Questions of Being Brown

I have always felt I do not belong.

Growing up, this was most obvious to me in the color of my skin. For a little background: My parents are Indian, but Indian Americans, both of them raised here, both of them educated in an American school system. Multiple times, friends have told me that they are the first Indian adults who they have heard speak with an American accent. My dad was the president of his frat. My mom speaks a little Punjabi, but she learned it in the way the children of immigrants learned their native language before being an immigrant was cool—which is to say, hardly at all.

I once wrote a college essay that tried to address the conflict inherent to my skin color. I wrote about being in middle school and being mocked by the other Indian kids for not being able to pronounce any words, for never going to temple, for rarely eating Indian food, for having relatively dark skin (that last one is insane, right?). I wrote about going home and telling my mom I wished I was white. In seventh grade, after being called a coconut for the nth time (brown on the outside, white on the inside), I remember daydreaming about being a white kid named Cole. My mom would be white, my girlfriend would be white, my house would be white. Everything would be so much easier. Why did I have to be encased in brown?

The conclusion of the essay was something about how Indian values shape my life, even if they are not visible. The strength of the family, education, things like that. The problem with this conclusion, if you will pardon my French, is that it is bullshit. If you need any evidence, you can ask my parents about how their families functioned, and how ours functions, and ask how similar they are, and how Indian they are. There is truth in the hypothesis that Indian values are at the core, somehow, to the questions of this piece, but that conclusion cannot be weakly summarized: I love and appreciate my family, and therefore should feel gratitude for being Indian.

For a long time, I didn’t mind not having a complete answer to these questions. My skin color, I figured, was simply one aspect of who I am, and such a little one at that. I could find community in other ways. Yet at every turn I find my sense of nonbelonging persists in a way that feels fundamentally linked to my skin color, and in a way that is therefore inescapable.

I have long believed that a vast proportion of who I am can be intuited from the media I consume. I was a deeply anxious kid, and as a balm for that constant, oppressive anxiety I found books, television, and piano. The obsessiveness with which I engaged with these media were my personal methodology to at first escape, then overcome mental illness. And by some turn of luck, this obsessive enjoyment has become my superpower. I have a level of reading endurance that I have encountered in very few human beings; in the last year I have read full-length novels by Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Forster, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Herbert, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Tolkien, Heller, Murakami, O’Brien, McCarthy, Marquez, Bronte 1, Bronte 2, to name the ones that come to mind after a glance at my dorm bookshelf. And in my heart I am still in love with Chopin and Lizst, and hilariously enough, I feel meaningful connection with Michael Scott and Matthew Murdock. These artists, characters, stories were the bedrock on which so much of the joy in my life is built. I owe them a tremendous amount.

And they are almost all of them white men.

Does it matter? No, you might say. But despite my love of—or, more aptly, addiction to—Western culture, I don’t stray far from Indian shorelines. I have found my way from Las Vegas, a place that was not designed for people of my race, to the Bay Area, which really, really is. I mimicked so many of my brown-colored brethren when I swapped out the desire to be a doctor with the decision to become a computer scientist. Don’t worry, I tell my parents over the phone. I won’t become a writer. Your son is different, but only a little: He is still going to be an engineer.

When you meet another college student, the first question after name and class is major. But that conversation doesn’t go for me how it goes for most people. It goes: “Hey Jaiden, nice to meet you! What’s your major? Wait—let me guess. Computer Science.” And then I nod, and chuckle, because after having this interaction around twenty-five times, I have learned that chuckling and saying nothing is the only possible response. I feel for my friends in the humanities when they conduct this somewhat microaggressive behavior. I know that preempting and then ignoring engineering majors can be the most direct way to avoid our particular brand of dismissive, masochistic self-obsession.

But the racial overtones stick in my craw. I can spend the rest of the conversation trying to prove that I’m “not like the other girls,” that I know how to read and speak, and usually I can find some success in that route. It is, however, a pretty obvious indicator of meaningful insecurity, which leaves me to question—what exactly am I being insecure about?

This question speaks to the heart of the racial dynamics at play in me as a second-generation Indian immigrant (side note: if you diagram that sentence, the subject is I, the verb is am, the object is immigrant). What values do I take away from being Indian? 

Framed differently: What does it take to escape partition, to travel to a new country, to establish yourself, to thrive, to have children who thrive? What does it take to be a child of immigrants in a place that has never seen brown people, that does not know the word Indian except as it relates to Native Americans, to eat meatloaf, to succeed in medical school? From an evolutionary perspective, from a natural selection perspective, what traits are necessary to engender success? What emerges from tremendous, unprecedented population pressure, from centuries of starvation by the British, from racism and poverty in a new land? Motivation, yes. A reliance on the people you love, yes. But what else?

In my experience, the answer is a very real, very visceral fear. It is the desperate, inescapable drive to stay alive. The Indian path is to work endlessly for the moonshot, but to never, ever, risk survival. Someone asks me what I study, interrupts me, then guesses: You are studying what you need to stay alive.

Does my anxiety originate from being Jaiden? Or does it originate in the color of my skin? There is a single question at the heart of my insecurity about my major, and it is this: Am I dedicating the productive potential of my body and mind to computer science because I love it, or because I am certain that on that path, I can finally be safe?

I wonder how it would feel if things were different. If my name was Cole. When people guess Cole’s major, they say economics. Cole laughs and tells them that he studies computer science. When Cole shows his friends his writing, they smile, and their eyes go wide. When Cole plays Chopin, they nod along, because these are things white people do. Cole does not have anxiety. Cole does not ask why he studies computer science, because he knows. Cole is confident. Cole is white.

I could not even escape my skin color when I was in Japan. But Cole could. When Cole walks into a bar and speaks Japanese, the strangers at the bar don’t respond with confusion, they respond with a gratitude-filled awe. I am speaking from experience. I have walked side-by-side with people like Cole into many places, and I have seen with my own eyes what the difference looks like.

I feel like I am seventeen years old again, and trying to find a conclusion to a college essay that wraps up my points into some kind of clean, beautiful realization. But here’s the real realization: I can’t talk about being brown but feeling white, because I don’t feel white and I’m not really brown. 

Is there a superpower to being an outsider? Lots of people will tell you yes. And more realistically, I am not some special outsider—my family, for reasons which cannot be understood, is just ahead of the curve. A few more decades and there will be plenty more like me. But the truth remains: There were no spaces built for us, no designers who created with us in mind. 

I love books. I know how to code. I have anxiety. My skin is brown. I play piano. This you can see at a glance. Is it all linked? Maybe someday I will have the answer.