January 24, 2015 - 22:19
I was visiting my hometown of Milwaukee, WI for a family friend's wedding the summer after I graduated from high school. This wasn't the first or second or even the tenth time I'd been back since we left. I knew my family friends, I knew the area, I knew that suburban Milwaukee was extremely white. As an Indian American who grew up in the Midwest surrounded by white people, I had to reconcile my differences with "those Americans," as my dad likes to call white people, by emphasizing the Midwestern friendliness and hospitality. I grew up thinking it was okay to be stared at and asked insensitive questions about "my Indian culture." So, having dealt with this for most of my life, I assumed this trip would be like any other-the overzealously friendly white people interested in my "ethnic clothing," and I, too polite not to respond, would walk away feeling like I had the weight of billions of Indian experiences thrust upon my shoulders. Slightly uncomfortable, but never too bad.
While in the midst of wedding preparations, my friend, her brother, and I, all three of us Indian Americans born in Wisconsin, went to the mall to buy the brother a shirt and to get our nails done. After successfully finding a shirt, my friend and I went to get our nails done, and her brother proceded to walk around the mall from store to store, with no intentions of making any more purchases. When I came out of the salon with my nails done, I saw my friend's brother sitting outside the store on a bench, looking particularly upset. Before I could finish asking what was wrong, he said, "The mall security asked me to leave because some storeowners said I looked like a suspicious figure. They said customers were getting nervous because I had walked by the store slowly a couple times." He was understandably angry, and it made me feel like I couldn't come back to suburban Milwaukee and see it the same way ever again.
Going back to that moment and understanding the many assumptions and oppressions at play, it's hard to remove myself from the the extreme feeling of disappointment in this place that I had almost idolized as a childhood home. It is obvious that the storeowners and customers saw my friend's brother as the stereotypical tall, dark-skinned, young man-clearly looking to cause trouble at this suburban mall. I think it is also important to think about the reason that my friend's brother got so angry. Of course, it was partially at the mall security for not understanding that he was a perfectly upstanding citizen and assuming the worst, but also at the fact that his identity had been erased and aligned with the stereotypical identities associated with young Black men and/or young Muslim men post-9/11. Implicit in this anger was a little bit of probably unintentional resentment towards anti-Blackness and Islamophobia. This speaks to larger patterns of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia in Indian American communities. I wonder if he thought about it that way. Would he have been able to bring this up to the mall security? Would it have been safe to? Would it have been worth it?