Honorary Whiteness and the Meaning of American

From yesterday's Washington Post Op-Ed Page ... a response to George Allen and his Macaca mess. A great essay.

On Becoming A 'Real American'
By John J. Thatamanil
Sunday, August 27, 2006; Page B07

From adolescence on, I heard a constant refrain from my Indian
father: "Don't ever believe that you're really American." I found
his advice peculiar, especially as I had been living in America
since age 8 and had largely forgotten my time in India. To him, it
didn't matter that the only language in which I could think a
complex thought was English. It didn't matter that the only music I
listened to was Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees and Billy Joel.

My father's dictum infuriated me, in part because I took his comment
to be racist. Did he mean that only white people count as real
Americans? What about African Americans, let alone Indian Americans?
I have insisted ever since that in America, what makes someone an
American is citizenship, not race or ethnicity.

This month -- after hearing Sen. George Allen call an Indian
American, born in this country, "macaca" -- I better appreciated my
father's sober wisdom. What he meant to say is now apparent: "You
will never be accepted as truly American." Education, meaningful
work and financial success can get immigrant minorities only so far.
For some, whiteness will always be a prerequisite for being
American. Conveying that message might not have been Allen's intent,
but it certainly was the effect.

What's the lesson to be learned from this episode? Must South Asians
and other immigrants resign themselves to second-class status -- at
least in the eyes of some? Of course "class" is the wrong word here.
Indian Americans are, statistically speaking, the wealthiest
immigrant group in the nation. We do experience discrimination and,
on rare occasions, violence, as some Sikhs did right after Sept. 11,
2001. But discrimination has not had marked economic consequences.
It is more often experienced by South Asians as a subtle matter of
failed recognition: We are either rendered hyper-visible, marked out
as different as S.R. Sidarth was made to feel by George Allen or, in
other circles, rendered invisible because we are accorded the status
of "honorary whites." Membership in that exclusive fraternity is
granted so long as difference is suppressed.

The Allen incident offers evidence that America is not now or likely
to ever be a color-blind country. How are South Asians to live with
this truth? Resignation is not the answer. Vigorous political
participation is. My youthful intuition that what makes me as
American as any Mayflower descendant is citizenship -- not race or
ethnicity -- was only partly on the mark. The piece of paper that
validates our identities as American citizens can do only so much if
we do little to struggle for recognition.

There is also a second lesson to be learned from this incident.
South Asian political engagement cannot be driven solely by the
private interests of a single racial or ethnic group. America's
obsession with color has a long history that South Asians forget at
their peril. Indian Americans and other affluent immigrant groups
would do well to remember the civil rights struggles of African
Americans and others without whom a racially inclusive American
nation would have been impossible. The Immigration and
Naturalization Act of 1965, which opened the door to people from the
Eastern Hemisphere, must be recognized as the fruit of a larger
struggle to expand the meaning of the term "American," a struggle
fought on our behalf before our arrival.

The aspiration to honorary whiteness -- motivated by the hope that
success alone will entitle Asians to equality within American life --
betrays the memory of that long conflict. Only by making common
cause with African Americans, only by joining with other immigrant
groups that have not been as fortunate, can South Asian immigrants
resist America's troubled racial history and embrace its best
aspirations for a truly democratic and inclusive future. That is a
legacy I hope to transmit to my 8-year-old daughter, who is herself
a lovely perpetual tan, a combination of my brownness with the
lighter tone of her Ohio-born mother, who is herself part German,
part English and part Native American.

In the near term, what this means is that Americans of color should
work together to ensure that politicians who can see the many shades
and hues of American life only as exotic, foreign or even un-
American have no role in shaping our common future.

The writer is assistant professor of theology at Vanderbilt Divinity
School in Nashville. He is the author of "The Immanent Divine: God,
Creation, and the Human Predicament. An East-West Conversation."