Thread by @anirvan

It's #BlackHistoryMonth, and someone emailed me about the BlackDesiSecretHistory.org website, and why South Asian Americans owe a debt of gratitude to African American activism.

Here's the truth: without the Civil Rights movement, South Asian America as we know it might not exist.

U.S. laws long restricted immigration from South Asia. While several thousand South Asians had made their way to the United States by the early 20th century, the Immigration Act of 1917 explicitly barred our immigration.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigrati…

The 1946 Luce-Cellar Act allowed Indians to naturalize, and loosened immigration restrictions—but allowed in only one hundred Indian immigrants per year.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce%E2%8…

Literally everything changed in 1965. Passed in part as a response to Black activism against racist laws and Cold War pressures, it made space for us in the U.S. Without it, there wouldn't be 3.5 million South Asians in the United States today.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigrati…

Without the Civil Rights movement, South Asian America as we know it might not exist. Our right to exist in the United States wasn’t just handed to us—it was won for us in part by communities of color and anti-racist activists. (go read @vijayprashad's "The Karma of Brown Folk")

South Asians and African Americans have history together.

BlackDesiSecretHistory.org is a start, but here are 4 books I recommend:

Vijay Prashad's The Karma of Brown Folk
Gerald Horne's The End of Empires
Nico Slate's Colored Cosmopolitanism
Sudarshan Kapur's Raising Up a Prophet

These books don't dive deep into Black-Dalit solidarities. But from Ambedkar and King to Cornel West and Dalit Women Fight, generations of activists have seen explicit connections between US race and Indian caste—even while acknowledging differences. I have more learning to do.

As a community that's still substantially of the immigrant generation, it's not surprising that many South Asians were never taught about the history of race in the United States, and how we fit into it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_cl…

But here's something I keep coming back to: for generations, when we were strangers to this country, Black communities took us in, stood with us, and created the conditions under which our community could grow and thrive. It's time to repay some of the debt.

(And this is doubly important at a moment like this, when our communities, Black and Brown, face a resurgent White nationalism. Solidarity isn't just a moral imperative, but also a necessary practical step for collective safety. When Black folks are free, all of us are free.)

As a Bengali, some of these stories of South Asian + African American solidarities and connection hit me deep.

There's DuBois' commentary on Tagore's 1929 "A message to the American Negro from Rabindranath Tagore," published in The Crisis.

credo.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/…

And the AMAZING book "Bengali Harlem" by @losthistories, which recovers the stories of two waves of primarily Bengali Muslim men who came to the US between the 1880s and 1940s, many of whom married and built new lives with African American, Creole, and Puerto Rican partners.

Slate's book describes how in the mid-1960s, Hamid Kizilbash (from Pakistan) and Savithri Chattopadhyay (from India), faculty members at Tougaloo College, challenged racial segregation and terror, using their ambiguous racial status to support their students. Stories to build on.

Just because we celebrate Black / South Asian solidarities doesn't mean we get to ignore all the anti-Black racism in South Asian communities. It's deep, and it's terrible, and it's linked to things like casteism, shadeism. But those stories give me hope that we can do better.

Incidentally, for a more global and radical perspective on Black / South Asian histories, this thread by @claystanman is critical reading.

https://twitter.com/solidaritysummr/status/959217603108655104

If you're interested in South Asian American history, you NEED to be following @SAADAonline, a scrappy nonprofit archiving our stories. I've spent dozens of hours exploring their online museum of South Asian American history. saada.org

South Asian Americans have work to do to confront anti-Blackness.

I've repeatedly turned to @sashawtweets' work, which calls in our people with love & empathy: tospeakasong.com/2014/12/19/the…

And the Queer South Asian Nat'l Network shares this 🙌🏽 curriculum: queersouthasian.wordpress.com/2014/12/19/it-…

And @LettersForBL offers these sample letters:

Bengali: lettersforblacklives.com/1bc0dfd460e2

English: lettersforblacklives.com/letters-for-bl…

Hindi: lettersforblacklives.com/9c8c221aa3b2

Nepali:
lettersforblacklives.com/simple-nepali-…

Tamil: lettersforblacklives.com/1bd896a02fe6

Telugu: lettersforblacklives.com/cea3cb627acc

Urdu: lettersforblacklives.com/9c7edc7baeb3