Children of ’65

One day, members of the South Asian Student's Association (SASA) at Brown University arrived at the office of Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) in Providence, Rhode Island, where I worked, to know how they, as Southasians, could do their bit. I was immediately impressed by their sense that something was not right in the world. Raised in affluent, de-facto segregated enclaves of suburban America, these young people knew that their own upward mobility was morally insufficient. They wanted elsewhere. I introduced them to some of the young people in our office – Sabrina, for instance, who was then a high-school student in the local public school, and who ran the E=MC2 campaign (Education = Multicultural Curriculum). Promising to lead a session on college entry for the high-school kids, these students showed me a new dynamic in our community that I had previously only glimpsed.

When migrants from India, such as my family, came to the US after 1965, few had any sense of themselves as victims of racism. They had been born into a country already free from the racist colonial state, and they were raised into middle-class families with caste profiles that allowed them to easily enter college. When they came into the US, it was after the Civil Rights Act afforded them rights to equality, and their technical training moved them into zones where they were able to do well. Fleeting meetings with others like themselves fulfilled their social lives, and their association was always with their homeland, even as they recognised that they would perhaps never return to live there. They were Indians in America who would become Indian-Americans later, only because this latter name was part of the culture of assimilation into being a 'migrant-American'. I knew these migrants because I was one of them. I remember the children of my relatives, those over whom I had to keep an eye as the adults sat in the living room or the kitchen, revelling in each other's presence. For the kids, these were their 'home friends', with their 'school friends' being mainly white kids or others, but rarely any of these Indian kids. I would meet them later, in those Brown University students.