From the Silk Road to the Information Superhighway: Navigating Diversity in Global Society Amidst Terror

Last week, France finally hit the crescendo from the religious right toward the liberal left in the form of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper who have published provoking comics, attacking every group and way of life as a way to poke fun at humanity. However, it can be said that you can mean what you say, and say what you mean, but you can never control how someone feels about it. And this was just the last straw for those "extremists" living in France. 

The French government places so many restrictions on faith practices that differ from the French or Gallic way of life. Christianity is allowed to be openly expressed in the form of Christmas markets and festivals, while hijabi women are condemned for wearing their faith expression through fashion. 

The meanings of faith expressions belong to those expressing, not the government. If you ask a hijabi woman if she feels she has freedom in relation to what she's wearing, she oftentimes does. The case for forced burqas and hijabs is little, and there is quite a sense of agency that is involved in the decision to cover up. This decision many women make on their own, with guidance from family and friends, and they can revoke it at any time.

In similar fashion, post-9/11 was when my mother began to work. She wears bindis daily as an expression of our Hindu faith, and often wore traditional dresses out and about with our family. These totally acceptable means of faith expression suddenly became more questioned. Though we luckily did not experience direct threats and insults like our Muslim and Punjabi brothers and sisters, we did undergo what I call the "waves of confusion", that initial double-take when one walks in the room, just because of the color of one's skin.

We all got used to it, but it doesn't hurt any less when people ask you "Where are you from? No, really." Or when the lady working for Universal Studios tells you to introduce your family as "coming from India" whilst opening the park, because it sounds more exotic than Boston. Treating your countrymen like foreigners may be convenient, but it is also an easy way to lose countrymen. In the United States, there is a growing trend of immigrants re-emigrating to their home countries, due to economic opportunity, but also possibly in part due to the feeling of acceptance.

Unfortunately, first generation immigrants, including my family and I, have a harder time with staying or leaving because we have invested so much of our lives denying our homeland in order to achieve assimilation, acceptance, admission. When I worked in India this past summer, I questioned whether I could even survive there, because unlike a second generation immigrant or a native, born and raised, I am the transition. 

I am the arrow from India, to Singapore, to the United States. I am a third culture kid, a go-between, at home in airports more than ports. At home in ports more than farmlands.  

When I left Boston for Los Angeles,  I started understanding and experiencing those microaggressions more and more often. At USC, I was forever the girl caught between worlds. I did not quite fit right in with the second-generation, American-born desis, nor did I fully understand my Indian friends from the subcontinent. But over time, I realized that as an arrow, I connect. I work to understand and adjust. I made friends with people on both sides of the bridge, and other bridge-builders. I realized that being mistaken for Latina was as much a compliment as a misunderstanding, Latinas are unquestionable parts of the DNA of America, whereas Indians tirelessly have to prove their Americaness.

I relentlessly have to challenge people's assumptions of me, prove that I am not, in fact, a foreigner. That I have truly lived here my whole life. That I played league soccer and took ballet. That I did improv and had a solo in the school musical. When will people stop being surprised? When will people treat me like it is completely natural that I am as complex as they? 

It is easy for a white woman or even a black woman to be multitalented, but for an Asian, desi brown girl to dabble in the arts and the sciences? It is still rare to be appreciated on both fronts.

I would like to think it has gone away, it has gotten less relevant, but honestly this kind of profiling may never go out of style. Early that Wednesday January 7th morning, on my way up to Massachusetts from West Palm Beach, a TSA official ran my designer bag through many tests and questioned me. And when I asked her, jokingly, " Why does this keeps happening to me?" she replied, "It's like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder," acknowledging the elephant in the security line: my skin.

I think that white America likes to pretend that we live in a post-racial world because it keeps the onus off them to truly  be accepting and kind. Like #BlackLivesMatter so too do #MuslimsLivesMatter, and #JewishLivesMatter, & #AtheistLivesMatter. That empathetic spirit, to join rather than point fingers at, will be key for our country's core values and ideology to survive in this 21st century. 

And more than just the nationalistic spirit of #JeSuisFrancais or #JeSuisCharlie or even #JeSuisAhmed,  the open dialogue of understanding and exchange between the East and the West will be the love story of this age, if we let it. Much like the time of the Silk Road, we are in the time of global mixing of language, traditions, foods, and ways of life. The power dynamics of those relationships is shifting, too. It used to be that the West, with the UK and the United States leading the charge, were the ones to emulate. But now, with increasing credence given to Eastern practices of yoga, meditation, mindfulness, Buddhism, and Eastern medicines like Ayurveda and acupuncture, and the growing economic prowess of India and China as true superpowers, the West has finally met its match. 

The Middle East, turbulent in its cacophony of wannabe heroes and freedom fighters, is just the same as it was in those Silk Road days. With claims of new religions and new philosophies, the syncretism of ideals and understandings, only a few deemed worthy of followers, this is still the norm. The use of faith to galvanize a society was the way power was expressed throughout history, and the fight to stop history from repeating itself unchecked is the charge of all citizens in this digital age. 

With persistence & prayers peace, 

Ray 

Maithreyi 'Ray' Shankar

@reyisofsunshine

http://raysofsunshine.me