I once dated for a few months a desi sister who remained my friend. She had separated from her longtime boyfriend, who was African-American. Her familyÂ’s disapproval was one of the big stresses on their relationship. So it was quite a step when they got back in touch and rekindled. I was honored to be privy to this, and with it, to R.Â’s management of her parentsÂ’ anxieties.

The next year they married, in her familyÂ’s backyard in Orange County. The aunties were in full effect, all gossip and jewels and rolls of flesh. They inquired hungrily as to my status. The uncles were hanging out. R. and W. sat before the pandit, soaked in sweat from their garments, the fire and the summer heat. No one was paying any attention. Except, that is, for W.Â’s family, a cortege of beautifully turned out Black folks from Arkansas and Texas. They sat for hours in the sun, sole occupants of the front row, wearing looks of deep confusion. I believe I was the only guest to attempt to explain the proceedings. The aunties looked right through them.

The wedding was a triumph for R.; her parents, lovely people, had come around. But it said little for the community’s readiness to miscegenate in the blackward direction. That pesky little problem, which many mutineers will be at least anecdotally familiar with, is not one of the themes of Lavina Melwani’s article “The Color of Desi” in the January 2006 edition of Little India (shout-out to Cinnamon Rani).

The article is a positively giddy celebration of desi mixitude: Continue reading →

NYC police chief Ray Kelly agrees that racial profiling is trivially defeated by terrorists and too dangerous to rely on:‘I think profiling is just nuts’

— NYC police chief
Ray Kelly

“If you look at the London bombings, you have three British citizens of Pakistani descent. You have Germaine Lindsay, who is Jamaican. You have the next crew, on July 21st, who are East African. You have a Chechen woman in Moscow in early 2004 who blows herself up in the subway station. So whom do you profile? Look at New York City. Forty percent of New Yorkers are born outside the country… Who am I supposed to profile?… Could a terrorist dress up as a Hasidic Jew and walk into the subway, and not be profiled? Yes. I think profiling is just nuts.” [Link]

The author of this New Yorker piece, Malcolm Gladwell, explains that a racial profile fails against an adaptive foe:

… what the jihadis seemed to have done in London [was that] they switched to East Africans because the scrutiny of young Arab and Pakistani men grew too intense. It doesn’t work to generalize about a relationship between a category and a trait when that relationship isn’t stable–or when the act of generalizing may itself change the basis of the generalization. [Link]

Kelly had previously eliminated ineffective profiling in the U.S. Customs Service:

… he overhauled the criteria that border-control officers use to identify and search suspected smugglers. There had been a list of forty-three suspicious traits. He replaced it with a list of six broad criteria. Is there something suspicious about their physical appearance? Are they nervous? Is there specific intelligence targeting this person? Does the drug-sniffing dog raise an alarm? Is there something amiss in their paperwork or explanations? Has contraband been found that implicates this person?

Continue reading →