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As usual, at 2:15 every weekday afternoon, I drove past the manicured lawns of the expensive private school where my two young boys attended school, and waved to the Lollipop lady as I entered their private parking lot.
Effortlessly reverse parked my Range Rover next to the line of prestigious vehicles already lined up by elegant women waiting for their children to be released from school. I had to dress nice for daily pick up; gym leggings and a t-shirt would not cut it for the school pick-up crowd.
I quickly dabbed on my lipgloss before leaving the car, and walked past the other mothers dolled up in fashionable clothing and their Van Kleef’s necklaces adorning their usual botoxed smiles and short hellos. “Hi, how are you?” Fine thanks, I replied curtly.
When I had finally reached the outside of my older son’s 2nd grade classroom, some of the mother’s had already formed their possum around the entrance and talked and giggled with each other as if they were the best of friends.
I chatted briefly with one of the girl’s mom’s in the class who was African American about how her daughter had not been invited to a sleepover that most of the other girls in the class had been to.
Unfortunately for us, our kids were not always included in playdates and sleepovers even if we tried to arrange one with the parents. It’s just the way it has always been. I knew what it was like to be left out. We could not say out loud that it was because we were brown that my son never got invited to sleepovers either, but the quiet voices deep inside told us it was because we are brown.
Our clothes, cars, houses and the education or careers we had could not surmount the generational divide of race embedded in the American subconscious.
My own experience with colorism
Without going too far in a flashback, I remember the difficult transition I faced when my parents moved from an ethnic Indian neighborhood in Queens to the North Shore of Long Island when I was in the 4th grade.
My school was predominantly white and I was, well, what many Punjabi’s call themselves, a wheatish color. I was immediately placed into an ESL (English as a Second Language) class, without any testing or assessment of my skills. I think the assumption was that I was brown and from the ghetto, how proper could my English be?
After a week in ESL, my lovely teacher who I still remember fondly, Dr. Barruso, turned and said to me, “your English is fantastic, you don’t need ESL.” She recommended that I be put back in regular classes.
Until I became a teacher myself, about 20 years later, did I finally realize what that had been about. It wasn’t my skills or English that had been assessed, it was the assessment of my physical appearance that had landed me in a category where I did not belong.
I was put in a category all the years while in school; the Asian kid who’s smart; the girl who doesn’t cut her hair; the chic who’s not allowed to date, the kid whose family is strict. The color of my skin was not the only dividing factor that kept me separated, it was the culture behind the skin color that was alien for other teenagers at school. “Why don’t you cut your hair.” “It’s a part of my religious tradition,” I would say. “We never heard of that.” “Why don’t your parents let you sleepover?” “They don’t believe it’s right for girls to sleep at someone’s house.” “Why do you have hairy legs? the middle school boys would laugh. No answer. They would not understand even if I told them that my mom thought a 12 year old girl was too young to shave her legs.
Being brown wasn’t about being sun-kissed all year round. Being brown was about being someone who did not eat, live, or believe anything that the other kids around me did. Did I try to be anything but brown?! Of course, I did. But no amount of fruit roll ups, tie dyed t-shirts and BackStreet Boys music would erase my Brownness.
It was about feeling separated by an invisible and intangible force that no matter how Americanized I became, I would never be American enough to fit in seamlessly. Not until college and beyond, did I finally learn how to love my Brown skin, and again I don’t only mean the kind that’s exposed.
I mean the Brown that lives in my soul; the aroma of cardamom in my chai; the Mantras of my morning prayer; the colorful ring of spices adorned in the kitchen cabinet; rose essence in my favorite summer drink; the bright colors of silk sarees and lehengas lined up in my closet; the bhangra dhol beat that I love to jam to in my car; that is the Brown I am, it’s seeped into my essence, inseparable from who I am.
Krishma immigrated to the United States from India when she was five years old, and like her protagonist Mira, grew up in Long Island and then attended NYU. She is a poet, writer, and public speaker. Krishma was the author of “Free Spirit,” a regular column in her hometown magazine, Brookville Living. She has an MS in education, as well as an MS in marketing. She has also worked as a high school social studies teacher for 11 years. She lives in NY with her husband and four children. She began writing From Ash to Ashes seventeen years ago, after the death of her first child. His loss was the inspiration for her book, and she has dedicated it to his memory. In addition to From Ash to Ashes, she is also writing a nonfiction book, titled Brown Girl’s Guide, a collection of essays on womanhood and motherhood as seen through the eyes of a woman of color.
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