The Other Wilderness

By Debie Thomas

           On the morning of February 6th, a 59-year-old Indian man named Sureshbhai Patel — newly arrived in the United States to care for his infant grandson — was taking a walk near his son's suburban Alabama home when he was confronted by two white police officers.  Apparently responding to an anonymous caller who'd reported a "suspicious" looking person — a "skinny black guy" — roaming the neighborhood and looking into garages, the officers pulled their car over.

           When Patel — who speaks no English — failed to respond satisfactorily to the officers' questions, one of them grabbed him, twisted his arm behind his back, and slammed him face-first into the sidewalk.   At the time of this writing, Patel is paralyzed, even though he has undergone spinal fusion surgery to attempt repair of his back.

           The incident in its entirety was captured by the camera mounted on the dashboard of the officers' police car.  Naturally, the video has gone viral, both here and in India.  I can't bear to watch.  I can't stop watching.

           "He don't speak a lick of English," I can hear one officer saying to the other — right before he pummels the victim with more questions.  "I don't know what his problem is, but he won't move," says the other as he tries to force the bloodied and paralyzed man back onto his feet.  "You're okay, you're okay," the officers keep telling the dazed man, as it slowly dawns on them that he is anything but.

           I can't bear to watch.  I can't stop watching.

           We're now two weeks into Lent, and my usual fasts and disciplines — no dessert, no time-sucking iPhone apps, more exercise, more mindfulness — are working out just fine.  I know how to navigate the wilderness I've chosen — its terrain is familiar, its dangers meek and mild.  Best of all, my inner wilderness is luxuriously private — the only person who has stakes in it is me.  My prayer life, my carb cravings, my personal anxieties, my soul.  I can walk away from any cactus or sandstorm in the place, and no one will know.

           But this other wilderness?  This wilderness of the bloodied face, the twisted arm, the broken vertebrae?  This wilderness of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin — and how many countless others?  This wilderness of race and racism that shames, silences, oppresses, implicates and terrifies me?  I don't want to enter it.  I don't even have language to express how much I don't want to enter it.

           I've mentioned in previous essays that I'm Asian by heritage — the daughter of first-generation immigrants from South India.  I've also mentioned that my grandparents used to visit my family here in the U.S when I was a teenager.

           Here's the thing: like Patel, my grandfather took walks in our white suburban neighborhood every morning.  Like Patel, he didn't speak any English.  Perhaps like Patel, he found American houses, garages, gardens, and gadgets fascinating; he often slowed down and stared as he walked past our neighbors' homes.  Not out of rudeness, but out of simple, childlike curiosity.  It would have required just one phone call, just one fear-mongering rumor of a "suspicious black guy," wandering my upper middle class street, to make Patel's story my grandfather's.  To make it mine.

           During this season of repentance, it's with shame and contrition that I confess this fact: while every headline story of racially motivated brutality the nation has seen over the past several months shook me intellectually, it took Patel's dashcam nightmare to shake my heart.  I didn't cry over Ferguson.  I didn't tremble over Staten Island.  I didn't rage over Sanford, Florida.  Until I watched Sureshbhai Patel — a man my culture would require me to call "uncle" or even "grandfather" if I met him in person — crumple helpless to the ground, I failed to see the wilderness in my own backyard.

           This is why racism thrives: I just don't care enough until it wounds "my own."  And something in me — something inherited, something lazy, something fierce — refuses to embrace every wounded victim — every black teenager, every Muslim man, every undocumented Mexican worker, every displaced Native American — as my own.

           To be brown in America — not black, not white — is to hold racial pain in one hand, racial privilege in the other, and attempt a juggling act that is neither entertaining nor profitable.  I know what it's like to walk into a room full of white people and hate my "ugly" dark skin.  I also know what it's like to hear early and often that "white people can't be trusted."  I know what it's like to be stereotyped ("Oh you're Indian!  You must be a science nerd!"),  patronized ("How is it that you speak such good English?"), rendered invisible ("But I honestly don't see color when I look at you!"), and traumatized ("When will you effing Hindus go back to where you came from?"). 

           But I also know what it's like to grow up in a minority community that actively feared and hated black people.  A community that swallowed the lies of racist TV shows and conservative political commentators.  A community that took its own economic, educational, and social privileges for granted, and prided itself on being, "not quite white, but well, definitely not black." 

           Now that my son is almost a teenager, my husband and I are wondering when and how to give him the talk.  No, not the sex talk.  The "if you're confronted by an armed police officer, drop to your knees, put your hands up, and DO NOT RESIST IN ANY WAY," talk.  But we're gut-wrenchingly aware of the fact that if we were black, we would have given our son this talk ten years ago.

           What happened to Sureshbhai Patel is tragic and evil.  But as these incidents go, he has already seen more justice than many of his counterparts in other communities will ever see.  Most victims of race-based brutality don't get to see their perpetrators fired or charged, the FBI brought in to investigate, and the full weight of international governments and elite diasporas intervening on their behalf.

           "Is not this the fast I have chosen?" the prophet Isaiah wrote millennia ago.  "To loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free?"

           No.  It's not the fast I have chosen.  It's the fast I've avoided, the wilderness I've thus far shunned.  So this Lent, I pray for courage, more courage than I've known so far.  I pray for healing — healing for myself as both victim and perpetrator.  And I pray for hope for the countless others who walk this wilderness, too.  Please help me to see, oh God, that they have always been "my own."