Thind and Belonging across the Edges of Time

Painted over. Broad strokes of power. Thin strokes of history. Whiteness painted over histories of interconnection. Histories of intimacies. Histories of us. One hundred years. And Thind’s case seeps in and out of our consciousness. Our policies. Our politics. Our desires. I want the case to reflect on our pasts, presents, and futures bound together. One hundred years. Our histories at the creases of US history, marginalized, written in as foreigners, nonhuman, as threats to civilization. Undo and redo the writing. Paint our history. Paint our future. Broad strokes and fine strokes, paint the contexts of Pain, Exclusion, Undocumented-ness, Incarceration, and Death foundational to Whiteness. Our canvas, our stories, our imagination connect acts of world-making. Scratch the record, rewind, paint the histories intertwined, shared, that existed. With each tip of the brush mark the white canvass of our solidarity, our coalitional futures.

Each word, each tap, every dot, every cross, by the stenographer, is the painting of Thind. Each tap an image of Thind’s beard and turban. Cloth and hair, foreign to the white background. Ozawa and Thind. Yellow and Brown. Connected through contradictions of Whiteness and American-ness, always sticking out, always separate from the white background. Politics run through the (common) white man. Politics run through the common (white) man. Politics run through the common white (man). Politics dictate commonsense. Commonsense dictates Asian as always foreign. Whiteness, the background, where my brown-ness stands, Black, Red, Yellow, Brown, Indigenous, and queer Others stand in stark contrast to the white canvas. We are many Others. We are connected.

Thind paints a desire for belonging. A desire amidst ambiguity, silence, a miss. The brush stops, it refuses, it cannot paint the “Muslims” and the “Hindoos” within the frames of citizenship. We paint, adding unbelievable and very real stories. Painting the stories of us on all walls, corners, pages, halls, and spaces. Painting the stories of justice. Inserting ourselves into the landscape. A viewing of something already built. A building and rebuilding of the past with eyes looking forward. With each brick and block of all our stories we must build the house of justice.

Shifting realms of race and racialization. What worlds are possible in our exclusions? Accounting for our erasures while imagining worlds, making worlds through pain and pleasure. Making worlds of unlimited belonging. Exceeding the “us” and “them” of (national) citizenship. Not dependent on denying, opposing, and dehumanizing but rather naming Whiteness and the racial landscape that must be dismantled. 100 years later. We realize our intertwined histories demand broad solidarities, and intimacies across continents and across states of white supremacy. Where Whiteness is no longer the background. Solidarities for justice and equity become the canvas for painting worlds. For making worlds. For all of us.