms, the Republicans are most like the Far Right and the Democrats are the Near Right (like the Christian Democrats); there is no Social Democratic party in the US, let alone a left-wing party of any force. In terms of foreign policy, the bipartisanship is quite remarkable, at least since World War 2. There is very little daylight between the parties in their commitment to US primacy.
Obama is the leader of a Democratic Party that is no longer like the party which Jesse Jackson tried to lead in the 1984 and 1988. It is the party of Money, and it is held up by social movements that have no-where else to go, are terrified by the Far Right, and therefore hold their noses and support the Democrats. This is a political travesty. There is no space to build the confidence of the people for an alternative ideology and set of institutions. It is the role of the Left to build that alternative, in local areas but also in terms of breaking the stranglehold of the idea of the “lesser evil.” If the Left simply falls in line with the Democrats, why would anyone who comes into politics consider themselves on the Left: why not simply become a Democrat? What defines a Left politics apart from Democrats?
There are a few matters that distinguish Obama from the Republicans: his victory was crucial, because, as I argue in Uncle Swami, Obama’s victory completed the Multicultural project. The highest office in the land has now been held by a non-white person. This means that there is no institution that is theoretically closed off to diversity. But this does not mean that racism has ended or that the social project has been completed. Far from it. Even Obama recognizes that, as I point out in [Uncle Swami]. Secondly, the Democrats and Obama differ from the Republicans in their approach to certain social issues (abortion, women’s choice, partnership for gays and lesbians), but here the distinction is exaggerated by the temperamental hatred of the Republicans and the generally dyspeptic support of the Democrats (how long it took Obama to come around to a sensible and poll-supported policy of gay marriage!). Third, Obama is a pragmatist, but to be pragmatic in a right-wing context means that you tend to right-wing policies. This has been the case with health care reform, which is actually health insurance company reform; it delivers an entire set of new customers to insurance companies (remember Obama refused to entertain single payer – even as a bargaining chip against the Republicans). Finally, on war mongering, there is little that differentiates the Democrats from the Republicans. Jimmy Carter has had a huge transformation. When he was President he pushed the Carter Doctrine, which ensures that the defense of the monarchical Saudi regime is equivalent to that of the USA. This yokes US policy to Saudi policy. The upshot of that in recent times is the invasion of Bahrain in March 2011. Obama has already begun a “covert” war on Iran (cyber attacks, assassinations, punitive sanctions), and has used drones with impunity for assassinations. All this cannot be set aside because Obama is temperamentally a terrific guy. His policies have to be challenged, despite the costs of an election year. The Republicans (who are crazy) will not logically challenge the Democrats; the social movements (unions, for instance) have given up their independence from the Democrats – who is left to challenge their policies? If the Left does not do so, it might as well close up shop.
