Lakshmi Sridaran: Advocate and Activist

Lakshmi Sridaran is the Director of National Policy and Advocacy at SAALT (South-Asian Americans Leading Together). Sridaran holds a Masters in City Planning from MIT, and a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.

Can you talk about the experiences that brought you to where you are today?

So I’m actually originally from Georgia, right outside Atlanta, and I grew up in a very white, kind of semi-rural area for most of my life. So when I had the opportunity to go to college in California at Berkeley, I took it. At the time, affirmative action had been revoked in California for about 10 years when I went to college in the early 2000s, and so there was a huge fight to try to essentially reverse that ruling. Unfortunately, there was a huge movement around the country to roll back affirmative action, so we did a lot of work recruiting and retaining student of color on campus. So I feel like labor organizing and student activism is really what got me to this work. I’d say that was my introduction to all of this.

What were some of the positions you took that brought you to SAALT?

I graduated college in 2005, which is when Hurricane Katrina happened in New Orleans, and so I ended up working at a foundation in California that was really committed to funding groups that were Black-led in the south. When Katrina hit, we knew it was gonna be a really important moment to make sure that those who were directly impacted were the ones getting the resources and actually determining how recovering from the hurricane would look. We knew there was gonna be a lot of displacement because that’s just what happens during disasters. I thought I would go off to law school and all of that, but I really noticed that in order to build trust with communities on the ground, that would be a bit challenging to do that with a law background.

There was a lot of federal money coming down to Louisiana, and most of it was going to these huge firms that would every now and then subcontract to a Black owned firm, but it was really rare that that happened, so we were tasked with doing that. From there, I ended up going to school at MIT for Urban Planning, but I was back and forth between there and New Orleans for a couple of years. I was able to continue working on a lot of the projects that I was starting before that, so the program really lent itself well to supporting the work in New Orleans. After I finished at MIT, I ended up taking a job first as the policy associate, then the director of programs, and then the deputy director for the Neighborhoods Partnership Network.

Then I left New Orleans and came to Washington D.C. five years ago, and I started at a movement support organization called the Praxis Project. That organization was dedicated to essentially supporting campaigns for health justice in various communities of color across the country, and so we worked with indigenous Black, Latino, South-Asian, and Southeast-Asian communities all over the country.

And then I came to SAALT. I’d never worked directly in our South-Asian American community, and I really wanted to take the experiences of organizing in other communities of color and think about the ways in which that could impact our community. I feel like the South-Asian American community largely become politicized only after 9/11 in a lot of ways, and so I think it’s important to go back further in history and think about how we do our organizing now and connecting to racial justice, and not just under a national security framework.

Specifically regarding the South-Asian Community, could you expand on what are some of the biggest issues we as a community face today?

So I do think, of course, civil rights and civil liberties which emanate from that national security framework around the ways in which our communities are racially profiled is a really important issue. I think the ways in which it goes beyond 9/11 is that profiling and surveillance in this country originally are rooted in the efforts by our government to dismantle the Black liberation movement. There was a program called the Counterintelligence Program (CoIntelPro) which was a very elaborate surveillance program that surveilled Black liberation leaders, so it’s basically that same infrastructure that’s been recycled over and over again, and now it’s being used mainly to surveil Muslim communities. I think it’s important to see that sort of connection to other communities of color. I would say the increase in white supremacy and hate violence targeting our communities is another huge issue, and SAALT has historically issued a number of reports documenting what that looks like and the ways in which the violence has grown so much.

I think immigration is a really important issue in our community. We have a large undocumented population; we’re the fourth highest after Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, so I think it’s really important that we focus on those parts of our population. Related to that, I think protecting worker’s rights and connecting our community more to the ways in which we’re criminalized in the criminal justice system is also really important. There are a lot of young South-Asians who also are getting funneled into the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline that are in working class, mainly Muslim communities. So I think the ways in which all of these systems intersect with our communities is really important to think about. It’s important to build that identity.

Across all of the careers you’ve held, what would say was the most defining in terms of your role in public service?

I always that I think my time in New Orleans was probably the most defining for me, I had the opportunity to be welcomed in the communities that, you know, were not racially my own, but who were incredibly welcoming. I was allowed to be in the trenches for so long with folks who were directly impacted, and I think having that level of, just, experience of doing that work alongside those people was the most defining. Also, I was really fortunate out of college to be mentored by two veterans of the Civil Rights Movement who’ve basically been a really big part of my life since I graduated from college, so I spent a lot of time with them in New Orleans and was able to benefit from the lessons that they learned from doing that work in the 60s. I had that mentorship throughout my time in New Orleans, so I think that also really defined the ways in which I think about organizing and activist work.

What do you hope to achieve in the next 10 years?

Part of the reason I came to SAALT was to think about the ways in which I can contribute to more effectively politicizing our community. I do think that the generation after me is a lot more politicized and doing really great work, but one of the things I’ve always wanted is either an institution or even a guide to organizing for the south-asian community. I know when we talked in the WLP class a few weeks ago, that a lot folks asked about, “How do we talk about anti-Black racism with our families, how do we talk about ourselves or our peers being lgbt with our families?” I think it’s important to how we handle those conversations, how we organize around those issues, how we are part of a larger racial justice movement. Taking the time to just step back and just saying “What does liberation movement look like for the south-asian community?” and just manifesting that in some way; that’s what I hope to do in the next 10 years. I don’t know exactly what that would look like yet.

What are you currently reading?

I did just see ArundhatI Roy speak like last week, and her new book just came out, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” and so I would love to read that book next. I have it sitting in my living room signed by ArundhatI Roy herself.

I know she’s doing her tour right now, and it was really just nice to hear her speak because it didn’t matter what the climate is like right now. What she had to say was just universally relevant — she just spoke about the complexity and the beauty that just comes out of writing fiction, how you can just talk about anything through these characters. You know, she was talking about issues of partition and religious strife in South Asia, and those are historical issues that are also playing out now today.