When I stepped into my middle school on my first day as a student in America, I was terrified. My skin was a shade of beige lost between black and white, and though I’ve never had an Indian accent, I didn’t quite sound Texan either. With my thick, frizzy hair and mismatched outfit, I felt unacceptably un-American.
As it turned out, my fears were entirely unwarranted: in the last decade, I’ve picked up a slight drawl, found a stylist who fixed me up with a new ‘do and a strict haircare regimen, and made scores of friends who wouldn’t care if I had elephant tusks. Oddly, the majority of those friends are not Indian, the extreme opposite of the seemingly requisite Indian – and on occasion, Pakistani – friends that my parents made.
Over the course of my academic and professional careers, I have found myself a grand total of ONE Indian friend. We glimpsed each other in the hallway of our freshman college dorm at Penn State and made an unspoken mutual decision not to be friends. I mistakenly wandered into her room later that afternoon, and it was love at second sight.
We had a conversation about that fateful day years later when my friend was taking a Race Relations class, and found that it was extremely important to both of us that we not use the fact that we were both Indian as a common denominator. The basis of our friendship was less superficial than our ability to share the same Golden Bronze powder or affinity for (or aversion to, in my case) Indian movies. And neither of us wanted to be (or be seen as) the type of person who, as a rule, only befriended other Indians.
We even dubbed groups like this “gaggles”, honking in two languages about the last Indian movie star to feign an onscreen kiss (how DARE they?), to be avoided at all costs for their expectation that we relate to them only because of our shared lineage. It was not that we were disinclined to make Indian friends; it’s just that we connected more to those who weren’t.
The friends you make do not have to be directly correlated to whether your skin is taupe, tawny, or terracotta. This blending of ethnicities is something that will continue to become increasingly common with the maturation of our generation, and we’ve already come a long way: just ask my 239 non-Indian friends. Take this MLK day to step out of your gaggle mentality. Next time you leave home, try making friends with someone you don’t instantly recognize a connection with: you may have more in common than you realize.
Image: pensiero
I'm Indian too, and while I definitely agree that we shouldn't pick friends based on color, I can't also help think that avoiding making friends with someone from your own race is a step in the same direction. Sometimes, in an effort to step out of our “gaggle mentality,” as you aptly put it, we end up entering another, just as restrictive mentality. I encourage meeting and making friends with people from other races, but I do think that choosing not to make friends with people from your own is hypocritical — you are choosing other races over your own, so eventually, race does end up being a factor.
Happy MLK day to you!