On Being Brown in America

Courtesy of FBI After initial footage of the suspects in the Boston bombings was released by the F.B.I., rumors started that one of them was an Indian-American student.

The recent bombings in Boston threw up many questions. One of the most pressing, in my somewhat narrow view, is the meaning of being brown in America.

On April 17, two days after the bombs went off during the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring almost 200 others, CNN’s John King went on air to say that the suspect was a “dark-skinned male.” In the CNN video, which shows that the time of the broadcast was 1.15 p.m. on Wednesday, we see King pointing to a photograph from the front-page of The New York Times. A positive identification had been made based on a surveillance video from a Lord & Taylor store just outside the frame of the picture in the Times, King said. A little later that afternoon, King would go on to assure viewers that a subsequent arrest had been made.

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No one had been arrested that day, of course, and, alas, there was no dark-skinned male. What is remarkable is that even while first reporting his piece of “exclusive” news, CNN’s King felt it necessary to qualify what he was saying. The qualifications he offered were not about the haste with which he was sharing a piece of misinformation, or the bewildering lack of specificity in his description, or even the absence of adequate verification. Instead, his remarks appeared to suggest to his viewers that he couldn’t be more open with them because of politically correct sentiments that complicated open disclosures of “game changers” that the police had uncovered:

“I was told they have a breakthrough in the identification of the suspect, and I’m told â€" and I want to be very careful about this because people get very sensitive when you say these things â€" I was told by one of these sources who’s a law enforcement official that this was a dark-skinned male… The official used some other words. I’m not going to repeat them until we get more information because of the sensitivities. There are some people who will take offense even in saying that.”

Some people! Who are they?

Frankly, I’m not among them. I was listening to King and wishing we were back in the days when we could say what we were really thinking. I mean the good old days even before television. Consider, for instance, W. Somerset Maugham’s famous short story from the 1920s about an Englishman, a detective named Ashenden, charged with the responsibility of catching a dark-skinned male named Chandra. Chandra was an Indian nationalist plotting against the colonial rule, a man “at the heart of plots to embarrass the British in India.” He had also been involved in two or three bombings that had killed “a few innocent bystanders” and, more seriously, shaken “the nerves of the public and so damaged its morale.” Here is the detective’s response when shown Chandra’s picture:

Evening Standard/Getty Images British novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham.

“To Ashenden, unused to Oriental faces, it looked like any of a hundred Indians that he had seen. It might have been the photograph of one or other of the rajahs who come periodically to England and are portrayed in the illustrated papers. It showed a fat-faced, swarthy man, with full lips and a fleshy nose; his hair was black, thick, and straight, and his very large eyes even in the photograph were liquid and cow-like. He looked ill-at-ease in European clothes.”

Vivid language. And such ease of description. This is an advantage of being white â€" one of the advantages, at least, although I know I’m merely speculating about a large group â€" you can judge others and yet never suspect that you are merely telling your version of the truth. Even I, with my swarthy skin and timid soul, am taken in by the pose. And I nearly fall over with gratitude when, a paragraph later, looking at another photograph of Chandra’s, Ashenden concedes that “in his turban and long, pale tunic he was not without dignity.”

I’m inclined to feel a bit sorry for John King, ruffled by the sensitivities of others. But the fact is that he needn’t have worried about at least a portion of his audience. Even after his mistake had been corrected and the Tsarnaev brothers identified as the suspects, the Internet presented stark examples of bigotry and ignorance: “I Can’t believe that pair in the Boston bombing was NOT Towel heads!!! They are Czechoslovakian!”

So it would appear that some Americans cannot tell the difference between nations. An even larger number, certainly thousands of users on the Internet site Reddit, were unwilling to distinguish between individuals. The amateur detectives on Reddit saw it fit to declare from the photographs circulating on the Web that they had identified the suspect as a Moroccan-American youth, Salah Eddin Barhoum, a spectator at the marathon. Others found it equally easy to spread the entirely baseless rumor that the FBI was saying Suspect No. 2 was Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student missing since the middle of March.

This behavior isn’t entirely the product of the Internet. In fact, it is not even new. It has its roots in history and, arguably, in law. Let us go back to the days even before Maugham had his detective Ashenden looking at the photograph of a dark-skinned male. I’m referring here to the 1917 Immigration Act in the U.S. â€" also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act â€" which regarded as undesirable aliens all those individuals who had their origin in Asia, a region spanning the so-called Middle East to the Pacific Islands, thereby lumping them in with “homosexuals,” “idiots,” “feeble-minded persons,” “criminals,” “insane persons,” “alcoholics,” “professional beggars” and others.

You’ve heard the words of the old blues song: “They say if you’s white, should be all right, / If you’s brown, stick around, / But if you’s black, mmm mmm, brother, get back, get back, get back.” That old racial imaginary is changing. Brown is staining the edges of the racial divide. Richard Rodriguez has written, “Brown bleeds through the straight line, unstaunchable â€" the line separating black from white, for example.” If we are going to be optimistic, we can even say that brown is the color of the future.

A new book by a Boston-based academic and filmmaker, Vivek Bald, describes the formation of what he calls Bengali Harlem in the early decades of the last century. Starting with the migration of Bengali peddlers to the United States in 1880s, and a later group of seamen, mostly Muslims, in the 1930s and 1940s, those who came to this country didn’t establish separate ethnic enclaves like later immigrants. Instead, they formed “networks that were embedded in working-class Creole, African-American, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods and entwined with the lives of their residents.” This radical mixing and assimilation, Bald argues, is an unnoticed aspect of the history of U.S. immigration.

The invisible assimilation of working-class immigrants in that early phase has given way to an entirely different order of mixing in contemporary America. The attacks of Sept. 11 might have drawn a line in the sand, but the reality of sand is that it keeps shifting.

Pico Iyer, who is surely the Dalai Lama of Diversity, has written that “perhaps the greatest danger of our global community is that the person in Los Angeles thinks he knows Cambodia because he’s seen The Killing Fields on-screen, and the newcomer from Cambodia thinks he knows Los Angeles because he’s seen City of Angels on video.”

Matt Roth for The New York Times Kal Penn, an actor.

I’m guilty of making a vast generalization about America from having watched a stoner classic: Harold and Kumar have not only come to America, they are on their way to White Castle. Indeed, if we follow the career of one of its stars, he has reached even the White House as an official in the area of public liaison.

Let me go further. As an Indian, I’m raising my kids in the firm belief that sooner or later, everyone in this country is going to look like Kal Penn.

Amitava Kumar is a writer and a professor of English at Vassar College in New York.