Disclaimer: I am not a profound scholar or novelist. My biggest goal in life is to simply live and luckily not make any enemies along the way. I have traveled to India in order to fulfill the mandated international experience required for all International and Global Studies majors at my respected university. I chose India on a whim, simply because it was one of the countries that I knew the least about and would possibly give me the greatest cultural experience. And that is what has lead me here: writing a blog about being a brown-skinned woman in a country living in a country once colonized by the imperial strong arm of England and is currently combating systematic hierarchies, deeply rooted with hints of racial separation, such as the caste system that has plagued their country for centuries.

I have never experienced racism. Actually I am lying; in kindergarten, I had accused three white girls of being racist towards me because they did not sit next to me at the lunch table. My teacher’s attempt to address my accusation was to have me to point out all of the people who were my friends and as I single-handedly pointed out people one by one, I was taken back at the end of her exercise when I noticed I had pointed out an astonishing number of white classmates. Even at six years old I had been bested by my own ignorance, an ignorance that would follow me for years to come, believing that racism was simply a white and black issue. It would not be until my second year of college that I would have another run-in with covert racism. One of my professors had taken the liberty to count the number of African American students out loud to illustrate his point of the percentage of students who were not closely related to Neanderthals in contrast to white students, who are the closest related descendants of Neanderthals. As if clearly stating the researched fact was not enough for college educated students to comprehend, counting out the number of brown-skinned individuals had to be added to add a slight flair to his point. Was it even fair for me to count this incident as my professor being racist, I am unsure; but I know that in that moment I had never felt so singled out before. Yet, even then I still believed that racism was a black and white issue because of how the incident presented itself.

I have been in India for over forty days. And within those forty days I have been asked what my “mother tongue” is, if I really was a student studying abroad from America, and generally ignored on a daily basis. I am studying in India with sixteen other students from America and who all happen to be white, expect one Asian student. I am not here to pass judgment on any of my fellow peers but I am here to properly paint a picture of my experience. I have lost count the amount of time that I have subtlety and overtly been overlooked in order to get near my white peers or have the opportunity to have a picture taken with the “white Americans”. I know that this sort of behavior is not specific to just India but in a city who has one of the largest foreigner populations in India, my ignorance of racism and of the heritage of this country made me assume that I would be as widely accepted as my fellow Americans. Instead, I am attempting to understand the still paralyzing effects of the caste system and how it has left me as brown as a common Indian and as African as my very distant ancestors. How I once believed that people saw me is no longer because that would imply that people actually see me. In a country with over one billion residents, it would be futile for me to think that I would be received with open arms and sought after like a rare gem, yet when I have seen almost three white-skin foreigners to my black-skin ones, one cannot help but wonder why the minority is not favored?