#I'm not going to cotton to any respectability brahmin cordiality shit about my word choice.

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Maybe another reason I'm accused of claiming to be a dalit, despite never EVER having said anything even REMOTELY close, is because I am up front about being affected by caste issues. But the reason I am affected by caste issues is not becauase I in particular belong to any certain caste. The reason I am affected by caste issues is because I live in India (or under Indian occupation, now) and everyone who lives in (or under) India is affected by caste issues.

It is my savarna detractors who are mistaken in their beliefs. Those beliefs are first that they themselves are not affected by caste issues, and second that my social position is similar to theirs.

As regards the first I do not need to go into very much detail about it. As they are the privileged in society it does not require much suspension of disbelief to consider that they might be very mistaken as to the mechanism of their social dominance. The belief that they are unaffected by caste is a simple chauvanism; nothing more, nothing less. They believe that caste means Dalit, that caste is found not in their own families and universities and overseas poc networks and stupid overbearing social media presence, but in rural Dalit households. Nothing new. These are the people who will run countless studies on Dalits and none on themselves, searching up and down and all around, searching for the elusive caste everywhere except under their own noses. Fortunately my second wave training made it pretty obvious to me where I might find it. I was right on the mark in my initial assessment that to Savarnas, caste is an enclosed patriarchy, and caste can be found in what is now called Brahminical Patriarchy, which is something that Brahmins who say stuff like “sex work is work” in a country where prostitution is an ancestral profession can hardly be expected to understand the nature of.

As regards the second, I will dispel it, but not to prove my own victimhood -- victimhood is not the basis of ability to speak and I need no such thing -- but to establish to the Brahmins that we are not and will never be anything alike. This is an assertion of boundaries only.

I need to say that even if the second premise was truethat we did occupy comparable social position,  I would still be required to talk about caste and the way it affects me in order to mount a serious social analysis. That they do not do so shows that they are not serious social analysts full stop, but just Brahmins after social clout. As if their choice in "issues" to "discuss" and the ways they "discuss them" didn't already make that obvious.

But the bigger issue is this. As I said in the post that started all of this, upper caste Hindus have this very weird thing about white people. Now as part of this Very Weird Thing, the Hindus have a strong desire for white approval and wrongly consider that their culture has anything in common with white western culture, especially in comparison to groups they consider to be ignorant, backward, and more conservative and less enlightened than them. 

This isn’t really true. Hindus have no history of womens’ struggle, no belief in social equality, they love wasting food -- do the people constantly making fun of white people for casseroles really think that we won’t notice or be bothered by the fact that they consider food to be polluted and unshareable once it’s eaten from? It’s viscerally repellant to me to see a Brahmin throw away perfectly good food that’s still warm even -- they hate beef which is at least three food groups for Americans. So we’re talking about two very different groups of people, and while the Brahmins claim that all of these repellant traits of theirs are “Indian things”, that isn’t true, they’re just savarna things, and we have them in common with Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and other groups in society that Brahmins look down and despise because of these traits. A Savarna who turns green at the sight of an omelette doesn’t like it any better because a white person made it. They still ain’t gonna wanna share utensils.

The only reason this stereotype persists at all is due to aggressive propogation of it by Brahmins abroad and all Savarnas in India, made easier by the systemic exclusion of everyone else from English language education.

Not only do Brahmins hate people because of these traits on a personal level, but it is legal, and the rule, not the exception, to discriminate openly based on not only them, but also on race and nationality itself.

Where the stereotype that white people are unaffected by this comes from is that it is true that in places like South Bombay and Gurgaon, where my haters live, there are neighbourhoods (the term we use in India is “colonies”, but without the same connotation, any neighbourhood can be a colony regardless of who lives there) where some very rich white expats live where they can pay a great deal of money to insulate themselves from India. It’s true that they don’t have to worry about discimination in housing, and are nonplussed at everyday occurrances like being charged extra for stuff. These people probably constitute a decent percentage of white people in India; the exact statistic probably isn’t known but they’re highly visible for the same reason all rich people are. What else should be kept in mind is that they may be privileged in society, but no moreso than Savarnas of their income level. All of these traits are things they share with rich Savarnas -- so maybe they have this in common with this particular group of white people.

What is not talked about much is the other two groups of white people that I know to exist in India, those being Israelis and Russians. Now Israelis are actually pretty well integrated in Goa and Himachal, they’re mostly like me -- long term tourist visa stays. The stereotype that they overstay their visa is largely not true. The stereotype that’s even less true is that there’s an “israeli mafia” that runs drugs back and forth between Himachal and Goa, which owns businesses and land in towns like Kasol, and is also heavily involved in other underground crimes. The BJP’s 2017 electoral campaign centred largely around this fictional Jewish Mafia, and it won this campaign. I should also note that antisemitic and nazi imagery is even more common in Himachal than in the rest of India. I even saw Indians walking around with Third Reich flags on their t-shirts a couple times.

So that’s the Israelis. What are the Russians doing? Well, some of them are economic migrants. But more visibly they’re being sex trafficked just like everywhere else in the world. A hookup once told me that in her ex’s apartment building, there was a floor full of Russian prostitutes that would go missing during election season. The political parties openly commit crimes like this and since the parties also control the police there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Their position is very similar to Bangladeshi and Nepali women. Does this affect peoples’ perceptions? You tell me.

So, getting back to the issue of the bizarre Hindu craving for white approval, this takes the form of sexual harassment very, very often. Another thing contributing to this is the widespread use of porn in India; the women in porn are mostly white. Bollywood has this problem too, where it’s a common plot that the protagonist of the film dates a “sexually open” white woman to get his bullshit phases out of the way before realising he needs someone who can cook and clean to spend his life with and marries an Indian woman (implicitly of his caste). 

So, acknowledging the following non-exhaustive list of some formal disabilities that I experience BY LAW -- 1. it is legal to discriminate in housing, 2. it is not legal for me to seek employment, 3. I am not allowed a vote or representation 4. There is no available path to citizenship from someone of my socioeconomic class 5. I cannot take advantage of government programs -- we are left with two remaining possible sites in which white privilege could possibly be found. 

The first one of these is uncomplicatedly fake. It was RSSBJP propaganda in the late 00′s and early-mid 2010′s that everyone in India is brainwashed by white people to believe that they are culturally inferior. This is pretty clear and flagrant fascist propaganda that has been weaponised to some pretty destructive ends. For example, it was asserted that Hindi is the indigenous language of India and natural language of all Indians (it’s not) and the reason anyone wants to learn English is because white people have brainwashed them into believing it’s superior to Hindi. Actually what this was was RSSBJP brainwashing a bunch of savarnas into believing that they’re race traitors for speaking the “coloniser tongue” (In reality Hindi is the coloniser tongue, and this is again a caste issue, but this is long already) and that this was white peoples’ fault. White people remain a preferred target because the imagination of the colonial era lends itself easily to the claim, because India’s millennia-old obsession with light skin bears a superficial resemblence to colour discrimination in the west, and because the “opposition leader” at the time, Rahul Gandhi, is half-Italian on his mother’s side.

Yes, the party in power criticises the “opposition leader” on the basis that he’s the half-white son of a naturalised citizen of the Republic of India. Yes, it works. Such privilege! Even Obama’s accusers at least had to cloak it, they couldn’t just come out and say “it’s bad that you are that race”.

Anyway, as white people have no such mind control ability, and no control over Indian media or any other resource through which they might promote such an idea, and the source of the claim has a clear conflict of interest, we can not only dismiss it but be reminded to keep a look out for it as it has ingrained itself into social imagination and in fact become another nonsense accusation against which I must constantly defend myself.

The second site is one I am willing to entertain, and it’s that white privilege is extant in relation to other groups of foreigners. If this is the case it’s still something that native-born Indians have absolutely no business grilling me on, because to be a foreginer is itself to face a certain level of social exclusion, which makes them the privileged class on the foreigner/native axis. This one, I’m, y’know, willing to talk about, but only with people who have any damn business bringing it up, not a bunch of Brahmin social climbers. Something often brought up is that people do make room for white foreigners (at least). This is true. I can’t really speak to whether people from other groups have the same experience (except for one or two anecdotal examples, which, for the record, indicate that they do) but even acknowledging that is an admission that such efforts are necessary. What else should be kept in mind is that they are spectacularly unsuccessful. 

So returning to the elephant in the room (get it because elephants are a symbol of buddhism which... yeah) is that there are power dynamics in India which matter other than race and class and that’s religion. As already established, this country is run by a genocidal, anti-Muslim hate cult. Now you can argue that because I’m white it doesn’t matter than I’m a Muslim, and I’ll be counted as a Christian, which is a very Hindu conclusion, and the most staggeringly ignorant thing imaginable to say but it turns out Hindus can just say any words in whatever order they want, so I’ll deal with this argument anyway.

The genocidal hate cult that runs the country is also anti-Christian. So, that’s that on that. The only thing is, the Good Brahmins don’t have any more good to say about Christians, particularly white Christian missionaries, than their RSSBJP immediate relatives do. Attacks against Christians, including white missionaries, are a daily occurrance in India being most common in the liberal paradise state of Tamil Nadu, and they are celebrated by Good Brahmin and Bad Brahmin alike as well as their boot lickers on social media, including this website.

But if we want to acknowledge the reality that I am a Muslim, then we have to take into account that BJP rhetoric assumes all Muslims to be infiltrators and foreigners. The only reason this is not taken into account by Good Brahmins on this website is that harbour the same prejudice as their immediate relatives, and so are unable to recognise them as harmful. For instance I’ve been accused of being undocumented or overstaying my visa by several people in the past few days. Careful readers will remember this stereotype from the Israelis earlier. It’s not true for them, and it’s not true for me -- I’m here legally but in a compromised, non-citizen status compromised by widespread discrimination and ground-level lack of access to theoretically available resources on account of my socioeconomic class. If this screams “invulnerable” to you, hoo boy.

TL;DR To quote one of my favourite Urdu poets, “The only thing we have in common is I’m a dick and you suck.”