I am not a good tourist. I drove from North Carolina to California for my research year in medical school like it was a job. I drove 8 hours a day and spent the night in a hotel, not once deviating off the freeway to explore whatever sights. Every time I travel for a work meeting, I’m in and out of the city as quickly as possible, rarely having an inkling of regret for not having explored the city.
Yet when I was invited to speak at the Indian Society of Nephrology last year, I accepted. In part because the academic world I lived in at the time said I needed to have an “international presence” to advance my career. And also because they were flying me business class and paying me a little bit of money. Had it been coach and just for my CV, then somebody would have needed to explain to me, Why should I do this again? like I was “this many” years old.
My husband wasn’t able to travel with me, so I planned to fly the 18 hours there in time to give my talk and take the first plane back home. Friends expressed their disapproval of this plan.
“You can NOT fly all those hours and not see the area!” they cried. “For Heaven’s sake, there is a Wonder of the World less than an hour away from where you’ll be!”
I succumbed to the peer pressure and rescheduled the return flight a few days later. Even planned to take a day trip to see the Taj Mahal.
However once I got there, I paid the fee to get back on that earlier flight for two reasons. The primary reason is related to why I was invited to speak in the first place. Stay tuned for an upcoming post about those details. For now, I’ll focus on the second reason.
I was keenly, uncomfortably aware that I was the only one like me when I traveled to India. People stared. An India-born colleague explained the stares were simply because of my afro: “We don’t have hair like that here,” he offered.
Selfie at Indian Society of Nephrology event in Chandigarh, India
“So you’re saying it’s not because of my stunning beauty?” I joked in response because, (1) most of the people around me had a darker brown skin color than I and (2) most of the stares were innocuous. Like the security guy at an evening event I attended who wouldn’t look away even when I looked at him. Or the little girl of maybe 5 or 6 years who came up close to get a real good look, then turned on her heels and ran away when I felt her gaze and looked down at her.
But it was in the Delhi airport waiting for food before boarding the plane that I felt a different stare. I was smiling at something amusing on my phone screen when I felt it. I looked up to find a fair-skinned, chubby Indian woman probably in her early thirties staring back at me. Her top lip was downturned and raised to her nose. Like I smelled bad—or, that my very existence disgusted her.
After a short, sharp inhale I looked away, too stunned to shame her with something like, “Take a picture it’ll last longer,” or “May I help you?”
Looking back, I liken the experience to being the only one like me in my entire division of nephrology at UCSF. Ever. In 50 years.
Sure, much of what I felt came from fairly innocuous words, like “I never know how to read your facial expressions,” or a less innocuous, “They found you too intimidating to talk to you directly.”
But some of the eyes and words and actions weren’t so innocuous. Some of them communicated the assumption was negative until proven otherwise.
So when I told someone about one of those not-so-innocuous experiences and their response was, “I don’t think the incident you describe was racist because the other people involved weren’t White,” I know two things: One, that I was alone, and unsupported. And two, “That person thinks White people hold the monopoly on anti-Blackness.” They couldn’t be more wrong.