March 21, 2017
A racist man shot Srinivas
Kuchibhotla on February 22, 2017. He wanted to kill a Muslim. He thought
Srinivas and his friend Alok Madasani were Iranians. A week later, Harnish
Patel was shot and killed in his driveway by another racist man. Sheriff Barry
Faile, investigating Patel’s case said, “I don’t have any reason to believe
that this was racially motivated.” Sheriff Faile’s words are not
convincing. Instead, the Indian community have concluded that these two brown
men were gunned down by two racist Americans who couldn’t care less if these
men belonged to the “model minority”class, or were U.S. born citizens or not.
All that mattered to them was that these two men were “brown” or “Muslims” and
hence they must be deleted. Permanantly. America First.
For the Indian community,
however, these men were not just “brown” men. One man was an Aviation
engineer working for Garmin in Kansas, while the other, an owner of a Speed
Mart convenience store in South Carolina. For one, the Indian community
raised $670, 000 for his funeral. There was no such GoFundMe campaign for the
other. For one, the Indian Americans mourned in the Silicon Valley and all over
America. For the other there was a hand made sign that was stuck on the window
of his convenience store: “Store Close for few days because of a family
emergency. Sorry for inconvenience.”
Kochibhotla’s funeral took
place in Hyderabad, India. Patel’s funeral was in Lancaster, South
Carolina. Paul Oommen, an India-based journalist with The Associated Press
tweeted that Kuchibhotla’s granduncle said that Kuchibhotla and his siblings
were all bright students, “but Srinivas was the brightest of the three.” For
Patel, there was a post on the guestbook of the funeral home saying, “He will
always have a special place in our hearts.”
The funeral for Kochibhotla
was a public event in India with hundreds of family and friends and even politicians.
Images of his body with flowers, grief stricken relatives, the funeral
procession, and even the lit funeral pyre were made public. The heartbreaking
photo of his young widowed wife, Sunayana Dumala made the pages of both The
Hindu and The New York Times.
Patel did have a funeral too.
A more private funeral. A small post by the Burgress Funeral Home read, “The
service will be overseen by priest Ashok Trivedi.” That’s all.
In the wake of Kochibhotla’s
murder Sushil Rao, another Indian journalist tweeted that the Indian government
should “institute awards for those who protect Indians abroad.” For the
other, no such protections have been announced yet.
Two brown men killed by two
racists Americans, yet for the Indian community these brown bodies belong to
two very different Americas, two very different kinds of Indians in
America. They belong to the America that still believes in
“exceptionalism,” and one that doesn’t. They belong to a belief of what
Kuchibholta’s grieve stricken wife said in her press conference: “he always
assured me that ‘only good things happen to good people. Always think good,
always be good. And good will happen to you’.
I am finding these articles
about the murder of the Indian Kansas man incredible sad, and this growing worry
about “our” safety amongst Indians frustrating. Who exactly is this “our”
in this collective call for “our community,” “our safety,” “our protection,”
“our dignity?” Who according to the Indians are “the good?”
If anything these two hate
crimes have highlighted is that there are two kinds of Indians, two kinds of
“browns.” The “right” kind of brown versus the “wrong” kind of brown, and
we urgently need to have a conversation about this divide. And this divide is
not new. It has existed long before Trump’s America. Lyndon B. Johnson’s “The
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965” put an end to the exclusionary and
racist quotas of the 1920’s, and gave birth to the class of people we now call
the “model minorities.” While the demographics of the right kind of brown have
gradually risen in American since 1965, “the wrong kind of browns” have been
playing in their shadows. Forever.
If the first casualty for the
Indian American community in Trump’s America is Srinivas Kuchibhotla, the first
casualty in Bush’s America, referred to as “The First 9/11 Backlash Fatality,”
was a man named Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh- American the gas station owner in
Mesa Arizona. I do not remember this level of anxiety within the
Indian-American community when Sodhi was killed after 9/11. He too was mistaken
as an Arab-Muslim and shot and killed by a man called Frank Silva Roque.
Rogue had told his friends that he was “going to go out and shoot some
towel-heads.”
Neither did Sodhi nor did
Patel have any large fund raising campaigns by their fellow Indians across the
country to cover the cost of their respective funerals. What, however, did
happen in Sodhi’s case was that many Arizona state representatives and citizens
of all backgrounds rallied around the Sodhi family and the Sikh American
community in support of this hate crime. Over 3,000 people attended Mr.
Sodhi’s memorial service.
Yet, just a few months before
the tenth anniversary of Sodhi’s death and the attack on America, the Arizona
legislature decided to remove Mr. Sodhi’s name from the state 9/11 memorial
because he was not deemed “a victim of 9/11″. Adding insult to injury, along
with stripping the late Mr. Sodhi’s name from the memorial, the legislation
even enumerated that the removed plaque to be sold to a scrap metal dealer. Ten
years after 9/11, the original sponsor of the bill to remove Sodhi’s name from
the memorial John Kavanaugh, a Republican member of the Arizona senate stated,
“It’s part of a myth that, following 9/11, Americans went into a xenophobic
rage against foreigners. That’s not true. America’s reaction towards foreigners
was commendable.”
I cannot recall any outrage by
“the right kind of brown folks” against Sodhi’s murder, or the subsequent
negation of his “victim” status after 9/11. While other communities of
color repeatedly expressed their anxiety over their safety after 9/11, and
Brooklyn New York’s “Little Pakistan” became a ghost town (as 20,000 Pakistanis
left Brooklyn out of fear and many landed in detention facilities), I do not
recall, then, any call for safety, or awards for keeping all people
“brown” safe?
But Srinivas was the “right
kind of brown,” the right kind of foreigner, the “good” immigrant. Yet
his wife was not so sure about their safety, as she said in her press
conference, “we’ve read many times in newspapers of some kind of shooting
happening everywhere. And we always wondered, how safe, or I especially, I was
always concerned: ‘Are we doing the right thing of staying in [the] United
States of America?
The night of Kuchibhotla’s
murder, hundreds of “the right kind of brown folks” who continue to take their
safety for granted have posted on various social media sites. asking, “why did
this happen to him?”
I continue to be frustrated
that there is still such dismay amongst the “right” kind of the Indian brown
community that Srinivas’s killing was one of a mistaken identity. “He was not a
Muslim” as hundreds of Tweets have said. Srinivas was “mistaken” to be a
Muslim. So, if Srinivas was a Muslim and Adam Purinton killed him, would his
death be more justified?
I find it even ironic that
these “right” kind of brown folks who are so shocked about the rise of racism
against the Indians in this post-Trump’s America, have continued to turn a
blind eye to the racism that has plagued Africans/African Americans and
Hispanics in this country on a daily basis, much before Trump’s arrival. Mass
incarcerations are not a concept that the “right kind of brown” has to witness,
let alone imagine. Such things do not happen to them or “good people.”
Oh well, the “right kind of
brown folks” (I forget) are here to advance professionally, to dream, to
contribute to America’s exceptionalism and demand safety that “the wrong kind
of brown” cannot even fathom.
The “right kind of brown” also
never thought that the Muslim ban, or the rise of anti-immigrant xenophobia was
going to impact any of them. After all they are the “the right kind of brown,”
“the right kind of immigrants,” “good people” –– well educated Hindu
professional. They have conveniently forgotten the “Muslim ban” in India. They
have conveniently forgotten that India has her own anti-Muslim “Purinton.”
While it deeply saddens me
that both Srinivas and Harnish are dead, (and both were vicious racist
hate crime along with the shooting of Deep Rai in Kent, Washington), I am even
more sad that the right kind of brown folks continue to believe that somehow
their life is more valuable than the “wrong” kind of brown –– those that are
not a part of the group that constitute “the highest per capita income” earners
amongst the minority groups. Are the lives of the right kind of brown
folks really more valuable than the Muslims, the refugees, the Speedy Marts and
gas station owners, the Hispanics, the Blacks, the Native Americans? Are
the lives of their children more valuable than Michael Brown or Tamir Rice?
Let’s face it. Until the right
kind of brown folks can begin to acknowledge their complicity, their willful
naiveté and their turning of their blind eyes against the wrong kind of brown
–– the Indian community will be forever fragmented and even isolated in their
discourse on racism in America. A conversation about “our safety” until then
should best remain suspended.
Trump may have given the
Indian community an opportunity to grapple with this contradiction both here
and in India.
Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt a
professor at Linfield College in Oregon and also the author of the book The
Postcolonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant.
