In/Visible POC: Narratives of a Brown Professor in Teacher Education

Abstract

In this article, I reflect on experiences of Brown (or South Asian) in/visibility in teacher education. Using an autoethnographic approach, I share reflexive personal and professional counternarratives of my experiences as a Brown person and Brown teacher-educator committed to issues of justice in the diverse context of Toronto, Canada. I explore how Brown invisibility operates in desiring recognition, insider knowings, investments in ambiguity, and relational harm and liberation. I trouble the ways in which theoretical frames open and limit experiences and expressions of Brownness, locating myself in between postcolonial and anti-colonial theorizing and notions of racial ambiguity in DesiCrit. I conclude with the importance of making visible the experiences and constructions of Brownness in faculties of education and education more broadly, as a form of solidarity that both resists Brown invisibility and exposes Brown complicity in an aspirational whiteness that maintains racial hierarchies through its invisibility.

Unsurprisingly, the literature on the experiences of Brown teachers in K–12 schooling, Brown preservice teachers, and Brown teacher-educators is largely invisible. In this essay, I narrate experiences of invisibility as a Brown (or South Asian) teacher-educator in Toronto, Canada, to make visible the invisible experiences of Brownness in teacher education. Brownness is often characterized by hypervisibility in the racist objectification, appropriation, and exotification of accent, phenotype, food, cultural and religious practices, and more, and experiences of Brownness are often characterized by “invisibility” (Bakhshaei et al, 2021; Thatchenkery & Sugiyama, 2011) and ambiguity (Harpalani, 2013; Kibria, 1996) in the material, political, socioeconomic, and psychic effects of racialization that are maintained by intersecting systems of oppression—neo/colonialism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism. As Upadhyay shares, “As non-Indigenous, non-Black, and non-white persons in the white-settler state, our presence here is often ambiguous, contested, and contradictory” (Patel et al., 2015). The multiplicity and contradictory experiences of Brownness further complicate experiences of invisibility and ambiguity. My relationship to Brownness has been complex, confusing, and ever-changing, rendering me invisible both within and outside of Brown communities through the colonial, White gaze and its internalized correlative. While there is some identification with South Asian, Indo-Caribbean, Indo-Canadian, and Desi, I identify as Brown; in part, Brown captures the complexities of my South Asian diasporic experiences, in part it is a form resistance to a colonial construct and to being reduced to a category on a census form. As such, it is my expression of reclamation and self-authorization (Bannerji, 1993) as a second-generation Brown Canadian woman. I begin by locating myself in autoethnography, followed by narrating my experiences as a young, Brown female. I then share specific experiences as a teacher-educator, before theorizing experiences of Brown in/visibility and Brown invisibility in teacher education.

Counter-Narrating Invisibility

Autoethnography (Adams et al., 2014; Russell, 1998) emerged in the 1990s as a method of inquiry that encourages self-reflexivity and introspection to connect personal identities to the broader understanding of culture (Pitard, 2019). This process challenges positivist epistemologies while engaging in systematic data analysis methods that transform the perceptions of the self and how other see ourselves (Kumar, 2020). Autoethnography disrupts Eurocentric approaches to research, such as colonial and “exotic” representations of subjects in ethnography (Chawla & Rodriguez, 2008; Ortega, 2021), by providing scholars with the space to engage in deep introspection and self-authorize (Farrell, 2017; Ortega, 2021; Sparkes, 2020; Tilley-Lubbs, 2016), and “centering of both the subject–object within a local and historical context” (Chawla & Atay, 2018, p. 4). Decolonial approaches to autoethnography focus on the hybridization of “practices, and identities, as well as on the ideologies, performances, and practices that actively question, critique, and challenge colonization” (Chawla & Atay, 2018, p. 5). Dutta (2018) further asserts that the autoethnographic methods radicalize knowledge production, in which “theorizing the body of the academic as the site for intervention into the authoritarian-neoliberal regimes of knowledge production” as a site for voicing resistance (p. 94).

As a Brown woman, I commit to surfacing internal disharmonies instead of essentializing a critical South Asian female voice, which ignores complexity, multiplicity, and contingency (Bannerji, 1993). As an academic, I heed Toyosaki’s (2018) caution of the influence of the academic second persona on auto-ethnographers, encouraging an additional and ongoing commitment to continuous self-reflexivity that relates to “how we became and continue to become auto-ethnographers in our academic culture and everyday living” (p. 32). Autoethnography requires an interrogation of knowledge production processes (Pathak, 2013, in Toyosaki, 2018) and “works to liberate and decolonize our researcher identities and practices, which are constructed, validated, and constrained by the very educational institutionalization and ritualization through which we ‘become’ researchers” (Toyosaki, 2018). Autoethnography is important in breaking silences, legitimizing voices, and valuing experiences for women of color scholars who have been historically silenced, minimized, and marginalized (Chavez, 2012; Griffin, 2012).

Early Invisibilities

I am the daughter of immigrant parents whose lineages and geographies have particular diasporic expressions and political implications. My mother was born in Trinidad and Tobago into a Hindu home and of the Brahmin caste, the “highest” caste in Hinduism. My mother has and continues to negotiate being raised in a prominent Hindu family (as my Nana was a celebrated Pundit in Trinidad), and her colonial education experiences in which Hindi, the Hindu religion, and Indian cultural practices were assimilated into Catholicism, Presbyterianism, and English. Despite their Brahmin status, my family experienced poverty until my mother was into her late teens, challenging correlations of caste and class that get subverted by the experience of indentured servitude in the West Indies. This is not to negate the prominence of casteism or notions of Brahmin superiority worldwide as a largely invisible and unspoken system of oppression, nor is it to negate all associations with class and caste. Rather, it is to highlight the complicate Brown experiences amid histories of colonization.

My father’s family migrated to Zanzibar, East Africa from Gujarat, India for business and trade opportunities, unlike former Indians who were sent by the British to Zanzibar to build the railways. My father is Jain, of the Bania caste, and speaks Gujarati. He was raised with the expectation of being highly educated in a very competitive schooling system because there were far more young people than there were spots in secondary schools. He then moved to the United States and stayed with American families to complete his secondary schooling. He moved to Canada after finishing university in America and sponsored his parents and sisters. I share these details to reject the universality of the Brown or South Asian experience and to center the personal and political possibilities in multiplicity.

My parents’ story is one of immigrants whose sacrifices for their children have spanned generations and continents. They settled in Toronto, Canada, in the 1960s and experienced what is often referred to as a period of “paki-bashing,” both uniting and reducing a diverse and complex diaspora. My parents continue to negotiate being permanently unhomed (Bhabha, 1994), creating new hybrid cultures amid the diversity of Brown and non-Brown people. My mother explains her experiences of being Brown as both constantly changing and frozen in time since her departure from Trinidad to Canada 50 years ago, similar to the ways in which she, and others, explain the ways in which religious and cultural practices were frozen in time when Indians were brought to Trinidad as indentured servants in 1845. Like other immigrants, my parents were not aware that Canada, a land of “promise and opportunity,” was founded on, and continues to perpetuate cultural genocide, land theft and the murder of Indigenous peoples. I identify as a colonized settler and I continue to negotiate my own histories of colonization and my responsibility as a treaty person to the lands, waters, and first people of Turtle Island.

As a second-generation Canadian, born and raised in the Greater Toronto area, my experiences were informed by a wide variety of cultural practices and worldviews in my relations with people from a diversity of races, religions, and ways of knowing, accents, languages, genders, sexualities, social classes, abilities, and more. My diasporic identity was also informed by trips to Trinidad, stories of Zanzibar, and a contested, yet deep knowing of my Canadian-ness, despite regularly being asked where I come from. Amid these experiences were the experiences of being auto-corrected and White-washed, learning which parts of me needed to remain invisible to avert racial discrimination. Growing up in “multicultural Canada,” I regularly found myself auto-correcting my food, clothing, religious and cultural practices, my parents’ accents, family and communal values, humor, and speech, alongside a constant battle with my parents who tried endlessly to instill pride in our cultural and religious ways of knowing.

My experiences of Brownness are unlike stories of longing for home as a “mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination” (Brah, 1996, p. 192); they are stories of invisibility and in-betweenness as a Brown woman in a White world, and stories of invisibility and in-betweenness within communities in the Brown diaspora. I have longed to experience a sense of belonging in Brown communities here in Toronto, and yet I am keenly aware of how expressing these sentiments can be confirmation of a backwardness and incivility that gratifies the White settler gaze and erases the divide and conquer logics of colonialism that give rise to these divisions. Growing up, I was keenly aware that my West Indianness was too wild and crude for East Indian sensibilities and that my East Indianness was too backward and confined for West Indian sensibilities. Bollywood, Bharatanatyam, or speaking Hindi or Gujarati did not define me or guarantee belonging in East Indian communities, nor did soca music, liming, or eating Doubles in West Indian communities. I was in-between Brown communities that preferred to make sense of me as belonging exclusively to one, perhaps because of the collective pain and discomfort it caused to remember and understand how we came to be separated, and the collective forgetting of these histories. I share these details to demonstrate the complexities of transnational, religious, caste, economic, and language differences that all make up the postcolonial diasporic “South Asian” experience.

I also grew up as a darker-skinned female in a body that was larger than many other South Asian girls my age, further rendering me invisible, ugly, and worthless in a harmful constellation of structural and internalized colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. The presence of my body was threatening to a Brownness that relies on racial ambiguity (Harpalani, 2013) to maintain the psychic and material benefits of its proximity to the very systems that oppress us. It was too bold, too different, and too visible. Affirming visibility in both Brown and White communities came in large part from my good grades and many accomplishments. Internalized meritocracy was my ticket to being seen in a White world that did not reflect my realities, and in a Brown world that learned its access to safety, mobility, and the hope of a “good life” was to internalize and aspire to Whiteness. It was a negotiation of realities as a Brown person in North America, caught between the myth of the model minority and the reality of perpetual foreigner (Murti, 2010; Prashad, 2000).

These experiences have all informed my pedagogy as a Brown, pretenured professor in a Canadian faculty of education who previously taught in the K–12 schooling system in Toronto. I have been keenly aware of how my Brownness mediates how I am read and responded to in the academy and the im/possibilities of voice and agency as a Brown woman in the “polite,” “multicultural,” “tolerant” Great White North. It is the dance of negotiating and resisting Whiteness, being erased and invisibilized in the Black/White binary, moving and being moved between the grateful, subservient model minority and the unwanted perpetual foreigner all the while yearning for self-definition.

Storying In/Visibility as a Brown Professor in Teacher Education

Desiring Recognition

I remember sitting in a staff room as a preservice teacher attending my first staff meeting. There were too many of us to fit comfortably in the room, which made space for more informal chatter. In walked a Brown woman, the Superintendent of our family of schools. She proceeded to talk about her vision for the year. I remember admiring the way her presence commanded respect and the calm, steady way she spoke. I don’t recall much of what she said. I was enthralled with the gravity of the moment. I watched myself playing out a number of new possibilities that had just opened up for me as a Brown, female educator. Would I be a principal? A Superintendent? More? What other possibilities existed? I was transported to an incident earlier that week in which a young, Brown girl ran up to me on the soccer field with a huge smile on her face. She was in a different class but had heard that I was practice teaching in the other Grade 4 class. “Your name is Ms. (Author last name)? My last name is (Author last name), too!” I smiled and said, “Yes, it is!” Her smile grew, almost beyond what her face could contain. She ran off, turning around at one point to look back, her smile still drawing me in. I understood the little girl’s smile and excitement differently in that moment—as confirmation that she belonged there, as deep connection through common stories un/told, and in the imagination of worlds opening up before her very eyes. I was drawn back into the staff meeting as the Superintendent said, “I hear your concerns, but this is how we are going to move forward.” She was assertive. And it surprised me. It didn’t feel authoritative or harsh. She was just unapologetically making the call as a Brown woman and as a leader.

Two years ago, I ran into that Superintendent at a workshop and shared with her the bearing of that moment on my younger sense of self and sense of becoming. That same evening, I was presenting to a group of racialized, preservice teachers on a webinar, sharing examples of anti-racist pedagogies. As I was being introduced, a Brown preservice teacher expressed his gratitude for seeing someone like him, a Brown educator, and someone committed to racial and other forms of justice, in my role. Time paused. This was no coincidence; pasts and futures existed simultaneously in that moment. There was an instant and unspoken connection and understanding, despite the many differences in time and space.

Insider Knowings

I recently taught a graduate course in which I intentionally decided to bring more of myself into the course, including the complexities and contradictions. We sat in a circle, we dialogued, we engaged in art, and we engaged in embodied practices to access and activate different parts of ourselves. In many ways, this class became a space that we could all settle into and take up space in our various bodies, in the confines of the ivory tower (literally). There were jokes, there were tears, there were revelations, and there were moments of silent reflection. On the last day of class, we lingered, munching on the food that we had brought, talking about our futures, but not wanting to leave. As we tied up and finally made our way out of the class, one of the students, a Brown woman, bent down next to me. I looked down thinking she had dropped something. She hadn’t. She bent down to touch my foot and then touch her head. She was bowing at my feet. I was stunned. Growing up, I was taught that bowing at your parents’ feet or the feet of an elder or teacher was a sign of deep respect, and that in return, they would bestow blessings. I looked at her, unable to speak, with I’m sure every emotion I was feeling written on my face. As she walked away, she said, “I just had to that.” As I got over the shock that I would be afforded that level of respect, I was flooded with reactions. I never quite reconciled bowing as a practice in relation to understandings of power. I had mixed feelings of discomfort because of the implications of how this might be read through White notions of power, and utter gratitude that this student shared her sentiment with a gravity that only we understood. And I was so proud, of both of us. All that I could muster as she walked away was a half-smile and a “thank you.” In that moment, I opened to welcome more of me into that space, more of my values and customs that rarely have expression in White-dominated institutions, and more of the contradictions and unanswered questions that the in-betweenness offered.

Investments in Ambiguity

I love the minutes before class begins. I am setting up the technology and students are making their way in, greeting me, laughing at inside jokes. A Brown, female student and a White, male student are chatting in the corner. “You’re so beautiful. You could be my Bollywood princess.” The Brown, female student smiles and looks down, then looks over at me, maybe for strength, maybe for support, maybe for direction. This is a critical moment, deciding whether to allow yourself to be viewed through the white gaze as exotic and mysterious, or whether to challenge the political, ideological, and relational differences that might threaten proximity to whiteness and the desired social capital that such proximity affords. I begin a class on white supremacy by sharing examples of racism in my schooling experiences:

As a Brown student, I experienced racism in multiple ways—as microaggressions, that felt more macro than micro, never seeing my cultures or realities reflected in curriculum, and having to conform white norms in order to be accepted by classmates and teachers.

“I haven’t had those experiences and I’m also South Asian. My school experiences were great. So, maybe those were just your experiences. Or maybe you were just reading the situation incorrectly.” This student looks visibly angry, as though I had exposed them in exposing myself. These moments often stop me in my tracks. I must have both surprise and hurt written all over my face and I feel myself retreating, invisibilized by those who are supposed to see me, who are supposed to understand these experiences without even needing to speak about them. After class, the same student approaches me:

I just don’t think we need to talk about this stuff. What’s the point? I’d rather not talk about these things and just let them go. It’s just easier that way. I don’t want to be seen as angry and disruptive like the Black students in class. They cause unnecessary conflict. What’s the point in that?

I recognize this as a form of distancing, from me, a Brown, outspoken, direct, and often controversial professor. It is a strategic move that provides some Brown students both perceived and actual safety from racial harm and social exclusion, and greater access to social capital and perceived racial safety.

Relational Harm, Relational Liberation

As Shaista Patel shares, our work as people of color is to unlearn the colonial and racist readings of Others and to center ethical approaches to relationality (Patel et al., 2015). I had been well into writing this article when George Floyd and Breona Taylor were brutally murdered by police in the United States, against a backdrop of the death of Regis Korchinksi-Paquet, and murders of Dondre Campbell, Jamal Francique, Aisha Hudson, Rodney Levi, Ejaz Chaudhry, and many others here in Canada by police. As I looked around me, I noticed incomprehensible levels of complacency, disregard, and ignorance in Brown communities, communities to which I belong. There was, “It’s really sad to see what’s happening to Black people. But hey, what are your plans for the weekend?” There was, “But why do they have to loot?” and “If they followed the rules, this wouldn’t be happening to them.” This is after the infuriating video of the final few minutes of George Floyd’s life. I felt alone and I felt ashamed of my people. Why weren’t there more of us who saw the deep interconnectedness between Brown and Black struggles? Here, we were, in the midst of a pandemic, with our worlds completely changed and it still was not enough to shake us out of our ignorance. I sat at my computer and started writing. I’m not sure where it came from or who I was writing for, but I shared my thoughts about anti-Blackness in South Asian communities in a Facebook post to my family and friends. I cited Aysha Tabassum (2020), who states, “we owe Black Canadians our right to exist in Canada as people of colour” and named the ways in which Brown–Black solidarities have been explicitly hidden from our historical remembrances as a function of white supremacy. Despite significant circulation, my Facebook post was “taken down” 4 times. At first, I thought it was based on the racist algorithms of social media platforms. Then, I realized that the post was likely reported by one of my Facebook “friends.” I was infuriated.

Theorizing Brown In/Visibility for Teacher Educators

Philip (2014) speaks to the socialization and development of the Asian American teacher in the image of Whiteness, which is understandable given the overwhelming presence of Whiteness that permeates teacher education as it informs curriculum and operates to serves the interests of White students (Sleeter, 2001). I have observed the ways in which my labor is often unnoticed and unaccounted for, sometimes couched as collective or “informal” work such as “informal mentorship” or taking on/being expected to take on a greater portion of “group” work, which requires tremendous, unacknowledged time, labor, and energy (Shah & Peek, 2020). I have also observed myself staying silent or “freezing” in the face of inappropriate behavior directed at me by White colleagues and tiptoeing around Whiteness to maintain access to power or to safeguard my position as pretenured faculty. I navigate simultaneous experiences of being made invisible, staying invisible to avoid racial harm, and fighting for visibility on my own terms. And I am in the constant negotiation of how I might invisibilize others’ experiences as I fight for my visibility, and the range of reactions from anger to admiration from similarly invisibilized colleagues and students.

As a teacher-educator and scholar, I speak critically of and from personal and professional locations (Bannerji, 1993) that are fluid, complex, and intersectional, yet distinct enough to situate how I have come to know and experience my Brownness as a teacher-educator, at different times and in different spaces. These complicated experiences make it difficult to locate my experiences of Brownness theoretically, another form of invisibilization. I find some of these invisibilities explained by notions of identity and representation in de/postcolonial theories. I also locate the complicities and complexities of cross-racial solidarities in anti-colonial discourses of resistance and my experiences of racial ambiguity in discourses of DesiCrit. Any of these theories alone do not capture my experiences and, independently, invisibilize one or more aspects of me.

Postcolonial theory centers the material and political consequences of the exploitation and control of colonized people and their lands. Postcolonial scholars critique Eurocentrism and resist master narratives of culture, spatial homogenization, and temporal teleology (Schwartz-DuPre, 2017), creating space for new theories of knowledge production by centering nonwestern histories, knowledges, and cultures (Gandhi, 1998). Of importance to this study is the theorizing of difference that informs a politics of identity and representation. Since the Enlightenment, difference was conceived as binaries (male/female, Black/White, us/them), which made it easy to attribute qualifiers such as good/bad, inferior/superior, right/wrong, and human/property. Postcolonial theorists describe identity as contextual and un-fixed, or fluid, and influenced by geographic, temporal, and political locations (Bhabha, 1994; Spivak, 1988). As such, identities are continuously shifting, resisting, renegotiating, and being re-created based on changing social relations and locations. We are also negotiating multilayered platforms of marginalization that capture the nuances and expressions of intersecting forms of oppression (Mohanty, 1988). The politics of representation includes who can speak and how the Other is presented and re-presented through the cultural interpretation or translation. In her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak (1988) underscored how representations are intimately linked to positioning: socioeconomic, gendered, cultural, geographic, historical, and institutional, especially for marginalized groups from the subaltern.

How do I understand my representation and how do I want to represent myself as a Brown teacher-educator? I have come to appreciate the mental, emotional, and spiritual representations of my physical body as a Brown woman, as an educator, and as a Brown, female educator, among Brown and other preservice teachers. Despite the complexities and contradictions in experiences of Brown people and Brown women, there are times when my one body seems to represent them all. In every classroom I have been in, whether a Grade 4 class or a graduate-level university class, there are Brown students, women in particular, who want to know me and my journey, so that perhaps, like me, they may journey into new, previously inaccessible spaces. I also see me in them. As invisible POCs, especially those of us in leadership positions, we are at once desiring recognition and embodying recognition, creating the spaces we desire as we desire them. I also reflect on how important it is for me to speak contextually and specifically about my ethno-racial experiences, to give voice and possibility to many more Brown experiences being expressed. I grapple with the limitations of the politics of representation and recognition framed through liberal discourses, being a recipe for co-option (Simpson, 2016). I also know that there is power in the visibility of multiple representations for racial populations that have been invisibilized, even within discourses of anti-racism.

Postcolonial scholars focus their analysis on cultural differences such as religion (Loomba, 2009) and colorism (Schueller, 2003). While there is some focus on caste (Loomba, 2009), Patel (2016) reminds us that “most of the scholars of Subaltern Studies continue to be upper caste people who have yet to critical engage with the reality of caste and casteist violence,” failing to represent the experiences of Dalit-identifying people. Postcolonial theory has also been critiqued for its overall silence on issues of race (Ghosh & Chakrabarty, 2002; Gnanadass, 2015), often conceptualizing race on biological differences (Ghosh & Chakrabarty, 2002; Loomba, 2009). I cannot locate my experiences of racialization here and agree with Schueller (2003) and Gnanadass (2015) that focusing on culture and ethnicity is safer in the Western academy while race, being more than biology and skin color, shapes society and the rights and experiences of people.

As such, I find myself turning toward anti-colonial theory. While anti-colonial theory is still grappling to make sense of diasporic experiences, I am drawn to the explicit focus on notions of domination, oppression, power, and resistance while considering oppressions on the basis of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, language, and religion. Anti-colonial theory in education centers colonial and re-colonial relations, and engages with Indigeneity, spirituality, agency and resistance, the politics of knowledge production in challenging colonial impositions, and the ongoing presence of colonialism in institutions such as schooling, associations with imperialism and decolonization (Dei & Asgharzadeh, 2001). Simmons and Dei (2012) consider a reframing of the anti-colonial in a diasporic context to bring “a particular reading of the ‘colonial’ that is relevant to the present in which both nations, states and communities, as well as bodies and identities are engaged as still colonized and resisting the colonial encounter” (p. 67). In this way, not all people of color are similarly situated; complicities and complexities exist within power asymmetries and we must therefore theorize colonialism, settler colonialism, imperialism, anti-Blackness, casteism, and capitalism simultaneously (Lawrence & Dua, 2005; Patel, 2016; Patel et al., 2015; Upadhyay, 2019). I am drawn to the work of Brown scholars troubling their settler identities. I am especially struck by Upadhyay’s (2016) assertion that “Indigenous people become the minority-Other for people of colour” (p. 254) in which a relational form of settling and seeking of “model-ness” for people of colour marks Indigenous people as “unmodel.” In other words, “The racialized self is not just constructed in relation to the white-superior-other, but also in relation to the unmodel-Native-other” (Upadhyay, 2016, p. 254). How do I actively engage in the undoing of a racialization that is multiply harming?

Anti-colonial readings force a distinct situation of Brown experiences in projects of settler colonialism and white supremacy. Insufficient theorizations can further invisibilize Brown experiences, and invisibilize the particular positioning of Brownness in a racial continuum (Harpalani, 2013) and as the model settler-citizen (Upadhyay, 2016). However, I reflect on the truth that I have come home to myself, again and again, to my Brown self, more through Black and Indigenous scholarship than Brown scholarship. I think about how minimally I have been influenced by South Asian poets, scholars, and philosophers, in a way that speaks to the boldness and courage that I wanted to live in the world. This is not to say that these thinkers do not exist; rather, it speaks to the invisibility of these thinkers in my life, as a second-generation Canadian, and as a preservice teacher-educator. I am increasingly aware of the erasure of Brownness in the imagination of the Black–White binary and how discourses of colonialism and white supremacy are estranged from Brown ways of knowing and being. I also know that the work of Black and Indigenous scholars has helped me know and experience myself as both spiritual seeker and activist. Yet, while I experience a sense of expansion within Black and Indigenous literatures, I simultaneously contract and make invisible parts of myself to be read in and through this literature. I yearn for a Brownness that can speak to the complexities of experiences of race and ethnicity. I yearn for a Brownness that is both spiritual and activist and does not use one identity to negate the other. I yearn for a Brownness that can hold on to values dharma and karma and that also aims to disrupt anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and casteism as it complicates complicities in and proximities to the White, settler state. And I yearn for a Brownness in which Brown people do not have to erase themselves to be in solidarity with Black and Indigenous people.

I have struggled to make sense of Brown racialization in the Black–White binary, which has been critiqued in the ways it limits understandings of racial complexity and efforts at racial justice and solidarity (Harpalani, 2013; Koshy, 2001; Prashad, 2000). I turn to Critical Race Theory (CRT) for ideas and inspiration. ¹ Similar to LatCrit and AsianCrit that challenge the Black–White binary, and the ways in which language, immigration status, phenotype, ethnicity, culture, accent, colorism, and colonization provide a deeper, more contextualized understanding of white supremacy, Harpalani (2013) uses critical race theory to analyze South Asian American experiences through DesiCrit. ² One of the main features of DesiCrit is the racial ambiguity of South Asians that is both formal (based on their racial categorization by the government as a political identity) and informal (based on “racial symbols” such as physical appearance, which may be racially ambiguous). Harpalani (2013) states that racial ambiguity shapes experiences of racialization in a racial hierarchy by “examining the agency of racialized actors, analyzing not only ascriptions of racial status by others, but also proactive claims to racial status by such actors” (p. 78). Examples of ascriptions include South Asians being labeled “Black” (the primary racial “Other”), “foreigner,” “terrorist,” and the myth of the model minority. The model minority myth* reduces and essentializes the multiplicity, complexity, and intersectionality of South Asian experiences and racist realities to mere representations of perseverance, hard work, success, financial stability, and compliance with White society and the law, erasing histories of resistance and historical and contemporary experiences of oppression and exploitation (Lee, 1996; Wing, 2007). Despite being previously seen as “uncivilized, sinister, heathen, and filthy” (Wing, 2007, p. 457), the model minority myth emerged as a political identity in Canada and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, during the rise of the civil rights movement, to construct Asians as the “answer” to racial and economic challenges and the model race, the “deserving” other, thereby justify the ongoing racism toward Black and Latinx people (Prashad, 2000).

Examples of racial claims are related to the notion of honorary Whiteness, which reflects desires to increase access to material wealth and social capital (Harpalani, 2013). Deepa Iyer (2020) explains this concept when she says, “Many South Asians take the ‘racial bribe’ and climb the racial ladder in a futile attempt to reach the status of Whiteness.” Claims may take on a number of expressions and motivations, including embracing (not simply being ascribed) the “model minority” stereotype as a means of aspiring to Whiteness and seeking economic gain and notoriety (Harpalani, 2013). Harpalani (2013) suggests that while Black and White are “the two racial statuses with the most salient social meanings in America to other groups” (p. 182), the racialization of South Asians reconceptualizes the Black–White binary to a racial continuum, which can increase the racial consciousness among South Asians to form cross-racial coalitions (Harpalani, 2013).

I see racial ambiguity operating in several ways in my classrooms. Some of my Brown students are comfortable being viewed through the White gaze as exotic and mysterious, and at times will engage in self-Orientalism (Kobayashi et al., 2019) by reducing the complexity of their Brownness to cultural food and dress and encouraging the cultural appropriation of Bollywood dance moves to “fit in” to white spaces. This is likely to maintain proximity to Whiteness, albeit precarious (Syedullah, 2015), instead of challenging political, ideological, and relational differences that might threaten this proximity and the desired social capital and mistakenly presumed protection that such proximity affords them. I have also seen racial ambiguity used in claims to Blackness, in appropriating surface markers of “Black culture,” such as dress and language. This is especially true for Brown students who grew up in largely White spaces, who found it difficult to access their own ethnoracial identities, and still desired an identity that was non-White (Harpalani, 2013). In fact, many of these students expressed being racialized Black at various points in their lives.

My personal claims to racial status have been most prominent in my Brown, anti-racist identity. I have watched myself embrace the model minority identity not toward aspirational whiteness directly, but toward an aspirational anti-racist identity that still maintains a racial hierarchy, even as it attempts to dismantle it. This shows up in “model” activism or what I have referred to as meritocratic equity (Shah, 2019) that prioritizes ableist views of productivity and value (in this sense, as an anti-racist activist-educator-scholar) while minimizing the differential complexities and possibilities in our abilities to “disrupt” depending on the bodies that we are in. I have also been very conscious of the ways in which I engage contemplative and spiritual practices in my classroom, to challenge the White, western, capitalistic appropriations of yoga and meditation while questioning my complicity in engaging in a form New Age Orientalism that draws upon my “foreignness” as a form of “racial capital” (Prashad, 2000).

A lifetime of invisibility means that it is harder for Brown people to draw on a racial consciousness. Collectively, we have not been socialized to critically reflect on experiences of pain and suffering, which means that we are less likely to draw on these conscious experiences of racism to fuel action and activism, consistent with our racialization as “solutions” to the racial problem (Prashad, 2000). These complexities and complicities require multiple theories and theorizations, which still feel inadequate.

Storying Visibility as a Brown Professor in Teacher Education

Teacher education is new terrain for Brown teacher-educators. In many ways, Brown teacher-educators are creating the very spaces we crave, spaces we have only ever imagined, while negotiating realities that are perpetually inhospitable and often harmful. I hold this newness in tension with the fact that as Brown people, we come from histories, legacies, and geographies of resistance, of creativity, and of ingenuity. I find solace in the remembrance that we, as Brown people, have been on this terrain before and found ways to force its adaptation to make space for us. As a Brown teacher-educator, my body and mind do not belong to me alone; they belong to generations past as honored legacies and generations to come as imaginings of future possibilities. This work crosses boundaries of the professional and personal, as my activism in my home and community informs my work in the university. They co-constitute each other. As such, I am encouraged to sit in the questions. How might we honor experiences of invisibility and also name experiences of racial ambiguity and claims to racial status in a racial hierarchy in our personal and professional lives? How do we, as Brown teachers and teacher-educators, heal and resist while making space for a multiplicity of Brown student experiences, and the placement of these experiences in relation to other experiences of racism?

In part, this requires making visible the racialization of Brownness, as resistance to white supremacy. To honor our families, communities, ancestors, thinkers, poets, artists, and spiritual and religious leaders is to resist white supremacy. To explore the multiplicities and contradictions within and between Brown communities is to resist white supremacy. To recognize the histories and contexts of how we became raced and how we continue to serve a racist agenda is to resist white supremacy. The invisibility of Brownness speaks to the necessity to make visible the ways in which Brown people experience racialization and racism in a system designed to render their existence invisible as inherent to the model image. Making Brownness visible also requires identifying the ways in which Brownness is complicit in anti-Blackness and white supremacy. It speaks to the necessity of a version of solidarity that does not require self/collective Brown erasure as we stand for Black and Indigenous lives. True solidarity requires that we deeply understand our own experiences with oppression, the ways in which we have internalized harmful messages at the intersections of colonialism, casteism, capitalism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy to create racial and other hierarchies. This form of solidarity, beginning with our own stories and suffering, allows us to act from a place of justice instead of guilt or shame (Choimorrow, 2020), focusing on how our stories of oppression and liberation are and have been deeply intertwined, as we struggle against the myriad of ways that white supremacy affects us all, albeit differently. Resistance also exists in learning about cross-racial solidarities that were silenced and collectively birthing new possibilities.

I think about our responsibility as Brown teachers and teacher-educators to ourselves, to our histories, to our Brown students, and to larger projects of racial justice. Our responsibility is to make visible what has intentionally been made invisible. First, teacher education in North America must make visible the diverse, complex, and diasporic realities of Brown students as we consider intersections of race with ethnicity, class, caste, religion and worldview, color, gender, language, accent, place of birth, sexuality, ability, and the systems of oppression that pervert difference from hegemony and systems of power. This requires an increase in diasporic representation of Brown/South Asian teacher-educators and professors, and preservice teachers. It also requires that Brown/South Asian experiences are theorized in multiple ways to raise the racial consciousness of Brown students, professors, and communities, as agents of our own stories, our own learning, and our own futures.