Brutal Honesty Thanksgiving

Suppressed majorities

It’s thanksgiving season now. The turkey jokes are flying around, waiting to be slaughtered and rehashed over dinner. The weather is bludgeoning us with its pre-winter cold grey drab mallets. The trees have ended their resistance and accepted their bare fate for the next few months. Yet, or perhaps despite the coldness, I am finding it terrifyingly easy to summarize what I am thankful for this time.

I am thankful for the recently found honesty in United States and of her people.

It’s been a long time coming. My love-hate relationship with the United States had reached levels of neutrality while I was in Germany. Yet, I maintained that I knew her and her people very well. My decision to return was entirely based on that assumption. I smugly told my wife what she could expect and what she shouldn’t. I shared my observations about her people, restaurants and gas stations. And for about a year, they held true. Almost as if they were facts.

But in weeks before election-day, doubts started seeding in my head. I started to rethink everything. I went from being comfortable in a party of friends and strangers to being the odd one out in a sea of white. The day after Election Day, I finally exhaled painfully in knowing how little I had understood about her and about them in first place.

My string of misunderstandings goes back to 2003. Every conversation I had with an American was saved in my head and analyzed for findings. I took pride in understanding their friendly distances. The sheer number of foreigners around me convinced me that it is the norm. I believed that Americans are inherently welcome and aren’t threatened by our accents, dressing styles and our jackets that smell of turmeric based cooking. I convinced myself that Americans are simple folks who are content, minding their own business. On several occasions, I almost wanted to warn them of their simplicity and how they could lose their place in the line if they weren’t careful. It is not that i trusted them blindly but I wasn’t afraid of them.

And while I was busy teaching myself these obvious non-truths, I missed all the signs that pointed to a different America. It wasn’t the boiling pot that was marketed within and outwards but rather a slow cooked stew that needed sieving. Back in 2005, when the maintenance guy in Trent Mesa, Texas refused to call me by my name, I passed it off as it being middle-of-nowhere-Texas-normal. Yet, in 2006, in Farmington Hills, Michigan some of the educated engineers were still taking weeks before saying my name. Even in my Frisbee leagues in Ann Arbor, most liberal of folks shyed away from my different-ness. People called me ‘Sir’ in the stores when the others got called by the first names while picking up their orders. I recall all the grimacing when an American had to call out my name at a restaurant or a hair salon. Suddenly, I realize that in 2005 that punk-ass kid in Pennsylvania who taunted me by not being able understand my English wasn’t being a jackass. He was merely communicating, what his parents could not, to me at work or at the grocery store.

I defended the ease of integration in the United States in other place vehemently. But in essence I was mixing up white politeness and indirectness as being integrated. It didn’t matter how much I knew about PAC 12 or grilled cheese, I was never going to belong to the majority here. I am much too brown, my English employed strange words and I didn’t grow up with zip drives. In Germany, my being round hole in square pig was obvious. Here the fit fell apart when you made it past the first level of ‘HI’s. It was closeted before and now it is finally let out. Differences weren’t being celebrated but questioned.

I am not cynical. To be cynical is to imply anger. Rather, I feel quite the opposite. This clarity is uplifting. It might be disappointing to know that people I thought I knew aren’t what they appear to be. But I am not mad at them. These colleagues and friends of mine, who we have been working alongside for decades now, how would they understand what singling out on basis of color or religion feels? They might even condemn it but they wouldn’t ever feel the effect of its widespread usage. They are the polite majority. I am a visitor, a minority. This allows them to vote for someone who promotes this kind of discrimination because they genuinely don’t understand or care about its impact. Their intent might be noble but their nonchalant attitude to the effect is the reality of majorities. It does make perfect sense. Back home in India, I belong to majority and so do my parents and friends. And yet when our questionable secular prime-minister suppresses the minorities or free speech, the majority comes to his rescue. It is universal. Societies that repress its own majorities aren’t sustainable. Why should the white Americans feel otherwise?

I have been in exile since 2003. I left seeking success at an age where I didn’t even know what that meant. I have lived in two countries since and have a fair idea know that success is at best fleeting, regardless of the postal code. But it took a crazy election for me finally understand my relationship with this current abode. I am so thankful for the utter honesty it has brought about in this land. That I can finally see the Americans as they are, whom in their deepest level, are just white. I can adapt wonderfully but I can’t change my appearance and the color of my skin. This is the rawest of differences that can’t be overlooked or concealed. Luckily, I can also be thankful for those who play a significant role in my life. My loved one and my family is shockingly patient and loving with my melancholic stance on things . I abhor the additional pounds but yet my two legs motor on for miles. I miss reading important emails at work but stand a chance to make history.

Ironically, in this new found and yet troublesome understanding of the United States, I am literally and finally home-less no more. And that is plenty to be thankful for.