learning to love my indian-american identity
Illustration by Wanda Carreras
About six years ago, I had the revelation that as a woman, my societal worth will always be tied to my beauty. About three years later, this was followed by the realization that my ethnic identity will never fit the American standard of beauty.
As a child, I always hated Halloween because there were no Indian women I could dress up as (apart from Princess Jasmine, of course). In American media, Indian women are markedly absent from most mainstream films and television shows. The few Desi female characters shown generally fit either the token “nerdy POC” caricature or the “light-skinned exoticized model” type. Either way, we Indian women are rarely shown in our emotional, physical, and historical entirety. Apart from the fair-skinned, long-legged, airbrushed women of Bollywood, the majority of Indian women are rarely represented, and even more rarely desired.
Recently, I’ve begun to understand that my racial background isn’t always seen as beautiful. When informed of my racial background, people will often question me. I’ve had people argue with me, telling me that I wasn’t Indian, but in fact Latina. I wish that I had the courage to tell people that being told I was “the only Indian girl they’ve been attracted to” or that they didn’t see me as “actually Indian” wasn’t the compliment they thought it was. Conversely, some don’t view me for my whiteness at all. Off-hand racist jokes or “questions’ about me or my family, especially after returning from my trip back to India, were unsettlingly common. They often came from people I considered friends.
For a while I used my slight ethnic ambiguity to my perceived advantage. Instead of correcting people, I often simply assimilated with whatever the predominant culture I was assumed to be: Mexican, Brazilian, Hawaiian, Filipino. I was whatever they wanted me to be. Looking back, this instinct was marked by a fear of being seen differently. Casual comments about me and my family’s intelligence, hygiene, and wealth had added up in my head and made me afraid of identifying as Indian.
In recent months, I’ve begun to regain a much stronger sense of my identity. Through beginning to learn my peoples history, listening to my elder family members stories, and traveling back to my family home, I have begun to learn about the power of fully claiming and owning my identity. Being a child of a second generation Indian immigrant meant having a very whitewashed sense of my ethnic background, which made it harder for me to cement my identity when faced with all the perceived negatives and so few of the positives. As I learn and familiarize myself more and more with what it truly means to be Indian American to me, not to my peers, I have become more and more willing and accepting of my full and true identity. Now when people ask me my ethnic background, I answer with nothing but pride.