Beyond the White and POC Binary: How the South Asian Community Contributes to Anti-Blackness

SRISHTI KHEMKA: Growing up, racism was always taught in the classroom as a simple binary of white people versus people of color (POC). I learned about slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, and more. The narrative was always quite clear: white people are the oppressors and people of color are the oppressed. This is accurate, but does it not paint the whole picture. Oppression and race relations go beyond that simple binary. Within the POC community, racism still runs rampant. As an Indian American myself, I have witnessed how anti-blackness is prevalent in the South Asian community. 

The most blatant way anti-blackness has persisted in the South Asian community is the model minority myth. The model minority myth characterizes several Asian American communities, among them the Indian American community, as a “polite, law-abiding group who have achieved a higher level of success than the general population through some combination of innate talent and pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps immigrant striving.” This model minority myth of being law-abiding, successful, and hardworking, is often put in direct contrast with the Latinx and especially Black communities. It is a weapon used to create a racial wedge between these communities, between the alleged “model” and “problem” minorities. And the South Asian American community, especially the middle classes and upper classes, perpetuate and enable this myth that provides them white praise and greater “respect” in the United States. Many have taken this privilege that has been handed to them and have climbed up the ladder of American society, leaving less-privileged minority communities behind.

You see phrases like “white silence is violence,” but the silence from the South Asian community in regards to racial justice for the Black community can be quite deafening as well. More than silence, there is active prejudice against the black community. In the South Asian community, you will hear the whispers of disapproval of interracial relationships and marriages between South Asian and Black people. You will hear slurs created to offend darker-skinned people, which originate from Indian colorism, occasionally used against the Black community. The white community is not the only community that participates in oppressing the Black community. Many members of the South Asian community have enabled continued racial injustice for the Black community either with their silence or prejudice.

With all that said, there have also been clear efforts in the South Asian community to address anti-blackness and to actively participate in dismantling it. There have been social media campaigns like South Asians 4 Black Lives, South Asian protestors in the streets supporting the Black Lives Matter movement during the summer of 2020, instances like a South Asian restaurant owner in Minneapolis saying “Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served.” when his restaurant was damaged during one of the protests. People across the South Asian community have been also having more open discussions about their own prejudices. However, the Black Lives Matter movement is far from over. As racial injustice continues to plague the United States, the South Asian community must continue to reckon with its own anti-blackness and understand the unique role it has in relation to racial injustice.

Srishti Khemka is an editor for On the Record and a sophomore in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service pursuing a major in Science, Technology, and International Affairs and minoring in French.