Recently, my husband told me he hated markets.
“Markets?” I thought to myself, “How could anyone not like markets?”
They’re like roads, or cars, or buildings. They just are – I’m surprised anyone has an opinion about them. I never asked myself whether or not I like markets, I just took them as a fact of life. Sometimes I went to them, bought whatever I needed and moved on. It wasn’t something I thought about.
And then I went to one with him.
In Bangalore’s busy majestic area, where buses and trains from around the state come in, it is ordinarily chaos. But when you have a tall, light-haired, foreigner in shorts with you – it’s like an attack. Everywhere people were clamouring to touch him, touch his hair, take a selfie, even hold his hand. And out of absolutely everywhere was someone trying to get him to buy something – (including a drum that he bought out of desperation while on his own). For my very introverted husband, the whole experience was overwhelming.
Of course, India’s exoticization of the ‘foreigner’ can be understood, and maybe even forgiven, (maybe), but it is a wider issue of how we treat white people in India that bothers me.
Mainly, that for my white, heterosexual, male husband, his treatment is simply an extension of his white privilege. The ability to get through life with special treatment, being treated as special, that he matters more than other people – mainly because he is white and male.
The interesting thing is, sometimes when we are out at a restaurant in India, I find myself getting this special treatment. Waiters being extra polite and falling over themselves to serve us. People waving us ahead in queues. Even road traffic not yelling at me, when they see a foreigner in the car (never mind that I am driving). It’s treatment I am not used to receiving and it confused me. No longer did the world see me as a small brown woman, but as a small brown woman attached to a tall white male. It took me a while to realise that suddenly, in marrying my white husband, I was receiving extended white privilege. Awkward.
Suddenly, my whole experience of India seemed different. My life of being catcalled in my school uniform and being charged extra for auto fare was spun on its head. Those things weren’t necessarily pleasant or unpleasant, it’s just that in the complex web of Indian hierarchy, I knew my place and so did everyone who interacted with me. All of a sudden, I wasn’t a middle-class Indian woman anymore – I was a ‘foreigner’s wife’. It’s like my status had suddenly been elevated by the presence of my husband.
I can understand this, but it makes me angry. I understand that people don’t know how to classify me when they see me with a white person. “Is she foreign too, will she throw airs and graces to impress her white counterpart? How do I deal with this middle entity that is so Indian and so not?” But it makes me angry that we discriminate against our own, treating foreign others as though they are worthy of better treatment, reinforcing every single colonial power dynamic we started off with.
It means that we think of ourselves, of brown people as less than. It’s that we discriminate against ourselves, treating brown women as less than white men. And while the rest of the world might think so, it’s terrible when it comes from actual brown women.
At another restaurant, while out with my family and husband, the waiter automatically emerged with the bill and placed it with triumph in front of my white (then 24-year-old husband). My dad awkwardly leaned over and handed the waiter his card. I cannot imagine a situation where a young brown man would be handed the bill instead of the older man at the table.
In other situations, of course, this dynamic is completely reversed, but somehow brown people still come off worse. Once when out with my (also white) mother-in-law, I was stopped in a queue for not having a ticket, even though she had just gone ahead displaying two tickets. It wasn’t that I was stopped in an accidental mix up, its that I was accused of not having a ticket and trying to sneak through the line before the guard realised and, embarrassed, waved me through.
Another time while out with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, the person taking the order at the counter, totalled their bill and then asked me for money separately. Despite having told her twice, that we were all together.
Racism is so much more complicated than the riots we see on TV. It’s in the subtle and the unspoken. The shrugs, the eye rolls, the gentle exclusion of people who just don’t fit the cultural definitions we draw up in our head. It is so much more than hating white and brown people, it’s in the millions of tiny slights and insults that add up – for people of every colour. It’s humiliating, it’s painful and it propagates a feeling that we are ‘less than’.
The only thing that makes it worse, is doing it to ourselves.