What Indians Need To Know About American Black People

There are riots right now in the city that is closest to me: Baltimore.

Yet another citizen was killed by police. This time very close to home for me. I want to be out there protesting. I want to show my support for this community that is so angry and hurting. I want them to know that they are not alone in that anger and outrage. Yet I’m a coward here at home several miles away. If Brad and I had known about the protests before they turned into riots we would have been there. At this point it doesn’t seem possible or wise to join in. But that doesn’t mean I’m not outraged. I am very outraged. 

I’m not here to say that the police are the enemy or the police are bad guys. I think it’s a terrible shame for all the good hard working cops out there that these sociopath officers are murdering innocent people. It makes me wonder if we need stricter guidelines on who can become a cop. Or better training. At the very least it seems clear that police really have to wear cameras to hold everyone accountable to not killing the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting.

I know that I’m going to get some racist backlash to what I’m saying here. The racist stereotypes that many people of all skin colors in this country believe are being pumped out to the rest of the world in our media. Add to that the fact that India already struggles with prejudice based on skin tone and there’s a situation where I think a lot of Indian people have a completely inaccurate perception of American black people. 

You have been lied to.

People have this strange idea that black people are inherently more dangerous than others. It is this lie that is making people unsafe in their own country. I beg you to stop and think for a moment about your feelings when you hear that black people are rioting in Baltimore. Now think about how you feel when you hear that white sports fans are rioting after a big game. For most people they have very different reactions to those two different riots and the one they dismiss and feel okay about is the white person riot. Yet that one is about a stupid game and the other is about the value of human life. 

Now think about gun culture in the U.S. There are white people who are bringing assault rifles into grocery stores to prove that Americans have the right to carry weapons. White people with real guns, huge guns, walking through stores where families are shopping. Yet a black person with a toy gun gets shot and killed by police in the same kind of store. If you think the man, who we can hear on a telephone recording saying, “Please don’t shoot, it’s a toy”, is the more dangerous of these two then you are delusional.

Now think about what counts as “suspicious” enough to call the police. Anyone not white. I’ve seen this in my own life. I locked myself out of my house a while back. I was new to the neighborhood. I was circling around, trying to see if there was an unlocked window to get me in. Guess what? The police never showed up! They really should have. This was very suspicious behavior. It was identical to the behavior of Dr. Gates, a highly respected Harvard scholar (whose daughter I went to school with). Dr. Gates, however, had lived in his Cambridge home for many years. Yet when he locked himself out and tried to get back into his own house, he was arrested. Neighbors called the police and the police didn’t believe him that it was his house. Me being white and him being black is not the only difference between us. He is more educated than I, he is more well known than I, he has awards to his name, he has been an expert on TV. He is much less suspicious than I am.

And as we all know, wearing a sweatshirt with a hood when it’s cold outside might be the end of your life. For some people if you want to live you’d better stay cold. I watched a close friend making that choice. He decided to stay cold rather than risk someone calling the police because he was a black man wearing a hoodie. 

Racism is also present in the way that people expect that a boy walking down the street with skittles owed anyone an explanation for existing. Why wasn’t he more polite to the maniac who gunned him down? He shouldn’t have had to be. 

We as Hindus know that all humans are equally divine. It is horribly hypocritical of us to have these prejudices against our fellow human beings who we should be looking at as our brothers and sisters. This is our family and they are hurting. Instead of offering comfort, we turn away.

These are our people. Our people being killed all over the country. Many of them are not guilty of any crime. Some of them may have been guilty of minor crimes that did not in any way deserve death (They never got a chance for a trial so I cannot say  what they were or were not guilty of). We do have an innocent until proven guilty rule here that seems to only apply to white people.

All Americans deserve to feel safe in their home and their country. I get to feel safe and it’s not because of anything special that I did. Some people may think that this violence is justified because black culture (which is not the culture and experience of all black people but is more connected to economic situation than race) isn’t “behaving” the way white Americans want it to, think it should. But we don’t get to dictate that. We are all Americans and we all have the equal right to the pursuit of happiness. We all get to try to figure out where happiness is and go about that in whatever way makes sense to us. This isn’t white Americans’ ancestral home and we don’t get to decide the rules for everyone else. We are all in this together as citizens of this country.

I cannot pretend to know the unique pressures that many black people face when their own home country looks at them with unjustified suspicion, when “succeeding” in society can seem like abandoning family, friends, and culture, when you have to work at least twice as hard and constantly be proving yourself to be “different,” when your fellow Americans don’t seem to care if your son or your husband or your nephew or you get murdered by the people who should have kept them safe.

People are deeply hurting and I am not surprised, though I am sad, that violence is growing. This explosion of anger and violence seems inevitable to me as too many people in authority in America have ignored the losses that have led us to this point.

It strongly brings to my mind the Bob Dylan song Blowing in the Wind…

How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?…How many ears must one person have before he can hear people cry?…How many deaths will it take til he knows that too many people have died?

{I look forward to a respectful conversation on this subject. Please remember that we have a wide diversity of readers and commenters here, from white American Hindus to black American Hindus to Indian American Hindus to Indian Hindus, etc. No one person speaks for his or her entire race, including me}