The privilege of cultural capital

The world has gotten even more competitive and maniacal about "credentials" since my high school years.  In India and here in the US, and in the rest of the world too, students are finding it more and more difficult to understand who they are and what they might want to do with their lives, even as they rush towards the prestigious colleges.  The competition has become so intense that the elite of the elite colleges in the US have eye-popping rejection ratios.

The intense competition is why the admission process at Harvard has come under scrutiny.  Qualified students not getting admitted there complain against the affirmative action practices there. 

Of course, any systematic discrimination is a bad practice; but, it does not seem like Harvard discriminated in that sense.  I can understand a 17- or an 18-year old thinking that "Harvard or bust" is the bottom-line.  But, seriously?

The Supreme Court has taken up affirmative action cases relating to admissions/rejections at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.  Odds are that the evidence-based arguments and questions from the minority liberal female justices will not make a dent against the ideologically driven men and the lone right-wing female justice.

India has had affirmative action programs for decades in order to address the different and unequal starting points that kids from different castes face.  The godawful college where I earned my undergraduate degree was fantastic for one reason: It provided me with a real education about why affirmative action programs are important. 

Until college, I hadn't seriously considered the practical and daily experiences of the "backward" caste people and Dalits in the villages.  One simple, but profound, comment that a fellow student made in the first semester echoed haunts me even now.  He said that he didn't want to go home for the holidays because he would not be able to be passive when upper-caste kids bossed over his parents and addressed them by their first names, and while his parents behaved submissively towards those tiny tots. 

I was shocked. 

I had not heard anything like that from somebody my age.  After all, in school in the industrial town we grew up not worrying about caste.  Of course, I knew that some of my classmates were brahmins and many were not.  The "modern" township had created for us an environment in which we could talk the highfalutin talk about social problems and progress but without any idea of the nitty-gritty details of the real lives of really oppressed people. 

The commie-sympathizer in me was fully awakened.  Or, to use a modern expression, I became woke.

In the NY Times, an Indian-American has authored a commentary in which she opposes affirmative action programs in higher education.  Renu Mukherjee presents her family story of her grandfather coming to attend graduate school in the 1960s with less than $100 in his pocket.  She writes:

[Because] Asian American enrollment at their schools exceeds the Asian American share of the population, stories like mine don’t count as “diverse.” Instead, the stories of “underrepresented” racial minorities tend to count more as the diversity in which universities have a compelling interest, the rationale for racial preferences today.

Search if you want in her commentary and you will not find any acknowledgement of the privileged position that her grandfather came from.  There is no mention of "brahmin" or "dalit."  

Vice President Kamala Harris' mother was able to come to America for graduate schooling because she, like many of us who came here decades ago, was from the privileged caste and class.  She was from a brahmin family as I am.  And that, I am sure, is the story of the grandfather who made it possible for his granddaughter to write that NY Times commentary.

The NY Times commentary author's last name is Mukherjee.  Wikipedia is all one needs to understand the last name of Mukjerjee: 

All Mukherjees belong to the Bharadwaj Gotra or the clan of Rishi Bharadwaj. The Mukherjees belong to the Kulin Brahmin class and are also classified as Rarhi Brahmins. The origins of most of the Brahmins in Southern Bengal can be traced back to the Gangetic plains of Northern India

Imagine if the author had briefly mentioned the privilege that her people have had over the centuries!

Ahem, I too came to the US with just about a $100 with me.  Unlike that author, I talk and write about the privileged life--as a brahmin and as a male--that made my success possible.  Merit did not mysteriously pop into my brain, but was the result of generations of literacy, learning, and exposure to the world, which is what Sharmila Sen referred to in her memoir as "cultural capital." Almost always, brahmins gained this capital at the expense of an overwhelming majority who were discriminated against.

Grandpa Mukherjee and the rest of us could come to this country in such huge numbers because of the changes in the immigration laws that allowed brown people to immigrate.  This change followed the historic Civil Rights Act.

Inspired by the Civil Rights revolution in American society, the 1965 Immigration Act explicitly abolished the discriminatory national origins quotas that had regulated entrance into the country since the 1920s. It explicitly prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence in the U.S. government’s decisions to issue immigrant visas. Instead, the law established a new system preference system based on professional status and family reunification.

Had African-Americans not fought for their civil rights, the immigration act would not have been revised either.  What a tragic farce it is that a privileged beneficiary of the civil rights legislation now questions the relevance of affirmative action!

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