Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

How often is it that people of color negotiate with racist frames directed at them and couched in the form of evaluations? These racisms that one experiences are furher nuanced when one is a foreigner, with the foreignness marked on the skin/name/last name! One of these instances happened very recently with the Tippecanoe County School System. Speaking to one of the school staff, I was appalled when she told me that our child grew up in an "English as a Second Language" (ESL) home. Her assumption was that we were Indian, so English was our second language. I went on to use this opportunity then to tell her that what she said was racist because her biases were based on assumptions she made about what happened inside our home by looking at my child's last name and by perhaps assuming that we came from someplace else where people didn't speak English. I then told her how I made my living teaching White kids from Americana how to read and write in English...

Whiteness, academe, silence Doing good, openness, equal opportunity Diversity, equity, justice Talk, all talk Talk that sounds good And gives me the reassurance that academe is somehow opening up To difference. And yet The talk is far from the truth Whiteness carries out in the actions of the benevolent White man and woman Who believes she has taught the world The logics of empowerment And takes it on herself To save the downtrodden and the oppressed From the Third. Whiteness and its specters Couched as doing good Couched as altruism and progress Telling me that I am backward That I have to refer back to the games of Whiteness In order to qualify as a participant. Whiteness and its specters Telling me That the knowledge of my culture is primitive So she is going to send her missionaries and mercenaries and democracy promoters and war mongers and public health professionals To teach me to behave To pick up the language So I could be empowered under her Imperial guises.