On the color of my skin

The title of this post is heavily inspired by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s recent blog post about the systemic racism he has experienced in his life and his encounters with law enforcement. I’d highly recommend reading it. We’re currently in the midst of a massive civil rights movement demanding justice and equality for Black lives following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. This has happened countless times before and will continue to happen until major police reform acts are passed, until the police budget is severely defunded, and until local governments vow to demilitarize the police.

The situation quickly escalated from peaceful civil disobedience demanding justice to extreme police brutality against peaceful protests to an uprising against a fascist dictatorship in a matter of days. In the protests against police violence, the riot police assaulted and attacked peaceful protestors completely unprovoked, all across American cities. They kettled and teargassed peaceful crowds for no reason whatsoever. And in the most shameful display in United States history, The White House teargassed peaceful protestors at Lafayette Park so that our “President of Law & Order” could walk to a nearby church to hold a bible upside down and get his photo taken. This was aired live on the news worldwide. No amount of denying or spinning this around at press conferences will make up for the fact that the world saw it happen live. There is currently also a Twitter thread of over 500 documented instances of unprovoked police violence against peaceful protesters that’s rapidly gaining traction.

And this in turn, is causing America to re-think itself. 54% of Americans believed that burning down the Minneapolis police station was justified in light of the Floyd’s death. Police using extreme violence at the protests only caused more Americans to show up at the protests. Riot police attacking news crews, press, reporters, and journalists is captured on film and broadcast to the entire world. White Americans are speaking out instead of staying silent and ignoring the problem. White parents are talking to their kids and racist relatives about race. WASPs are confronting the fact that their privilege and freedoms are only upheld by the pillars of slavery, systemic oppression, and racial injustice against Black Americans. The entire world seems united in this fight, and it is very different than previous civil rights movements for that very reason.

As a brown person, I’m no stranger to racism. I moved from India to the United States at the age of fifteen in 2006, and was immediately confronted with having to fit in to a very different type of society. In India, I rarely ever saw non-Indian people. So upon coming to America, I loved the fact that I got to interact with so many different ethnic groups. But throughout high school, college, and even my professional career, there’s always been an underlying layer of racism that I could never look away from. I’ve just accepted it as a part of living in America, but a shocking number of White Americans only now seem to be waking up and acknowledging this fact, so I wanted to share what it’s actually like being a minority in this “great nation”. I don’t mean to take attention away from the Black Lives Matter movement by sharing my experiences of racism against Indian-Americans. Fighting racial injustice against Black lives is currently and will continue to be the most important thing we need to be fighting for, and I only hope for this post to serve as a reminder that racism is not a problem you can just look away from and hope that it fixes itself eventually. It needs active engagement and involvement from the White community to solve it.

One of my most recent jobs involved a lot of overseas travel to countries abroad where I got to prototype and test my designs with users in many different markets. When getting ready to depart to the airport with my White co-workers, I would mention that I’m planning to be at the airport by 3:00 PM to catch our 6:00 PM flight. They respond with jokes and memes like “wow are you even a frequent flyer” or would flood our group chat with personal anecdotes about how they usually get to the airport twenty minutes before boarding and still make it in time. This is one of my favorite examples to bring up because it involves willful ignorance and denial that racism exists. Even if it’s unconscious, even if you didn’t realize it, it still exists.

The reason I get to the airport three hours early is because I never know when I’ll be questioned and interrogated for hours on end about why I’m going to this specific country or what I plan to do there or who I’m going with. This is because of the color of my skin. Post-9/11 security processes in the United States have unfairly targeted brown Americans and you know it. This is remarkably common when returning to the United States from abroad, where US passport agents and locally hired security teams with little to no bias training will immediately assume that anyone who’s not White is probably not American. I get to the airport three hours early because I never know when I’ll be “randomly selected” for a routine search. Meanwhile, I get to watch my White friends joke about how one time, they forgot their driver’s license at home but the TSA agent let them on for a domestic flight anyway because he liked the fact that they were wearing a sports team jersey that the TSA agent happened to be a fan of. That right there is a prime example of systemic racism and white privilege.

And what about the workplace? Many white people think diversity means simply hiring a bunch of people of color and stopping right there. They plaster faces of Black and Asian employees in diversity panels and brag about high minority statistics in their employee makeup. What is the value of all this if you’re not proactively doing anything to actually make sure they feel valued and included in the company? Tech is actually the prime example of this.

Employee “outings” in the tech world include things like ski retreats or golf trips. This is almost always organized by a vocal white person who assumes, naively, that it’ll be a nice way for everyone to kick back and relax with co-workers. Did you ever stop to think who you might be excluding? Black and Asian people don’t really ski or ice skate that much. Wonder why? It requires a lot of specialized equipment that were not accessible to them growing up, so they never had the privilege of participating in these sports. Many South Asian folks, myself included, have never “hit the slopes” or tried ice skating because we come from a sub-tropical climate where it never snows. This is why football is the most popular sport in the world. Because it’s the most accessible sport. It literally requires one ball to play and two nets on either side (which can be makeshift poles if needed). It was incredibly intimidating the first time I was invited to a ski trip. I wanted to hang out with my co-workers and get to know them a little bit better, but I really didn’t want to ski. I tried and practiced it (I was horrible), but it just wasn’t my cup of tea. Since then, I’ve declined invitations to two design “conferences” that were actually just an excuse to ski while attending two random talks that revolved around ski analogies. Massive eyeroll.

The ski trip is a prime example of unintentionally excluding people of color from your company, but this isn’t limited to sports. Almost every tech company has happy hours or outings that involve consuming alcohol. Have you ever realized that many don’t drink either by choice or due to religious beliefs? A lot of people of color immediately feel excluded from events like these because they were never privileged enough during high school and college to simply drink for leisure. They were too busy fighting injustice or studying intensely in a highly competitive academic environment or just figuring out how to immigrate to a different country. Many of us cave in to the peer pressure around this eventually, and this is how a toxic culture of “white bros” develops in tech.

Let’s talk about the cops, because boy is this relevant now more than ever. Back in college, I was once walking down a quiet street late at night with a couple of my White friends when we witnessed an accident. A bicyclist collided with a parked car and hit the ground pretty hard. There was a loud scream and we could tell that she was in extreme pain. One of my White friends ran to go get first aid from one of our friends that lived nearby, while my other White friend immediately called the cops. They arrived on the scene a few minutes later, called an ambulance with an EMT, and we explained what we saw. The cyclist was fine and had a pretty fast recovery after a few days in the hospital. That entire night, I didn’t sleep because I was up wondering what I would’ve done if I didn’t have my White friends by my side.

I could not believe that my White friends didn’t hesitate to call the cops and decided to immediately get involved and administer First Aid. Because I know exactly what my reaction would’ve been if I had witnessed this accident by myself. Here’s what my mind would’ve done: “Oh god, what just happened? Shit, she seems to be in a lot of pain. Crap, I should get some help. Should I call the cops? Will they believe me when I say that she just slammed into the car by herself? Will they think I had something to do with it and that I’m trying to cover it up? They’re probably going to arrest me. Should I just not get involved? Is it best to just walk away right now and pretend I didn’t see this? Shit, she really needs help, I’m not sure what do right now.”

Yeah, I bet that was painful to read. Your immediate reaction is probably “Why on Earth would you not help someone who’s bleeding on the street?”. Well, because I don’t have the presumption of innocence that a White person does when the cops show up. Because I wasn’t a US citizen yet and any involvement with law enforcement could be used against my visa and work permit. Because I don’t trust the police in a predominantly White city and college campus to recognize their unconscious bias against minorities. Because I was taught by my parents to keep my head down and not “poke my nose” into problems that aren’t my own. Because I’ve seen my minority friends and minority parents try to explain their side of the story to law enforcement only to fall on deaf ears.

Given all this, is it any wonder that a vast majority of Black and Asian women do not report sexual assault crimes? Who’s going to believe or help them? The police? Give me a break. Is it any wonder that most police killings and assaults go entirely unreported? Is it any wonder at all that systemic racism is deeply entrenched into a police system that originated out of slave catchers in Southern states and evolved to be the way of modern policing with no accountability or oversight while being protected by police unions all the way? Yeah, welcome to the revolution.

In November 2016, when Donald Trump won the election, I was shaken to the core. I had massive group chats with my Indian friends, my Asian friends, my Black friends, and so many more that were worried about what was going to happen to us. We talked and exchanged our worries until 5:00 AM in the morning. I remember long streams of everyone going “FUCK! FUCK! FUUUUCKK!” when we were all at a loss for words. I wasn’t sure if I should go into work the next day. I hadn’t slept well. And yet I did. I was working at a small tech startup in Boston at the time, and our CEO made some blanket statement about how “it’s not the end of the world”. He mentioned that the ideas Trump has for the US economy will actually boost business. He said something along the lines of “the sun will still rise tomorrow.” He was white.

While our CEO was saying this, I was staring blankly at my co-workers, who were mostly white tech bros, to see if any of them were as worried as I was. It was in this moment that I realized this impacts me in a very different way than it does White Americans. To them, the worst that could happen is their idea of a just President be defamed by this moronic reality TV star. The worst that could happen is him deregulating environmental protections, refusing to acknowledge climate change, rolling back worker protections to make him billionaire friends richer, and maybe, just maybe, in the worst case scenario, he tries to tear down American democracy. And yes, these are all very problematic issues, but none of them shook me to the core as much as him accelerating racial tensions and spreading misinformation about minorities was. I know climate change is the most important issue of our time, but racial injustice seemed to hit at a way more personal level.

When Trump won, all the opinion pieces by Asian-American journalists and writers were being dismissed as alarmist or overly sensational. Well, within months, he had a Muslim ban going that wrongly targeted and singled out seven Muslim-majority countries. He said there were “fine people on both sides” when White supremacists ran over a woman in Charlottesville. He attacked immigrants ruthlessly for “stealing American jobs” and even provoked violence against them, causing the rise of extreme right-wing nationalist groups. And well, the sun is technically still rising over a barricaded White House amidst tear gas that’s clearing out in the morning dew as military helicopters buzz around Washington D.C. this morning. Thinkpieces are coming out in droves about the death of American democracy and how we might fight a fascist dictatorship. Welcome to the lives of minorities.

I’m not sure if you got anything useful out of reading this, but if you’re a White American, take a minute to at least recognize that racial minorities live in a very different America than you do. It’s not okay to make jokes about how we’re treated because of the color of our skin. It’s not okay to stand by the sidelines as you literally watch oppression unfold in front of your eyes. Being able to call the cops when you witness injustice is a privilege that many of us don’t have. We literally don’t think they’ll believe us when we call them. If you want to educate yourself about how systemic racism played directly into mass incarceration, do yourself a favor and watch 13th on Netflix. It does an incredible job at laying out how conservative American politicians have been twisting loopholes in the Thirteenth Amendment for decades now to essentially continue slavery through the prison-industrial complex.

Police are literally taught to assume every Black or Latino person is a potential threat and are incentivized to imprison them, place unaffordable bail amounts on their release, and then force them to plead guilty and take a plea bargain instead of ever giving them a fair chance at trial. The system was designed for this and is working as designed, out of sight for most white Americans who are consistently told by republican propaganda that “violent criminals” need to be kept locked up behind bars or else all hell will break loose in their peaceful suburban neighborhoods. And most of them fall for it. It’s disgusting.

So yeah, Black Lives Matter. Racism exists. It’s systemic and built into every form of American “justice”. It’s a shocker that Black people are only demanding for equality and to not be killed for being Black instead of outright calling for slavery reparations. Be glad that they don’t want revenge. Discrimination and exclusion is real. I’ve experienced it. Every person of color you know has experienced it. Even if you think your workplace or community is immune from all of this, let me tell you it’s not. Ask any Black person in your workplace. And yeah, the policing system is the worst offender of all this. Police violence and brutality against racial minorities to uphold some hypothetical “law & order” that was spun up out of the War on Drugs in the 80’s and 90’s is still continuing and is well alive today, as evidenced by the thousands of videos documenting police brutality in the past few weeks. So yeah, we don’t call the police.

Just even thinking that the police exist to “protect and serve” is such a massive delineation from our line of thinking that it just boggles the mind to think that it took until we got to 2020 to bring mainstream awareness towards all of this. It’s maddening that yet another Black man had to die at the hands of the police and that it had to be captured on video for the full eight minutes and forty eight seconds to get White Americans to wake up. Well, better late than never. We’re all in this together. We’ll fighting a respiratory virus, an economic recession, racial injustice, police violence, and a tyrannical government all at once. Equality and justice is not a lot to ask for. Stand with us and fight with us until sweeping policy reforms are passed. Or we’ll continue to witness more of what we saw with George Floyd for years to come.