Last week I watched the wedding season on Netflix. It’s a light-hearted rom com in which two eligible Indian-Americans try to avoid family pressure to get married by pretending to date each other. Predictably, they fall in love and get married.
I cringed as the two mothers obsessed over how to convince their grown children that marriage was the key to happiness.
This got me thinking.
Arranged Marriage & Love
Marriage rates in the US have been falling steadily since the mid-1980s, so why are Indian Americans (and some Asian Americans) so preoccupied with arranging their children’s marriages?
I wondered if, instead, we could make a dent in the social fabric of our adoptive country as Indian-American parents by trying to abandon our cultural tendency to arrange life partners for our children.
Let me explain myself.
When I arrived in the US as a graduate student in 1989, an advanced degree was not my only motivation. Soon after our wedding, my husband and I had to leave India. I grew up in a Hindu family. My husband is Muslim. Although our marriage was not illegal in India, it became extremely difficult for us to live there as a couple. Indian society is still intolerant of inter-religious marriages like mine. So, we decided to head to graduate school in the US
Loving vs. Virginia
I started law school in Chicago. In my first Constitutional Law class, I came across the case of Loving v. Virginia 388 US 1 (1967). In this landmark decision, the Supreme Court declared that any law prohibiting interracial marriage violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
The Lovings lived in Virginia, which enforced strict anti-miscegenation laws. The State Racial Integrity Act of 1924 criminalized marriage between people classified as “white” and people classified as “colored.” So the couple married in Washington, DC, which allowed interracial marriages. Richard Perry Loving was white and Mildred Loving self-identified as Rappahannock Indian. When they returned to Virginia, the state sentenced the Lovings to a year in prison for marrying each other.
Applying the strict standard of review, the Court determined that Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act had no discernible purpose other than “insidious racial discrimination” designed to “maintain white supremacy.” Therefore, she ruled that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause.
My daughter’s interracial marriage
For me this case was no different from any other in my textbook because I had just arrived in the US. Only later did I begin to understand its social and historical impact not only in the context of the larger American society, but also in my own personal life. life.
In 2019, my daughter married her fiance, who happens to be white. He was raised as a member of the Southern Baptist Church. Watching my daughter’s double-ceremony wedding—they exchanged vows in the Christian tradition followed by Saptapadi, seven steps around a sacred fire in a Hindu ceremony—it struck me that if it weren’t for Loving v. Virginia, their marriage would not have been possible.
My husband and I had faced tremendous opposition to our unorthodox marriage, but no one had questioned the legality of our union.
Somehow, I had assumed that being born in America and raised as Americans, my children were safe from such prejudice and humiliation.
And yet, just fifty years ago, some US states would not have allowed my daughter and her husband to celebrate their interracial marriage.
The Changing Face of America
Demographic data collected by the US Census Bureau shows that by 2045, the US will cease to be a majority white country. It’s hard to escape the fact that the white population (especially in rural America) has reacted to this trend defensively, polarizing our politics. This phenomenon has brought significant electoral consequences.
In 2016, the country elected Donald Trump as its President. During his four-year term, America’s minority communities have been upended as Trumpism gained a stronghold on the Republican Party and sparked behavior the country was unprepared for. Inevitably, immigrant communities were targeted.
Nearly five million American citizens of South Asian descent live in the U.S. According to the U.S. Census, most of us immigrated between 2000 and 2017.
With that in mind, most of us who immigrated here as adults tend not to understand the historical context or pervasive currents of racism and how they affect our lives. Often, we see ourselves outside the Black-White divide.
Only when racist rhetoric translates into direct action against us do we take it into account.
Bias against immigrants
In 21016, Steve Bannon (Trump’s 2016 campaign manager) expressed displeasure about Silicon Valley immigrants saying, “three-quarters of the tech industry is run by Asians.” But Ascend, a non-profit group for pan-Asian business leaders, disputed that view. A 2015 study estimated that less than twenty percent of managers in Silicon Valley technology companies were of Asian descent. Their data suggested that systemic bias prevents Asians from rising to the top ranks.
Among Indian-Americans, Banon’s assertion fueled fears of a racist backlash. It was not unfounded. In June 2017, two Indian engineers were shot dead in a bar on the outskirts of Kansas City. In 2020, Trump suspended the H-1B program, which had been driving the US’s Indian-origin technology workforce. Then, in another hate crime, four Sikh workers were shot at a FedEx facility in Indiana in April 2021.
Attacks like these exposed the anti-immigrant, racist underbelly of American society.
Brown bias
But while Indian-Americans have long known that being brown in a predominantly white society can work against us, we’re not always honest about how we ourselves perpetuate prejudice.
Historically, we are a color-conscious culture. Being fair-skinned is equated with upper caste position and privilege. Transplanting this baseless, immoral cultural principle into the society we immigrated to is unconscionable. Our community is more likely to accept a White-Brown couple than a Black-Brown couple.
Meera Nair movie, Mississippi Masala, from thirty years ago, observed Indian prejudices against the African-American community that are largely still valid. In recent years, the Blindian Project, a social impact media platform that advocates against blackness and Indophobia in our communities, has helped normalize black-brown relations.
But we have a long way to go.
A pluralistic society
Building bridges in a divided nation is the government’s responsibility, said Justin Gest, professor of public policy at George Mason University. At an Aug. 5 EMS conference on interracial marriage in a polarized America, Gest suggested that government policies should cultivate pluralism and harmony among different ethnic groups. He sees intermarriage as the primary means of promoting such social change.
In his book The minority of the majority, Gest explores six societies (Hawai’i, Mauritius, Singapore, New York City, Bahrain, Trinidad and Tobago). It identifies factors that produce positive social outcomes in majority-minority transitions. Gest concludes that political institutions can use their power to shape public responses and transform perceptions of demographic change.
Such policies of inclusion are especially important in a country of immigrants like the US, which constantly asserts on the world stage that American identity is defined by its multicultural, multi-racial population.
What makes you American?
My husband and I faced tremendous opposition to our marriage in India. But I assumed my American-born children would be spared such prejudice and humiliation.
In my opinion, becoming an American is not just about taking the oath at the naturalization ceremony.
As Gest suggests, we must separate our ethnic identities from our civic identities to understand who we are. Policies aimed at promoting equality will not work if citizens do not build relationships across racial divides. And it seems attitudes are changing. A Gallup poll shows that a majority of Americans (94%) now approve of interracial marriage.
Multi-ethnic marriage
If we encourage our children to step outside the descriptive parameters of caste or religion and enter into inter-racial marriages, it will catalyze the process of assimilation for our minority community into the mainstream.
Actively welcoming or advocating for marriages between people of different races, castes or religions certainly helps to mitigate and ultimately overcome prejudice.
Marriage is a powerful way to mend tears in America’s multiethnic tapestry. Multi-hued threads are needed to repair these tears. Regardless of arranged marriage, choosing who to marry, regardless of ethnicity, religion or identity, should be one of them.
Edited by Meera Kymal, Contributing Editor at India Currents.
