Racist/Not Racist

a test case

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This last Friday night in Seattle, Diane and I walked through a hotel lobby on our way to a comedy show. There’s at least two restaurants and a coffee shop in the hotel so the lobby was fragrant with delicious scents.

“Is that scallops?” my wife asked of one stronger smell.

“Yes,” I said and was about to add “and curry” but then spotted an Indian American hotel employee standing nearby in his suit, tie, and nametag. And I mean Indian from India not my kind of reservation-raised Indian. So I didn’t say anything about the smell of curry.

Why did I refrain from saying “curry” within earshot of that Indian dude? You might know the reason. But let me go on a tangent to more fully explain why I refrained.

My wife and I are Native American, yes, but we’re also ambiguously ethnic. We’ve been mistaken for all sorts of brown-skinned people from different cultures and countries. Two years ago, a convenience store worker thought that I was from India like him and that my wife was Pakistani.

Yeah, my wife and I were American Indians interacting with an Indian American who hadn’t yet spent much time among American Indians.

That Indian convenience store worker’s English skills were still developing so I ended up identifying my wife and I as “casino Indians, slot machine Indians.” All of us laughed when he finally understood who and what we are.

This is what happens among brown people. We’re always on the lookout for one another. We’ve always got out radar detectors going. And sometimes we rely on stereotypes to define ourselves. We often give each other the ambiguously-ethnic head nod because that brown stranger in the mall or movie theater might be of our race.

And now certain white, brown, and black people will rush to say, “But, Sherman, race is just a social construct.” And my response is always, “What makes you believe that social constructs don’t have real world effects, both negative and positive? More pointedly, why do you need to believe such a thing?”

White strangers love to discover that I’m Native American. They’ll immediately tell me about all the Natives they’ve ever known. I like to joke that every white guy had a Native best friend in high school.

My high school best friend was a white guy named Doug.

Hi, Doug!

And now I’ll return to that hotel lobby.

I didn’t say “curry” because I was looking at that Indian American hotel employee and knew that he might’ve thought I was speaking of his personal scent. And, yeah, I’m quite aware that he was also ambiguously ethnic. Maybe he wasn’t Indian. In any case, regardless of his race, he might’ve been insulted if I’d said “curry” while looking at him. He might’ve thought that I was being a racist asshole.

But, being highly conscious of the ways in which we brown people have to navigate our way through the white world, I was instantly aware that “curry” can become a racist word.

But a white person could’ve easily been unaware of those cultural and political conditions.

In that hotel lobby, a white wife might have asked, “Is that scallops?”

And a white husband might’ve said “and curry” while just casually looking at that Indian hotel employee.

And that white dude could’ve easily been accused of being racist. Just imagine if somebody had managed to catch that moment on video and posted it to social media.

Imagine that white guy, in the stormy aftermath, saying on TikTok, “But the lobby did smell like curry. I love curry.”

Just imagine how “I love curry” might as well have been the epitaph on his social tombstone.

If that white dude had been punished in that fashion then it would’ve been wildly unfair. It would’ve been morally, culturally, and politically wrong. He would’ve been innocent.

As my wife and I exited the hotel lobby, I said to her, “I almost said it smelled like curry while looking at that Indian dude.”

She laughed because she immediately understood all the mores and meaning of that moment.

By the way, my wife and I were on our way to see Aziz Ansari, the Indian American comedian. At one point during his show, Ansari razzed an Indian American wife/white American husband in the front row for having a daughter named “Madolyn,” one of the whiter names of all time.

But Ansari was razzing them because he’s married to a white woman—a Danish citizen—and they live in England. And they’re currently trying to conceive a baby who’ll be born into an interracial marriage with all of its cultural, theological, and political complications and delights.

So what am I trying to say here?

Well, dear white people, I know, when it comes to race, that you’re often gingerly tiptoeing your way across a social minefield. I know that you’re often running through a political obstacle course.

But I’m not going to judge you if you’re inadvertently step on a mine. I might even grab your amputated reputation and hope that it can be reattached. I’m not going to condemn you if you accidentally trip and fall into a water hazard. I might even offer you a dry towel.

This is just to say that I’m good at knowing what racism is and what racism isn’t and I’m going to do my best to always make that distinction.