Student perspectives: Blackness, colonization and South Asia

I am Niyonta. I am cis-presenting, I am physically and mentally able, and I used to represent the privileged majority in my home country before I moved to the United States at age 20. So I have cis and able-bodied privilege, some mental health privilege, some socioeconomic privilege, and childhood self-perception privilege. 

I am also a Muslim woman, a Bangladeshi expatriate, have mental health struggles, and don’t have family support. So I don’t have male privilege, religion or culture privilege, citizenship privilege, white privilege, family privilege, or typical mental health privilege.

The interaction and weighted permutations of my privileges and disadvantages allow me to have a very specific and niche relationship with myself and my current society. While I have experienced racial and xenophobic trauma in this country from people across multiple races, I am still safe, I am still fulfilled and I still have resources. I cannot pretend to be able to imagine what my life would have been if I did not have the privileges keeping me alive and thriving, elevated and mobilized, and, most importantly, acting as my safety net and defense against my disadvantages. I cannot pretend to imagine surviving any personal or social disadvantage or trauma as a Black child or adult.

As a Bangali and a Brown body, I want to give context to my specific positionality and my experience of how being black or dark is treated. Because of colonization, Blackness and darkness are dehumanized and demonized around the world, including in Bangladesh where I am from— so much so that we grow up learning dark is synonymous with ugly and light-skinned is synonymous with beautiful. South Asian and Bangladeshi media relentlessly casts light-skinned actors as protagonists and in all lead roles— even though light skin does not represent the majority— and casts dark-skinned actors as antagonists. Bangladeshi store aisles and TV commercial-time aggressively promote whitening creams such as Fair & Lovely, a skin-lightening cream manufactured by British-Dutch company Unilever and managed by their subsidiary Indian company Hindustan Unilever.

These products, popular media, and our socio-cultural ecologies in Bangladesh act as a modern and technologized colonial ploy delivering and promoting messages that we will be neither socially, romantically or professionally successful if we do not take measures to whiten our skin. This is post-Mughal empire subscription of Caucasian-Arabic-Islamic imperialism, post-colonial subscription of white and British supremacy, post-liberation war subscription of fascist light-skinned West Pakistani elitism, and postmodern Brown self-hatred which finds its roots back to India, which both Bangladesh and Pakistan used to be a part of about 70 years ago.

The caste system in India is the epitome of discrimination based on privilege, socioeconomic class, and color. Although it is currently illegalized, is still very much active systemically, institutionally, and socially. Caste according to the Oxford English Dictionary means “pure or unmixed (stock or breed).” The caste system in Hinduism, the majority religion of India, divides people into four classes with Brahmins at the top of the hierarchy and Shudras at the bottom. Dalits and tribal people are further dehumanized as outcastes and termed “Untouchables.” While it has idealistic and conceptual origins in ancient Vedic texts, the caste system was significantly influenced first by the Mughal Empire and then structured and politicized to its current state by the British Empire. Pre-colonial records show little or no mention of caste as a system of government; the caste system as we know it is the result of the colonizers, who were active as late as 1948. According to Sanjoy Chakravorty, professor of Geography, Urban Studies and Global Studies at Temple University, in his 2019 BBC article “How the British shaped India’s caste system,” the colonizers reconstructed Indian social identities to create a single-tiered society with an easily governable common law. One of many examples of systemic colorism and casteism operationalized by the British colonizers is that they elevated light-skinned and upper-caste Indians to allies and provided them systemic advantages over black and dark-skinned Indians and Dalits. 

Neha Mishra states in his 2015 article “India and Colorism: The Finer Nuances” in the Washington University Global Studies Law Review journal that colonizers named their Fort St. George settlement “White Town” and their Indian Settlement “Black Town”. Further, entry to restaurants and educational institutions was prohibited for “Black Indians” with signs stating “Indians and dogs not allowed.” Colorism was thus immiscibly incorporated into the caste system and has since then perpetuated all realms of Indian and South Asian life. Every single year, including this year, there are multiple reports of Dalits being brutalized and murdered by upper-caste rural villagers in India, with Dalit women and girls also experiencing gendered and sexual violence. This is genocidal Brahmin-supremacism and genocidal colorism, casteism, and classism. 

These are all examples of within-race colorism. None of this begins to imagine consequences for an outside-race. Even so, South Asia has slurs for Black people from the minimal exposure it has had to Black expatriates, migrants, and Black representation in American and British media. Today, some Bangladeshi communities and local businesses overtly deny service to Black foreigners. Western affiliation is perhaps the only protective factor in physical safety.

A world conditioned to function as anti-Black after more than 400 years of slavery, colonization, white supremacist trade and capitalism, and racialized war and genocide is not a safe world for Black people. I will never understand the pain and trauma Black people face every day. That is not an easy world. This world has yet to heal from hundreds of years of systemic racism against Black bodies as well as successfully dismantle power structures that— still today— maintain racial hierarchies continuing to oppress Black lives. 

As an immigrant woman of color in this country, my social and personal liberation is tied up with my Black sisters, brothers, and non-binary family. I, and other Bengali and South Asians at Utah State University, stand by our Black community. Black and Brown bodies deserve to not only be heard, but listened to, not only be seen, but looked up to, and not only respected, but honored.

—niyonta.nch@gmail.com

—isc.usu.edu