Perspective: Saying DEI in an Indian Accent

It was a warm day, everyone wore masks, and people were distributing water bottles. I calmly wandered onto Chicago Avenue not knowing that in a couple of hours I would witness historic grief and rage spill out onto the streets of the city I was temporarily calling home. Minneapolis, where I am doing a Ph.D. in the Ecology department at the University of Minnesota.

Brought up in the relative security of an upwardly mobile family in urban India, I had always had a healthy dose of anti-colonial consciousness, but an unhealthy lack of awareness about the caste and class divides in India. ‘Divide’, is, in fact, just a euphemism for the caste system that enables a tiny minority of people to access the country’s elite institutions as well as those in the rest of the world. Having grown up in India, I had benefited from the caste system far more than I had suffered from racism.