I immigrated to the U.S. from India in the early 1970's. I came as a small child, barely four years old, but old enough that “home” had imprinted on my heart and mind. 

I landed in Des Plaines, IL - a poorer part of Chicago.  My parents, who had already been in the country for a few years, were diligently working multiple jobs to build a life for us.  Both my parents found work in health care - my mother as a dentist at a clinic on Madison Avenue in the heart of working class, Black Chicago and my father as a jack of all trades for free clinics in the Cottage Grove neighborhood of Chicago. At that time, Cottage Grove had the the highest violent crime rate in the Chicago area.

In many ways, we saw and lived amongst the rampant racism and anti-blackness of post-Civil Rights America.  And at the same time, we also quickly escaped living amidst its most blatant manifestations.  My parents were able to get a mortgage and buy a house in the western suburbs of Chicago, gaining entry into white space, though their work lives remained in working-class, Black communities. The move to Elmhurst was ostensibly, in their view, to secure a better education and life for me and my soon-to-be-born sister. Unbeknownst to my parents, a “better” education also came with a painful, isolating reality for me.

This snapshot frames my journey as a racial justice advocate in the U.S.  I entered a world in the U.S. that looked a bit like the world I had left behind - it was brown-skinned, communal, loud, with close-knit spaces.  I was fascinated by it.  But, for my parents, it was imperative that we move.  While I liked our new house with a yard and a room for me and my sister, I had no idea that it would be a place where I would feel the loneliest and most foreign.  As a non-white, non-black immigrant who entered the U.S. race conversation in the 1970s, I grappled with what it meant to both experience racism and xenophobia while also having caste and class privilege; to be technically a part of middle-class America yet kept apart.

In many ways, it feels like 2020 was some alternative sci-fi experience, not because we were in the throes of a global pandemic, but because we now seem to have completely forgotten everything that was happening then.  At this point, we're pretty much ignoring the Covid-19 pandemic, despite ongoing surges.  And, sadly, unsurprisingly, attention to the pandemic of racism and anti-blackness has been short-lived and we've returned to ignoring it at best, and doubling down on it at worst.

I believe that the only way we can move the needle forward on dismantling racism is by complicating the question of race.  Biologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other academic disciplines have debunked the notion of race as a material category. It is a social construct.  And yet, it is one of the most powerful organizing power systems we utilize.  I posit that we must explore this social construct from a more nuanced perspective if we are ever to truly dismantle it.

Race, and by extension, racism, has become a code word for much more than the Black-White binary we tend to default to in the U.S - understandably so, given the U.S.'s history with chattel slavery and all that followed, including the one-drop rule (a practice codified into law in the early 20th century by which someone with even one ancestor who was Black/of African descent was automatically considered and classified as Black).  Racism in the U.S. has purposefully been structured to function within the binary of Black/white.  However, the roots of racism are deeper and older than the U.S. history of chattel slavery.  Even in its attempts to break away from royal English rule, the U.S. built itself on a foundation of White, Anglo-Saxon, gentried Christian colonial praxis.

I believe that continually returning to the Black-White binary is problematic in two major ways: first, it reinforces white supremacy by erasing the complex experiences around racism, pitting communities of color against each other (as we fight each other about who is experiencing racism, how and when), and locating racial violation/solidarity in very narrow, simplistic frames.  Second, it leans into a U.S. nationalist cause by allowing a blindness to the interconnections between global white supremacy and U.S. racism.  It blinds us to how the privilege of our U.S. status ends up perpetuating racism on a global scale, which in turn reinforces our local (national) racism.

Dr. King stated that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.  His words build on W.E.B. DuBois's prophetic claim that the color line will be the crisis of the 20th century.  When we talk about white supremacy, we are usually referring to something that has its roots in colonial legacies of White, Anglo-Saxon, Gentried, and Christian origins.  The notion of "white" is a truncated read of this more complex, intersectional identity.  Each of these identities is inextricably intertwined - meaning it is not merely about one's color, class or religion.  Rather, it is about the interplay between these identities as dictated by those who belong fully to that group. And, often, choices are made amongst and between these identities. Simply put, we sometimes choose to focus on one identity over another and thus “accept” that person.  However, because we are never just one identity, those identities that are hidden or ignored will reemerge and we realize that the acceptance we had was fragile at best. For example, we may find that "we" accept one group because they align more closely with gentried roots (e.g. the model minority myth) or another because they align more closely with Christian roots (e.g. Christianized Blackness) or another because they align more with white roots (Jewish communities). But, at any point, any of these can and *will* get demonized.  We are lulled into a false complacency of belonging, without seeing how our belonging is only a tool to secure the grip of white supremacy's fully fleshed colonial legacy.

This complacency then allows for our work to often fade away and lose traction.  Because it is seen as unconnected to larger global issues.  The separation from and between non-dominant groups assures the ongoing power of global colonial forces. 

We must understand and lean into intersectionality in our struggles - allowing the multiplicity of our identities to be points of connection, no matter how uncomfortable we are with the differences between us.  Abusive systems of power count on our inability to be connected with those unlike us. 

So, how do we make these connections happen? We’ve tried to do it by building community; we’ve tried to do it by legislation.  Yet, we fall short.  In 2020, we saw a groundswell of anger against racism and it moved the needle. But, in 2021, we also saw a groundswell of white nationalism and it moved the needle as well, albeit in the opposite direction.

I deeply believe that if we are going to build sustainable change, we have to dance in the interplay between the interpersonal and the structural.  We have to build meaningful relationships with those who are different from us *while* we are building practices, processes, and policies that legislate equity and inclusion.  This building process is ongoing, synergistic, at times tiring to the bone, at other times profoundly joyful, often all of these things at once.  This is a dance. It has a series of steps, but only so far as to provide a framework for our creativity and liberation. It requires deep discipline, deep enough that we are truly free.

So, how do we get here?

For me, liberation is a journey and more specifically, a spiritual journey with three pillars: coalition building, self-reflexivity, and knowledge building. 

Coalition Building

The first pillar is coalition building.  We must see others’ fight in our fight.  Every place is a microcosm of the world; we must push ourselves to see *the* world in *our* world.  It is not a question of do this *or* do that, it is knowing that we must *do something* and to do something, we must keep broadening our horizons about what is happening in the world.  Building coalitions means seeing the connections between our causes and our communities. A word of warning, coalition building cannot work in a capitalist mindframe.  If we only build coalitions through a transactional analysis, the mission of all organizations will fail.  Coalition building works when we understand and act on the knowledge that by standing in the other person’s fight, we are simultaneously standing for our fight.  As legal scholar Dean Spade, who has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades, argues, this is trickle-up justice. Our social justice efforts have to move from the grassroots up. When we fight for the rights of the most marginalized, we all benefit. 

Self-Reflexivity

Coalition building works best when we engage in what I consider the second pillar of the journey: critical self-reflexivity.  We must hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold the colonizer. We demand that those who uphold the dominant structures look deep within and face the monster that they have unleashed on our worlds.  The Sociologist and foundational Black Feminist theorist, Patricia Hill Collins asks the same of us when she tells us that we must confront the oppressor within.  How are we also part of dominant structures of violence? The truth is that we all have ingested the elixir of power and it flows through us.  Sometimes, to our own detriment; always to the detriment of those who are marginalized differently than us.  As a brown immigrant in the U.S., I have to confront the fact that my caste and class privilege have been weaponized against Black, Dalit, and Indigenous peoples.  I cannot merely lean into the xenophobia I experience every day and rest on my laurels addressing only that. 

Knowledge Building

To know how we are weaponized against others, we utilize the third pillar of the journey - we must read the stories of those who write and speak despite the herculean efforts to silence them.  There’s a bibliography that goes with this essay.  It includes earlier writers, such as Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi, and it also includes current authors such as Claire Jean Kim, and Ibrahim Kendi.  It includes writers with roots in the Global South, such as Arundhati Roy and Yashica Dutt.  It reflects writers who approach racial justice work in ways similar to mine, such as Ruth King as a way for me to be in conversation around the questions that push most often in my mind.  It's incomplete, but it is a start.  I'd love to know who you would add to this list.

Conclusion: Embrace the spiritual journey; liberation is a journey, not a destination

With each pillar of this journey, I return to my truth that this is a spiritual journey for me.  I anchor my work in the Hindu adage “nishkama karma” - action without expectation.  It is my responsibility to act for justice.  I must let go of the ego self that demands the results of those actions.  Liberation, for me, is a journey.   My responsibility is to learn and honor that there are many approaches to change.  I know which is mine - gnyana yoga (the scholarly path of knowledge).  I choose it with intention and understand that it will take many approaches over a long period of time for change to occur.  Change is a journey, not an end goal.  Things have changed and more needs to change. 

To go back to the original question - where are we since 2020? So many seeds were planted. Most will come to fruition for future generations, allowing them opportunities to plant new seeds.  Was the change wrought by multiple pandemics enough? No. Did something change? Yes. Was that change meaningful? That is not mine to decide. That which we see as success now will be failure later. This does not mean we failed.  It means we succeeded because we built a world in which others moved forward and found even more space for inclusion.