Moments of mainstream attention offer a unique opportunity for the American public, and specifically South Asian Americans, to move past celebrating identity politics and to invest in liberation politics.
The United States has entered into a cyclone of “historic firsts” for Indian Americans—from the GOP presidential bids of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, to the whirlwind Democratic nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris.
As two female South Asian lawyers, our own stories have often been flattened and used as social currency—the token diversity hires in a majority-white industry. But these moments of mainstream attention offer a unique opportunity for the American public, and specifically South Asian Americans, to move past celebrating identity politics and to invest in liberation politics.
They failed to address us by our names, interrupted us on the court record, mistook us as ‘too passive’ and created a hostile environment where we were made to feel like our worth and competency as brown women had to be proven.
When Ramaswamy and Haley dominate the ideological narrative by proposing harmful xenophobic and transphobic policy agendas and spewing nonsensical government conspiracy theories, does their identity negate their complicity in the oppression of marginalized people? Does Vice President Harris’ identity absolve her from the harms of a “smart-on-crime” strategy she pursued as a former prosecutor—one that, even if well intended in the pursuit of justice and fairness, still reinforced the carceral state?
Our profession exposed us to countless explicit and implicit biases from judges, prosecutors and landlords’ lawyers in our prior work as public defenders. Frequently, they failed to address us by our names, interrupted us on the court record, mistook us as “too passive” and created a hostile environment where we were made to feel like our worth and competency as brown women had to be proven. Outside of courtrooms, we relatedly experienced the lack of acknowledgement from colleagues, being cultural minorities in our work and educational settings and not being offered leadership opportunities reflecting the scope of our capabilities.
Conversely, we find discussions about how our work combats anti-blackness and racial capitalism almost entirely absent in the South Asian community. When we entered the legal profession, Black Lives Matter emerged as an abolitionist slogan and principled belief that many within our South Asian communities uplifted in racial solidarity. But our culture still bases its conceptions of privilege, agency and upward mobility on elements of racism, casteism, classism, colorism and ableism.
Commending ourselves as the “model minorities” reinforces the white supremacist propaganda that our culture is monolithic and that anyone who does not conform to its traditional narrative of the South Asian “rags-to-riches-through-grueling-work” is a troublemaker. By doing this, we not only isolate ourselves from the struggles of Black liberationists and other marginalized communities, but we become complicit in holding up structures of oppression.
To elevate our visibility and representation as South Asians, we have to push each other to be uncomfortable by the times surrounding us. This does not mean reserving a space in the American conversation about racism—even though plenty of us would benefit from having one.
It means having real, intentional conversations about the ways we can internally support and acknowledge our gifts and talents.
It means making space for the voices of those who are closest to the social ills we see unfolding each and every day, acknowledging the ways that our own cultural biases and racialized stigmas cause generational harms that are fully within our control to eradicate.
It means decolonizing our hearts and minds and accepting that South Asian liberation relies on our collective liberation.
And it means, as we work with social abolitionist movements to abolish jails and prisons, decriminalize homelessness and delegitimize a callous judicial system, we must use our positions of privilege to build a world that exhibits compassion and humility for all humankind.
We cannot let representational wins be more important than liberatory wins.
Let us not forget the scores of Indian farmers who courageously mobilized in 2020 to reclaim food sovereignty, exhibiting the power of our abolitionist heritage just as we showed up as allies after the killing of George Floyd and other Black and brown lives.
The professional and the personal will always be hard to untangle, as we are living, breathing reflections of how cultural identity politics led us to becoming abolitionists in a crumbling “justice system” and gutting global struggle. The impacts of our work have repeatedly proven to us how cultural representation makes a real difference when it occupies a moral high ground and is shaped by a sensitivity to the scope of human suffering. But we cannot let representational wins be more important than liberatory wins. As South Asian daughters of immigrants who chose to dedicate our life to fighting systemic oppression and defending the vulnerable, ours should be a generation of revolutionaries.
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