The problem with such an approach is that it is unfalsifiable. Pretending I know the true motives behind others' words and actions frees me from any responsibility for engaging with them. It allows me to treat them dismissively. Sarma can lob his rhetorical barbs at white Hindu converts free from accountability for his words and the hurt that they cause while moreover claiming a moral high ground because of the racism from which he has suffered.
Although I therefore have no reason to expect that my arguments will move him, I write on in the hope that others who may be eavesdropping on this conversation might thereby benefit.
Back to the main point: the conscious intent of this white Hindu convert has not been to mimic those who were born Hindu. Indeed, I have been (mildly) critical of those Hindu movements that insist that their non-Indian adherents assume Sanskritic names and traditional Indian forms of dress (strictures to which even many who were born Hindu do not adhere). My desire has not been to Indianize myself in a vain effort to "color my life," as Sarma might say, but to practice my spiritual path as who I am: Irish American, raised Roman Catholic, Midwestern, sci-fi and rock fan, and so on. I would like to see Hinduism emerge (as it is emerging) as a global tradition, just like Buddhism, with many cultural forms and expressions. To the degree that white Hindu converts feel they must engage in cultural "mimicry," I may be just slightly less critical of them than Sarma, but for a different reason: not seeing such mimicry as mockery, but as simply unnecessary.
Mistake #2: Whose colonial history?
The second major error in Sarma's essay is his sweeping assumption that all white people are equally implicated in the colonial oppression of India. The very term "white" is itself deeply problematic, and an over-generalization. I was not involved in the colonization of India and neither were my ancestors. Indeed, most of them were busy being starved out of Ireland by the very people who did colonize India. Most ended up as poor farmers in West Virginia, Missouri, and Illinois. The exception was my great-grandfather, who was busy fleeing, there is reason to suspect, from anti-semitism in France.
I am of course blatantly engaging here in what Sarma might call a denial of my colonial history. Armed with his hermeneutic of suspicion, he can be confident in his knowledge that I do have a colonial history, whether the facts of my family history bear this out or not. My melanin-deficient epidermis is a sufficient basis for this charge.
One could of course argue that, despite my humble origins, I have clearly benefited from the phenomenon of "white privilege." This is certainly the case. There is no denying it. I have also benefited from growing up in a country that had the advantage of centuries of free slave labor at its command in developing its economy. But then again, so has Sarma.
Believing that one can predict—or even worse, dictate—how people will think, feel, vote, or believe and practice religiously based on the color of their skin is as good a definition of racism as any. I am not saying that Sarma is a racist. That is a very serious charge to lob at a respected colleague. I am cautioning him, however, that he has come perilously close to it in this essay.
Finally, I cannot help mentioning that if one takes certain kinds of Hindu philosophy seriously, this entire line of thought is mistaken. Ethnic and national identities, and even gender, are qualities related to the body. They are ultimately impermanent karmic effects that do not reflect the ultimate nature of self as pure consciousness. Not only, therefore, did neither I nor my ancestors colonize India; it may be that both I and they were Indian on many occasions (and that Sarma was the British Viceroy of India).
Judging others by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character is a basic error from both Vedantic and progressive secular perspectives. Avoiding this error does not require one to fall into the opposite error of "color blindness," naively ignoring the many ways in which race continues to matter in contemporary society. And if Sarma has felt patronized or offended by the behavior of some white converts to Hinduism, he certainly has a duty to name this truth and to start a conversation about it. But if he is offended by the very existence of white converts to Hinduism, he risks replicating the toxic attitudes of those who have marginalized him.
Mistake #3: The nature of religious belief.
In his essay, An Apology for Apologetics, philosopher of religion Paul J. Griffiths states the axiomatic claim that we each have an epistemic duty to strive to believe things that are true. In the comment thread attached to the Huffington Post essay that I am critiquing here, Sarma clarifies that nowhere in his essay has he made mention of the truth of Hindu doctrinal claims.
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