Brother, don’t you know it!

Having spent a considerable amount of my childhood in the American south naturally afforded me the privilege, from time to time, of hearing myself called a ‘sand nigger’. Anyone reading this knows what a nigger is: if you live in Delhi, it’s effectively what you heard the mob yelling at Masonda Ketanda Olivier, the Congolese man lynched to death. Or you might have heard the analogous slurs in Bengaluru while a Tanzanian woman was being stripped and beaten by a mob in reaction to some other random event elsewhere involving a Sudanese man. She was forced to pay his price for her blackness.

But a ‘sand nigger’, do you know what that is? You are a sand nigger, my friend. It makes no difference if you think you’re Aryan, Dravidian, or even Arab. This is equal opportunity colourism. Kind of like how any South Asian in the UK is eligible to be dubbed a ‘Paki’.

My own early experiences of racism – in school in the American south, and later in college in England – would serve to heighten my admiration for the Godfather of Soul, aka James Brown, aka Soul Brother No. 1. In fact, I’m blasting his 1968 black-pride anthem as I write this:

Say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud!

Say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud!

It is also these early experiences of racism, mixed with an increasing identification with black power and black pride movements, that fostered my easy lateral drift into Dalit power circles, and ultimately to become a prominent researcher into that foremost champion of Dalit pride, B R Ambedkar. Both young Ambedkar, living in upper Manhattan on the eve of the Harlem Renaissance, and W E B DuBois, the pioneering black protest leader and civil rights activist, recognised the deep affinities between the black and the Dalit struggles, as the extant letters between them attest:

Dear Prof DuBois,

Although I have not met you personally, I know you by name as everyone does who is working in the cause of securing liberty to oppressed people…There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.

—B R Ambedkar

Dear Dr Ambedkar,

I have often heard of your name and work and, of course, have every sympathy with the Untouchables of India. I shall be glad to be of any service I can render if possible in the future.

—W E B DuBois

As I read through the newspapers this week, humming along to James Brown and sipping my coffee (black, of course), two pieces of news jump out at me. The first, that Harvard University has denied black American philosopher Cornel West’s request for tenure. West has been as much an activist as a scholar over the last few decades, and is an irrepressible voice for racial justice. You can find videos of West on YouTube dancing and singing along with James Brown…

Some people say we’ve got a lot of malice/Some say it’s a lot of nerve/

But I say we won’t quit moving until we get what we deserve.

We have been ‘buked and we have been scorned/

But just as sure as it takes two eyes to make a pair/

Brother we can’t quit until we get our share.

Does Cornel West deserve tenure? The answer is best expressed in West’s own words. When I asked the great philosopher to endorse my new set of books, B R Ambedkar: The Quest for Justice, and especially the fourth volume on Racial Justice, West pithily responded: ‘Brother, don’t you know it!’

The second piece of news is about the young Indian woman (I won’t cite her name because I am not adequately apprised of the veracity of the charges) who made history upon becoming elected president of the Oxford Student Union. She has now resigned from the position amid controversy over social media posts decried as racist and insensitive.

What?! Upper-caste Indians, aka sand niggers, making racially insensitive remarks about others?

Brother, don’t you know it!