Two moments touched me in my identity feels at the airport in Goa: 1) I saw an ad for sunscreen with a very pale woman (at least ten shades lighter than nearly any locals I have encountered since I have been in Southern India) promising to let you enjoy the sun without risking a tan (because god forbid your skin be any bit darker than can be avoided) and 2) I saw an Indian woman who looked very visibly Black (with dark skin, which is not particularly noteworthy around here, but also distinctly African-influenced facial features and she was rocking straight up naturally kinky hair) working at the airport security.

Indian colorism and the privileging of lighter skin is no secret. As in many other parts of the world I have visited, the legacy of colonialism has left a beauty standard that values close approximation to European. Most movie stars and other women acclaimed for their beauty are fair skinned and lightening creams and other remedies for being dark are easy to find. Recently, a group of South Asian women called attention to this with a campaign called “Unfair and Lovely,” an answer to skin lightening products called “Fair and Lovely.” 

Dark skin in beautiful rich mahogany and radiant ebony is very common in this part of the country. And yet all the advertising, film and other media images I have seen feature people with light brown skin or paler. The question of color is significant for me, as someone who was led to believe that the absence of my Indian father in my life is the result of anti-Black racism. This is a strange irony because here I am in India surrounded by black skin. 

My own brown skin is a genetic compromise between my dark chocolate Indian father and my “high yellow” Black American mom. I’ll never forget the day my Indian-American friends from college met my mom at graduation and one of them registered shock and said, “She’s so fair! So, it’s your dad where your color comes from!”

This leads me to my second moment at the Goa airport, the Black woman working at the security check with an Indian surname on her badge and an Indian accent who even wobbled her head in the telltale Indian way when she spoke. I was dying to ask her about herself, which would have been awkward under any circumstance but given that she was checking me through a crowded and chaotic security line, seemed wildly inappropriate and impossible. Was she raised here? Did she identify as Black? How do others see her? I had a thousand questions.

Links between Indian and Black people are understandably an on-going fascination for me. I’m ever enthusiastic to discover “Mississippi Masala” moments. I find joy and validation in Black/Indian creoles in the diaspora, like in the Caribbean and parts of South and East Africa. I was intrigued by a talk at the Schomburg Center in NY on an early wave of South Asian immigrants in the US that intermingled with African-Americans and a book by the speaker called “Bengali Harlem,” that I rushed to get my hands on. I was deeply fascinated at that same talk to hear the stories of Black African Muslim slaves who became nobles in Northern India.

It’s important for me to have a counter-narrative to the often anti-Black reputation ascribed to the mostly white collar Indian immigrants to the U.S. in the modern era and global surveys on racist attitudes that rank India at the top. It’s one of the many paradoxes of my experience that my allegedly anti-Black origins are in many ways also very black.