Skin deep and deeper

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to do something unprecedented:

That right there - that is me. Of COURSE I always look exactly like that :-D. As you can see, I look sort of - well, you know. Unspecified. What ethnicity would you say I was? Do you have one particular idea en tête, or would you hedge your bets?

Anyone who reads this blog regularly (not a lot of you, I'd warrant) knows that I'm of Indian extraction. The only person to ever guess that correctly, however, was a Turkish man. The most frequent guesses are Iranian, Greek, Spanish and Turkish. The first two in particular.

So, what was the point of all this apparent navel-gazing and skin-based angsting? Well, this post was inspired by a sarky comment in response to a comment of mine. The poster wrote:

Personally I've yet to cash in on my white male privilige, but if I could get one of the brotherhood to get me a well-paid sinecure, a detatched house in Shropshire & a ridiculously beautiful wife I'd be grateful. The system surely wouldn't leave one of its own living on a council estate in Stoke, would it? But I must have been absent on the day they taught us how to exploit our advantages...

This didn't make me as angry as it might've. Strange formulation that - but accurate. I think the fact that the poster didn't dismiss the notion of privilege outright gave me hope. I got a picture of somebody who doesn't fully understand how racial privilege works (fair enough, it's not particularly easy to explain or understand).

I decided to strike back at this using my own personal experience. Many white people, especially those who are of working-class backgrounds but educated (like this fella was) have a hard time accepting the fact that they have an advantage over people who aren't white. Given that there are highly successful middle-class Asians and blacks in this country, you can sort of almost see what they mean.

However, the fact is that 90% of this country's population is white, and if you don't belong to a 'model minority' (read: if you're Muslim), your life is NOT going to be easy, because if there's one thing the papers hate more than chavs, it's you. Let's not forget the fact that many who claim to be Islamophobes are actually 'Muslimphobes'. For people like that, supporters of the BNP and similar - the technicalities are unimportant. The colour of your skin says it all.

Hence this post. I have always made people uncomfortable. Sometimes it's something I enjoy, sometimes it's highly isolating. When I was younger and trying hard to be what my family wanted, I actually felt bad about the way I look. Why couldn't I look more like other Sikhs in my area? Why wasn't I a 'proper' Asian girl? Most of the Asian teenage girls I knew were identikit black-clad, feather-haired clones. However, as well as dress, their complexions and features united them. Most of them had a skin tone like Parminder Nagra's or Konnie Huq's, and were either long and skinny or tiny and skinny.

My family are all quite fair by Indian standards, but I was most definitely the freak. Naturally, this HAD to be topped off by my having a rounded body with large breasts. The day of reckoning, when I faced down my actual size, was terrifying enough without my mother's input. We were going to India soon afterwards, and I had to get bras my actual size. 'I'll get a few here and some in India,' I told her.
'No!' I knew she was appalled that I had let her down by allowing myself to be so un-Asian, but this was a bit much... 'They won't have them. Your size doesn't exist in India.'

I thought this was a joke. It wasn't. Every time we went shopping and even remotely neared a rack of underwear-type garments, I would start looking, with no success. Underwear aside, even most of the 'Western' clothes could only have been worn by me when I was hitting adolescence! My body was wrong. My face was most definitely wrong - I realised my features were not tiny and delicate, and I didn't have huge eyes like Indian women are often expected to have. Nor was I anywhere near being a Bollywood actress.

Men and women alike gawped at me and gave me hostile stares while I was in India. In France, people automatically asked where I was from whenever we were introduced, and when I was there with my ex-boyfriend (who is unmistakably Asian in comparison) we got some looks of absolute loathing. Even in this country, once I venture out of the little Asian enclave where I grew up, I notice people looking at me sharply. Some people are just curious of course, but the fact is that I make others uncomfortable. They can't 'place' me automatically, they can't fit characteristics and assumptions to me just like that. It should be fun, but it's often not. South Asian women often give me hostile and disapproving looks. I don't totally blame them for it, because Indian culture obsessively prizes fair-skinned women, leading to the coinage of the famously awkward term 'wheatish' in matrimonial adverts. Old white women have looked at me with a kind of disgust. That was just when I was with my white boyfriend!

On my own (and with him), I have had to deal with territorial behaviour and disapproving glances from Arab and Asian men alike. I've occasionally had white tourists look at me for that bit too long. I think the problem is that I look so close to white, but for those who are looking hard, my features have something oddly Arabic about them. My hair's a bit too dark. I'm not as rosy as a white person should be; nor am I white enough. Though it might sound crazy, sometimes I catch myself worrying that people look at us together because they think that I am 'not white enough for him'. Why do I even have to worry about shit like that?!

The point I'm trying to make, is that this just goes to show that white privilege does exist. Just because people aren't aware of how it works, or don't consciously choose to exploit it, it doesn't mean that it's not there. The only other people I know who've had similar experiences to mine are a) Asians/blacks who are perceived as 'wanting to be white' ('coconuts' or 'chickpeas', as I've been called myself) and b) mixed-race people. If you're white in this country, you're part of the majority and you get to be invisible. Even in London, where everyone wants to be invisible. Not even consciously, but recently I have perhaps begun trying to 'pass' more than previously. I say 'not consciously' because I do want to look different to other Asian girls, but not for research's sake - just because I love colour! The more I've tried to 'pass,' the more I see that I can't, not fully, but that it is advantageous to do so. Who thinks indie girls are 'exotic,' after all?

The whole thing doesn't generally bother me that much, because I like to have both parts to my identity: British and Asian. 'White' and 'brown.' Still, everyone has times where they want to belong, where it feels safer to be part of a pack, and frankly, I can't choose. Many middle-class Asian kids like to think they can 'choose' their identities by pretending to be black, but it doesn't really work. They are almost all eventually faced with the choice of being 'true to themselves,' being 'black' or being 'white.' Usually, 'true to themselves' means acting black for a while, then shifting back to becoming like a white middle-class person, with the extra Asian culture thrown in for good measure. White people never really get made to 'choose' unless it's the tired old narrative of 'selling out their class' by moving up socially. Even then, it's on one front. Try having to 'choose' twice over! Minority cultures dismiss their own for acting 'white,' but white people are allowed to 'act black.' For example, consider how common it is to have white rap artists (Beastie Boys, Eminem, Asher Roth, Skinnyman, etc. etc.); how many black or Asian artists can you think of who are as well-established in 'white' forms of music (country, indie, electro)? Kele from Bloc Party, TV On The Radio, er... Their (white people's) identity is not getting erased by their doing so - because they are over-represented everywhere in mainstream popular culture (and even more so in 'high' culture). To be invisible and yet omnipresent. What is that, if not privilege?