The Tyranny of Internalised Racism

You don't even know you've been had.

I have talked about the ways in which internalised racism impacted on me in sessions I deliver on Diversity in the Curriculum, and in posts here about skin colour, bodies and health matters. Sharing examples of internalised racism feels shameful because it feels like a betrayal of my own culture and heritage. But it’s like a silent disease, exhibiting at times minor symptoms that you ignore so as not to rock any social boats.

The simple fact is, for many years, I didn’t even know I had it.

I think back to my childhood and schooling. Did anyone ever overtly tell me that bering Asian was somehow bad? Did they point at me and say ‘you deserve less because you are less’? No. I don’t think it ever happened like that.

This disease seeps into your skin without you even noticing it. I remember being delighted by any representation of South Asian people on TV. I remember laughing along when seeing an advert for Walkers’ Poppadums with a Sikh man in a turban singing and dancing like Elvis. It was set in a corner shop. It referenced ‘punkawallahs’, the name for those who operated fan pulley systems for British settlers in India. The man had comedy pointy shoes.

Even before this, when watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I remember being surprised and intrigued by the Indians represented in the film. Looking back, I should have been appalled. The Indians are presented as poor, filthy villagers, dressed in rags. The villain is South Asian and invokes the name of Kali Ma, an Indian goddess mistakenly believed to be associated with evil. The food is deemed to be revolting to the fair haired, blue eyed heroine.

I could go on. As my cultural education continued, unfiltered by adults who had a decolonial or anti-racist perspective, I learned that being Arabian equated to being violent in Disney’s Aladdin. I learned that enslaved people were happy to be mistreated in Gone With the Wind. I learned that being African meant that you were on the wrong side in Zulu. I learned that if you were poor and black, a white woman could save you in Dangerous Minds. Or that if you were from East Asia, you could be any of the stereotypes: Mr Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or with Mrs Meers’ disguising herself as a Chinese woman to kidnap white women with her equally nefarious henchmen.

Hollywood aside, we had Asian people on British TV. It was before my time, but I have since seen how Love Thy Neighbour usualised racial epithets between races, but also firmly placed the Black characters as being troublesome.

I was already conditioned to believe at this point that being South Asian, or African, meant being poor, submissive, savage, or dangerous. So it didn’t occur to me that these representations were offensive, steeped in colonial beliefs about the Oriental Other. It was what it was.

My academic education didn’t counter any of these ideas. I was left to soak in it, like a bathtub of racist water. References to India were limited. References to history related to East Africa were limited, other than pertaining to the Scramble for Africa. Indians were subjects in the Golden Raj. The men and women who stood against the British in 1857 were called mutineers. Or they were depicted as malevolent, exotic and indolent in literature by Conan Doyle. Heathens, the lot of them.

But it’s okay, because we had Apu in the Simpsons to keep us going.

If you sit in the racist water too long, it becomes part of you. I rejected my culture early, refusing to learn to read or write my home language of Gujarati. I confess, ashamed now, all these years later, I looked down on my people with accents, who didn’t speak in perfectly formed English. I proclaimed the might of the Empire and was proud to say that I was a child of British Imperial rule. I did English degrees and read English books. I learned French to be more European. They called me a coconut and I didn't flinch. The muscle that allowed me to speak in my home language to my loved ones wasted immeasurably. The ones with Gujarati tongues became distant. We didn't, we couldn’t know each other.

And each day that passed, I saw that I had spent so long trying to be acceptable that I had no idea who I really was. If I looked in the mirror, I saw a woman who parcelled up bits of herself and packed them away because she thought they were exotic, dangerous, indolent. I never wore clothes from my Indian heritage because I felt like I was on fire in them. There’s a poem I used to teach - Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan and in it, I recognised the ache written here:

I tried each satin-silken top -    was alien in the sitting-room.I could never be as lovely            as those clothes -   I longedfor denim and corduroy.   My costume clung to me            and I was aflame,I couldn't rise up out of its fire,   half-English,            unlike Aunt Jamila.

I had given myself up to become obedient and grateful.

As I grew up, I finally found some nuance in Asian people in film and TV. Most often, these films or shows were made/written by South Asian writers and actors like Meera Syal and Gurinder Chadha. I relished these moments of discovery, the laughter, the recognition and the connection. Bhaji on the Beach, East is East, Brick Lane, Mississippi Masala. I watched, fascinated. Could I be these people? Could I inhabit these spaces, as fractured as they were? While they were not perfect representations, I saw my people as humans with a vast energy and heritage for the first time in my life. I was in my twenties.

Literature now allows me to see my heritage. I devoured Kaikeyi, the feminist retelling of the Ramayana with wide eyes, my tongue curling around the names and the places in languages that were siblings with mine. I read The God of Small Things, then A Suitable Boy (and revelled in the weight of it!). Tagore, Rushdie, Anita Desai, Nissim Ezekiel, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Shashi Tharoor, and then Sathnam Sanghera. I stopped lamenting my brown skin and learned to appreciate it. I learned about universities, medicine, science, all cradled in South Asia. I read poems. I listened to lost voices about Empire and knew that I had been wrong to celebrate it. It was a travesty.

I look back with anger at the ways in which I was allowed to think. No one forced me to watch or read what I did. Those media were just there as part of mainstream culture. It hasn’t gone away entirely.

So what we teach in schools has to be designed with an awareness of who is marginalised and how they feel when they see caricature of themselves laid out for public consumption. What we teach might stop someone catching internalised racism. It might stop them from devaluing themselves for decades. It might stop other children from believing that South Asians are stereotypically X and Y.

Look at your content again. Find the ways to let light in.