The “Hello World!” Post

July 9, 2020 — San Francisco, CA

It is July in the year of 2020, and we are in neck-deep in a pandemic / economic meltdown / anti-racism revolution / bitter US election cycle.

My name is Ishan, and amidst this cacophony, I’ve made the calamitous decision to become one of those people, and have started a blog to chronicle my experiences and reflections.

So, who am I, and why would I decide to start a blog?

Not that I’m that interesting of a person, but for the sake of context, let’s pause a bit to talk about me at this point in time:

• A Canadian citizen, residing in San Francisco. One of countless other techies out here who have transformed the Bay Area into a region of transplants. And no, before you ask, I did not go to Waterloo.
• (F)unemployed — I quit my job in June to give myself some time to recharge before starting graduate school at Berkeley in August. (Go Bears!). At present, worried and frustrated about the ramifications of the ICE rule changes for Fall 2020 concerning international students like me.
• A 26 year old of South Asian descent, who having grown up in Canada, has struggled for years to reconcile being non-white in a white-dominant society, with the feeling of being culturally not-quite-brown either.

That last bullet in particular operates as a nice segue-way into the question of why.

Why this blog?

brown-ish, I’m hoping, is going to be a place for me to share experiences and reflections from my own ‘not-entirely-brown, but definitely not white’ vantage point in North American society.

(Thank you to Black-ish for the inspiration for the name.)

The truth is, this is my way of embracing that the tension between identities as an entirely valid identity in itself.

For a lot of complicated reasons that I’m not going to fully get into just this moment, I spent a lot of my adolescent / young adult years trying my hardest to outright reject my South Asian identity. I played hockey, I hung out with the white kids, I learned their slang, their traditions, and their music** (Sweet Caroline and Tiny Dancer, anyone?).

** I drew the line at country music though…I could never get behind country music.

But in the end, in trying to whitewash myself, I never found belonging — only erasure. By virtue of being raised by Indian parents, enough of White Canadian culture was inaccessible to me. And enough of my South Asian heritage was inaccessible to White Canada. And so, to my dismay, I realized that all my efforts had gone to simply render myself invisible.

I was adrift, and searching for identity. Until somewhat recently.

Jump to June 2020, and seemingly across the entire country, protestors are taking to the streets to protest the latest string of extra-judicial murders of Black Americans— George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, among others. Social media, of course, exploded with activity and information about the history of racism, and the essential strategies of anti-racism.

It struck me, however, that as a non-White man, some of this material didn’t feel entirely applicable to me, or people like me. The relationship that South Asian folks have with racism in the US and Canada differs considerably from that of white folks. We occupy that mythological ‘model minority’ space, and also espouse our own severe forms of anti-blackness. So I wrote up my own version of an anti-racism guide for the South Asian community.

In so doing, I realized that I would not have had the wherewithal to write this document without having felt like an outsider for much of my life. Those years feeling seemingly adrift were also years spent developing a critical perspective of each of the parts of my overall identity. I was not adrift between two worlds — I was the connective tissue that could bring them together. And damn right, I was going to write about it.

In short, an identity was forged, and the seeds for this blog planted.

What to expect in future posts

Much of the origin story of this blog has to do with race and culture. This will certainly be a focal point of future posts, but I’m also hoping to cover more ground than just that. There will be personal anecdotes, opinion pieces on current issues, and a healthy dose of rambling on whatever topic catches my eye.

I can only hope that I’ll be memorable, entertaining, insightful…and I’ll try to be brief as well.

Till next time.