> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.chudgar.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How I learned I am white - URL: https://www.chudgar.com/how-i-learned-i-am-white/ - Published: 2021-01-18T06:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2023-08-10T19:13:31.000Z - Description: Over the past couple years, several folks have given me professional opportunities that turn out — often quite a ways into discussion — to be premised on their belief that I am a person of color. This is how a rabbi taught me to respond. - Author: Ash Chudgar - Tags: Writing, Longreads, Personhood My father was from northwestern India, my mother is a Pennsylvania-Dutch kind of American. That combination produced my older brother in 1971, then me in 1979\. My brother is eight-and-a-half years older than I am, and he’s a little darker than I am. I get the sense people read my brother as nonwhite all the time, which was a liability in our southeastern Pennsylvania suburb in the ’80s. He did not have a good time in school. ![My older brother and me at the Philadelphia Zoo in 1982.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53e4d517e4b0dc6847406585/1612464067992-W9NV24USCB18820CZS7K/1982+Jai+and+Neil+at+the+Philadelphia+Zoo.jpeg) My older brother and me at the Philadelphia Zoo in 1982\. Photo: Ashvin J. Chudgar I’m a little lighter than he is, and I went to the same schools nine years later. So while I got (relentlessly) pegged as queer, I never got told I wasn’t white. The handful of Indian kids in my school refused to believe I was Indian till they met my dad. (Indians *still* have a hard time believing I’m not adopted, so used to carry a family photo in my wallet.) That’s how it is for me. Even now, I'm low-key aware of the fact that I get read as white in public, mostly because I’m super-duper aware that I *might* be read as queer. (Pretty much everybody in America does this kind of low-key social threat calculation, I imagine, though [some](https://www.neilchudgar.com/big-ideas/why-im-not-a-centrist?ref=chudgar.com) might not know it.) So. Over the past couple years, several folks have given me professional opportunities that turn out — often quite a ways into discussion — to be premised on their belief that I am a person of color. Those discussions got real awkward, real quickly, for everybody. > **THEM** … and it’ll be great to bring a *diverse voice* into this process! > **ME** (*alarmed*) Because I’m queer? > **THEM** Oh! Um well yes, that and … > **ME** That and what? > **THEM** (*genuinely horrified*) I mean! You are? A person of color so > **ME** No! Well, actually, um It gets even more awkward after that. It turns out there is no conversational pattern to fall back on at such times. (We Americans, I think, do not have a very rich library of ways to talk politely about racialized identities.) It was after one of those “Oh but I saw on your website that your father is Indian and I assumed” conversations that I ran this little poll: ![A screenshot of a Twitter poll from @chudgr, dated Sept. 25, 2020. It asks respondents to answer "From my perspective, Neil Chudgar is:" 73 people voted, among whom 23% said "a person of color," and 77% said "a white person."](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53e4d517e4b0dc6847406585/edc18a93-6c2f-4241-a680-a0d9db898d98/Screen+Shot+2022-06-02+at+1.21.56+pm.png) Seventy-three people voted, which felt like a lot to me — but very few commented, perhaps because it wasn’t clear at all what I was after, and perhaps because it’s never clear what *anybody* is talking about when they talk about racial identity. A few friends said they knew I was a person of color because they know my history, *but* that if they didn’t, they’d see me as white. But that made me ask: **Is there anything to whiteness *other than* passing?** Maybe not. That settled it, I thought: three out of four Twitter poll-takers identify me as white; I move around the world as white'; but I'm half-Indian: ergo, I am “white-passing.” So I replied, when anyone asked, “My father is from India, but I pass as white.” But then, months later, I read Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s reflection on whether Jewish folks are white. Here’s what she wrote: > It’s true that Jews were not coded as white in Europe, very much the opposite. And it’s also true that in the U.S., built as it is (literally) on antiblackness, I am seen as white and afforded the protection of whiteness in pretty much every aspect of my life. In stores, when I get health care, when I interact with the police, around my education and career, as a parent, etc. To deny that would be totally disingenuous as well as dismissive of the ways racism functions in American society. I’m white, and there’s no denying it. … We can only be allies in the fight against racism when we acknowledge this—the unfair advantages those of us with white skin are afforded as a result of that skin in a white-supremacist society. — [Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg](https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1269681311825920002?s=20&ref=chudgar.com) “The unfair advantages those of us with white skin are afforded … in a white supremacist society.” This explains so much about my life: How my slightly-darker, much older brother had a dramatically different school experience from mine — and also why I’ve never felt *entirely* comfortable identifying as south Asian, since I know in my bones that people don’t think of me that way. But this is the moment in the Rabbi’s thread that really hit home: > And to clarify, imho “white-passing” is a misnomer. It implies possibly getting away with something. When a doctor or cop or etc. finds out you’re a Jew, they continue treating you as white. Because: Whiteness has expanded to include Jews, has done so since the GI Bill. > > — Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) [January 18, 2021](https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1351181795967062021?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=chudgar.com) Exactly. Unless I happen to be around a bunch of people for whom race is *really important* — like the white nationalists we’ve all come to know all too well these past few years, *and* the people who explicitly want to hire consultants of color — people don’t change their behavior toward when they learn my father was from India. They don’t decide I am a *different kind of person* when they know where my father came from. My Indianness is a “fun fact” about me, like piano-playing or having cats. It does not expose me to harm or violence. And that, this January 2021, is how I learned I’m not white-passing: I’m just white. The consequences that follow from this understanding about myself are just starting to unfold. I don’t *want* to be white in America today — because to be white in America today is to be *structurally* harmful. Now it’s up to me to figure out the harms I’m perpetrating, and work to undo them. --- *Thanks to several good-hearted people in the nonprofit sector for enduring those intensely awkward are-you-or-aren’t-you conversations, to the Rabbi for her wisdom, and to the 73 people who took my Twitter poll.*