Damaging Psychological Consequences of the Discourse

Abstract

However politically correct a racist discourse may be, it has negative consequences on the psyche of the people toward whom it is directed. Research has shown that children are most suspectable and vulnerable to racist discourse. When subjected to racist discourse, they develop an inferiority complex, resulting in low self-esteem and lack of self-worth. They build defense mechanisms to dissociate themselves from their ancestors’’ ethnicity, nationality, or culture. The sanitized and politically correct discourse of Mill in current school textbooks, which remains racist because of the history that it has inherited, has profound psychological and sociological consequences for Indian American children that this chapter comprehensively exposes.

Given that it is the politically correct and sanitized version of the colonial discourse, which is run roughshod with racism, that is being taught to the Indian American children, the psychological consequences that the narrative or discourse generates are very similar to the effects that have been observed in colonized people and in groups that are racially targeted, for instance, the African American people. This chapter is dedicated to discussing this issue threadbare.

We saw earlier that colonialism and racism have gone hand in hand. Colonization, with its racist underpinnings, has been known to cause psychological consequences, as described by Fanon and Memmi, who were more or less the trendsetters in this area of study. Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, as the name itself suggests, describes in detail the psychological consequences that colonized people, especially the Black people, have been subjected to. Memmi began the analysis in The Colonizer and the Colonized and completed it in the Dominated Man¹ and Racism.² Though the political colonization for most of the world, barring the First Nations people, has ended, racism has not. It is very much operational today: alive and kicking. Any discourse rooted in colonial domination is essentially a racist discourse, and it will cause the same psychological consequences as when political colonization was in place. In other words, the psychological damage that colonization causes is very similar to what Racism inflicts. We will exemplify the last point by comparing Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Beverly Daniel Tatum’s “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”³ Tatum’s work is predominantly in the context of African American children, whereas Fanon’s work is in the context of colonization and implicit racism.

We will, therefore, in this chapter, give a summary of the consequences of colonization, draw a comparison with how racism impacts African American children in the United States, and, in the light of the two, analyze the impact of the school textbook discourse on the Indian American children. The data is the depositions of the Indian American children proffered at the State Board of Education (SBE), California. As discussed in the previous chapter, the SBE is responsible for generating the HSS Framework—a sort of curriculum—which publishers of social science textbooks use to curate teaching materials for K-12 students. The HSS Framework is revised every ten years through a process in which students, teachers, professors, and parents, among others, give feedback. The publishers then produce textbooks based on the HSS Framework. All the stakeholders mentioned above review and comment on the books. The data for our analysis come from the testimonies given in the last revision cycle, which ran from 2015 to 2017, specifically from the hearing on November 9, 2017. As many as seventy-two Indian American children, ranging from elementary school to high school, participated in the process and spoke about the damaging consequences of the text on Hinduism and India that they had been studying or were about to begin studying (based on what they had seen their friends or siblings undergo).

We want to underline that even before we looked at the data, we first created a framework for analyzing the psychological consequences of colonialism and racism. In a certain sense, in this work, we predicted that the literature on the psychological effects of colonialism and racism, coming from the works of Fanon, Memmi, and Tatum, will coincide and match with the testimonies of the Indian American Children at the SBE. They did. We will critically examine our prediction in the final section of the chapter.

We begin constructing the framework with Fanon, a trained psychiatrist. We then gravitate to Memmi and subsequently to Tatum. Though Fanon wrote from the perspective of a black man within a colonial situation and Memmi from the perspective of a Tunisian Jew, their contentions assumed a universal appeal for all the colonized people because the truth of their observations could be validated and substantiated in the colonized population across the world. Though both Fanon and Memmi used the terms “colonizer” and “colonized” to comment upon the relationship that exists between the two, we are substituting them with “dominant” and “dominated” respectively. This is precisely because political colonization has ended in most of the world—their use in the current times will make them archaic and redundant. Also, if we use the terms “dominant” and “dominated,” we will be able to integrate and compare the work of Fanon and Memmi with that of Tatum. Memmi’s Dominated Man may have unconsciously inspired substituting colonized with dominated.

Inferiority Complex, Shame, and Becoming One’s Enemy

In the dominated, they develop an inferiority complex, which makes them disconnect from their culture, ethnicity, and tradition. The dominated do not feel comfortable in the color of their skin and want to become white. The language and the culture of the dominant become the standard to which the dominated want to measure up. The more the dominated adopt the culture and language of the dominant, the further they go away from the language and culture of their ancestors. The dominant “others” the dominated, creating myriad misrepresentations. These myths are not seen by the dominated as myths but as facts because these myths not only become part of the educational system but also get recycled in media and mainstream conversations. Consequently, these myths cavorting misrepresentations get internalized by the dominated, resulting in the dominated recycling the discourse about themselves, which has not been formulated by their ancestors but by the dominant, whose explicit agenda was to subjugate and oppress. Therefore, one of the objectives for Fanon to write Black Skin, White Masks was to liberate the black population from itself—from the chains it has put upon itself due to the internalization of the oppressive discourse.

The myths, masquerading as facts, essentially stated that the dominated have no culture, language, history, science, philosophy, arts, etc. In subtle and explicit ways, they get internalized in the psyche and constitution of the dominated. The dominated consequently engaged in two interdependent behaviors: 1. They do not investigate the veracity of “facts” about themselves and the culture that has been set by the dominant. In fact, they do not even know that the discourse in the mainstream on them has been framed by the dominant—just like the situation in the context of Hindus and Hinduism, we did not know that the current discourse in textbooks is nothing but a sanitized version of the colonial discourse set in motion by James Mill. 2. As they disconnect from themselves and their own culture and traditions, they gravitate towards the culture, civilization, and traditions of the dominant, thinking them to be universal standards, thereby mainstreaming the dominant’s civilization, culture, and knowledge systems.

The result of this twin process is that whereas the civilization, culture, and knowledge systems of the dominant grow and proliferate, the civilization, culture, and knowledge systems of the dominated atrophy and die. They are either museumized or mummified by the dominant as artifacts of history, past, or tradition that have been superseded by the onward march of humanity (of course, humanity equals the dominant) or are ravaged and cannibalized for appropriation—as has happened in the case of yoga and Indian philosophy.⁴

Inferiority complex manifests in the choice of partners as well—and the choice, as per Fanon, is not guided by authentic love. It is driven by the Adlerian unconscious, where one begins to dislike a partner from one’s ethnic group. The choice is inspired by the desire to partake of the culture and the civilization of the dominant because of the inferiority that one feels vis-à-vis one’s own. With measures as in the above and others in which one seeks the dominant’s culture, there arises in the dominated a desire to whiten oneself—inside and outside as was the case with Michael Jackson. The dominated begins to seek the approval of the dominant constantly. The dominant is seen to be rich and beautiful or handsome (as the case may be depending on one’s sexual orientation). By marrying into the ethnicity of the dominant, the dominant unconsciously and, at times consciously, seeks to elevate themself. Fanon describes this phenomenon “affective erethism,”⁵ as stated earlier.

Racist discourse creates not only an inferiority complex but also an identity confusion, as Fanon exemplifies with his example of Jean Veneuse—an Antillean schooled and raised in France since childhood: Is he French, or is he a black person? For in his mind, he could not be both. Being French was out of the question because French and whiteness were conflated; being a black Antillean was also out of the question because he was raised not on an Antillean Island but in France. Neither the French accepted him as his own, nor did the Antillean islanders.

Inferiority complex results in a lack of self-esteem and confidence. Fanon, critiquing Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: Psychology of Colonization, however, makes explicit that the inferiority in the dominated is not before the emergence of the colonial dominant but is a result and consequence of the dominated-dominant relationship: “Inferiorization is the native correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority. Let us have the courage to say: it is the racist who creates the inferiorized.”⁶

As we mentioned, it is not just the conscious aspect of the mind that gets impacted by the discourse—the unconscious gets shaped and influenced too. The dominant operates in binaries such as good versus evil, black versus white, leader versus led, hero versus follower, etc. Whatever is considered positive in these binaries and the world of the dominant gets appropriated, and the negative gets projected onto the dominated. These constructions and projections find their way into children’s books and comics, like Tarzan, Phantom, Mandrake, etc. The child begins to identify with the consciousness of the dominant and, at the level of the unconscious, internalizes the negative constructions of its own people, civilization, culture, tradition, etc:

In the Antilles, the black schoolboy who is constantly asked to recite “our ancestors the Gauls” identifies himself with the explorer, the civilizing colonizer, the white man who brings truth to the savages, a lily-white truth. The identification process means that the black child subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude. He invests the hero, who is white, with all his aggressiveness—which at this age closely resembles self-sacrifice: a self-sacrifice loaded with sadism…. Gradually, an attitude, a way of thinking and seeing that is basically white, forms and crystallizes in the young Antillean…. The fact is that the Antillean does not see himself as Negro; he sees himself as Antillean. The Negro lives in Africa. Subjectively and intellectually the Antillean behaves like a white man. But in fact he is a black man.⁷

What is the consequence of this? The dominated develops hatred towards one’s people and consequently towards oneself. Fanon could not say it better, citing his example:

It is normal for the Antillean to be a negrophobe. Through his collective unconscious the Antillean has assimilated all the archetypes of the European. The anima of the Antillean male is always a white woman. Likewise, the animus of the Antilleans is always a white male. The reason is that there is never a mention in Anatole France, Balzac, Bazin, or any other of “our” novelists of that ethereal yet ever-present black woman or of a dark Apollo with sparkling eyes. But I have betrayed myself; here I am talking of Apollo! It’s no good: I’m a white man. Unconsciously, then, I distrust what is black in me, in other words, the totality of my being.⁸

There is a split that occurs in one’s psyche. Externally, one is the very person that the mainstream education, books, pedagogy, and media describe and judge—that is how others see one—and internally, through the identification with the mainstream narrative, one is constantly judging how one looks externally. In other words, the internal constitution ends up judging one’s external appearance. As a result, one ends up hating oneself, reflecting the hate one is subjected to through the narrative, which essentially “others.” Self-hatred is one of the major consequences of the racist discourse:

The black man is, in every sense of the word, a victim of white civilization. It is not surprising that the artistic creations of Antillean poets bear no specific mark: they are white men. To return to psychopathology, we can say that the black man lives an ambiguity that is extraordinarily neurotic. At the age of twenty—i.e., at the time when the collective unconscious is more or less lost or at least difficult to bring back to the realm of the conscious—the Antillean realizes he has been living a mistake. Why is that? Quite simply because (and this is very important) the Antillean knows he is black, but because of an ethical shift, he realizes (the collective unconscious) that one is black as a result of being wicked, spineless, evil, and instinctual. Everything that is the opposite of this black behavior is white. This must be seen as the origin of the Antillean’s negrophobia. In the collective unconscious black = ugliness, sin, darkness, and immorality. In other words, he who is immoral is black. If I behave like a man with morals, I am not black.⁹

Self-hatred results in either assimilation or alienation. Assimilation is accentuated by the shame that one feels, as described by Memmi in The Colonizer and the Colonized, toward one’s own culture, customs, traditions, language, and philosophy, which results in the aping of the culture, language, customs, practices, and philosophy of the dominant. The disdain and hatred towards one’s traditions are more or less directly proportional to the fascination that one feels towards those of the dominant. Consequently, the psychological consequences begin to be revealed in sociological behavior. The dominated then starts to become one’s own enemy:

The colonized does not seek merely to enrich himself with the colonizer’s virtues. In the name of what he hopes to become, he sets his mind on impoverishing himself, tearing himself away from his true self. The crushing of the colonized is included among the colonizer’s values. As soon as the colonized adopts those values, he similarly adopts his own condemnation. In order to free himself, at least so he believes, he agrees to destroy himself. This phenomenon is comparable to Negrophobia in a Negro, or anti-Semitism in a Jew. Negro women try desperately to uncurl their hair, which keeps curling back, and torture their skin to make it a little whiter. Many Jews would, if they could, tear out their souls—that soul which, they are told, is irremediably bad. People have told the colonized that his music is like mewing of cats, and his painting like sugar syrup. He repeats that his music is vulgar and his painting disgusting. If that music nevertheless moves him, excites him more than the tame Western exercises, which he finds cold and complicated, if that unison of singing and slightly intoxicating colors gladdens his eye, it is against his will. He becomes indignant with himself, conceals it from strangers’ eyes or makes strong statements of repugnance that are comical. The women of the bourgeoisie prefer a mediocre jewel from Europe to the purest jewel of their tradition. Only the tourists express wonder before the products of centuries-old craftsmanship. The point is that whether Negro, Jew or colonized, one must resemble the white man, the non-Jew, the colonizer. Just as many people avoid showing off their poor relations, the colonized in the throes of assimilation hides his past, his traditions, in fact all his origins which have become ignominious.¹⁰

Beverly Daniel Tatum confirms the aforementioned psychological consequences within the context of racism alone, given that she predominantly focuses on the African American population in contemporary times. Her work begins in the framework of internalized oppression—the internalization of a stereotypical and negative discourse—and then subsequently explores the psychological consequences of internalized oppression among children, adolescents, and young adults, stating the following:

The negative messages of the dominant group about the subordinates may be internalized, leading to self-doubt or, in its extreme form, self-hate. There are many examples of subordinates attempting to make themselves over in the image of the dominant group—Jewish people who want to change the semitic look of their noses, Asians who have cosmetic surgery to alter the shape of their eyes, Blacks who seek to lighten their skin with bleaching creams, women who want to smoke and drink, “like a man.” Whether one succumbs to the devaluing pressures of the dominant culture or successfully resists them, the fact is that dealing with oppressive systems from the underside, regardless of the strategy, is physically and psychologically taxing.¹¹

Mark that the above is almost verbatim to what Memmi stated in a penultimate quote. She notes that the negative images impact the psychological development of children—as little as three years old. Negative images lead to self-rejection and a lack of self-worth. It is, therefore, a large part of her work committed to developing a positive self-image among people of color, particularly African Americans. It is in middle school that identity formation begins: at the time when the school textbooks begin pummeling the Indian American children with negative images. Research also indicates that adolescents of color are far more interested in identity issues around race than their white peers.

Tatum further says that one of the consequences of experiencing racism is that Black children, particularly the ones who are academically astute, as a coping mechanism develop racelessness, “wherein individuals assimilate into the dominant group by de-emphasizing characteristics that might identify them as members of the subordinate group.”¹² This is in addition to the oppositional stance to white identity that Black students take.

Experiencing racism, the children of non-white immigrants to the United States develop one of the following strategies: “assimilation, withdrawal, biculturalism, and marginalization.”¹³ These strategies are remarkably similar to what Memmi had described above: assimilation and alienation (aka withdrawal and marginalization).

Colonial-Racist Discourse’s Negative Consequences on Indian American Children

When we analyze the testimonies of the Indian American children at the California State Board of Education (SBE) hearing on November 9, 2017, we find that they are articulating all the consequences that emerge from a racist discourse: feelings of inferiority, shame, self-doubt, self-rejection, self-hate, identity confusion, and lack of self-worth, self-esteem, and self-confidence. As a result, there is a tendency in them to either deny their Indian/Hindu¹⁴ identity (akin to racelessness and assimilation) or withdraw and feel marginalized. Indeed, they report marginalization and bullying, which begins almost as soon as the class is exposed to the discourse on Hinduism and India. It was, therefore, they showed up in hordes at the SBE to get the representations altered. Do they fully understand where the problems are coming from? Do they know that they are being fed an archaic colonial discourse on Hinduism? Certainly not. However, given that they are on the receiving end of the consequences of the discourse, they showed up to demand change. Due to their experiences, they know something is wrong with the discourse. They expressed their views depending on their capacity to understand and articulate the nature of the problem.

The analysis of the testimonies reveals certain patterns. While the younger ones spoke about bullying or the fear of bullying, for the most part, the older ones spoke about bullying and its consequences. Among the older ones, some only stated that there were problems in the representation because of which they and their peers faced bullying, whereas others were able to get into the nature of problem as well, mainly emanating from the conflation of Hinduism and Hindus with caste, dirt, and filth—apart from Mill representing the Hindus through the prism of caste, hierarchy, and oppression, we would like to underline that he had spent considerable time in characterizing them as dirty which textbooks reproduce. It was students from higher grades who spoke about the psychological consequences as well as the discourse being racist and Hinduphobic. We have classified the student population into four categories for our analysis: pre-sixth grade, sixth grade, seventh and eighth grade, and between ninth and twelfth grade. Also, though most of them have articulated their names and school affiliations, we have decided not to use them despite their testimonies being part of the public record of the SBE proceedings.

Pre-Sixth Graders and the Fear of Getting Bullied

The pre-sixth graders express concern and fear of getting bullied, which their elder siblings or friends have already faced. Here is a fifth grader speaking about what her sister underwent at school and what she fears that she, too, would experience if the contents were not altered:

I am a fifth grader…. My oldest sister is in ninth grade, and she learned misguided information about Hindu culture. I know many truths about Hinduism, but her classmates don’t. I don’t want to go through what my sister felt and read about my culture in our school. I also don’t want to be teased, taunted, and bullied by my classmates due to what the textbooks will say next year.¹⁵

There is another fifth grader who is concerned about encountering what her elder peers of Indian origin have already faced or are currently undergoing. She already is grasping that the textbooks represent Hinduism as inferior to other religions and that she is going to encounter prejudice because of her Hindu faith. She states:

I am a fifth grader…. I have heard stories from some of my sixth and seventh-grade Indian-origin friends about how they were bullied in school for being a Hindu. I am worried that I will have to suffer the same fate because the textbooks incorrectly portray my religion as inferior. Religion never taught me to have negative prejudice against somebody who follows another way of life or prays to another form of God. And I expect the SBE to present Hinduism with equal respect as it has shown to other religions. Fighting with my classmates on whose religion is superior is the last thing I want to do in middle school. Can you please fix those textbooks?¹⁶

Sometimes with the teachers devising ingenious ways of teaching Hinduism to their seniors through the paradigm of caste, they find out even before getting to read the textbooks that they would be taught that Hinduism equals caste, which would not agree with their experiences of India and Hinduism. They begin to dread going to the sixth grade, fearing that their non-Hindu and non-Indian-origin friends would look down upon them. Here is the concern of one elementary school student, who perhaps still retains his Indian citizenship:

To me, my country is a place where I get together with my aunts, uncles, and grandparents and have fun. To me, my country is a beautiful place. To me my country is full of amazing and colorful cultures and traditions. But not everyone thinks of my country in this way. There was a class of sixth graders who were taught about Hinduism in this way: The teacher put a bunch of papers into a hat. Half of them said Brahmins, and half of them said untouchables. Each student picked up one piece of paper from the hat. If they were a Brahmin for the rest of the week, they could talk only to the other Brahmins, but they had to stay away from the untouchables. If they were untouchable, they had to stay away from the Brahmins. That’s not what Hinduism is. When my friends learn about my religion and culture, I don’t want them to think of slums and the caste system. I want them to think about the beautiful festivals and temples that fill up my country.¹⁷

The student in the above is already articulating that he would feel shame in front of his peers when his religion and culture are taught. It should not be rocket science to conjecture that he and many others may develop issues surrounding self-doubt, self-worth, self-esteem, and self-confidence over a period. Indeed, there is a fourth grader who is already speaking about identity confusion, though in not as many words. She is already sensing that there is a negative portrayal in the textbooks, which she wants to be corrected:

I request you to dismiss all such drafts which promote negative impressions like my sister’s textbook [who is in the sixth grade]. Let me tell you why: when my parents and my sister were discussing culture and religion and how it was described in my sister’s social science book, I felt so confused and worried by how it is portrayed. We know of an older friend who came home crying because of being bullied in school after the lessons on Hinduism. I don’t want my friends to look down upon me because of the unfair message the sixth-grade textbook is trying to convey. Instead of focusing on the negativity, it can focus on so many positive aspects.¹⁸

Sixth Graders Report Negative Portrayal

As many as 11 sixth graders were present at the SBE hearing, and they all spoke about the negative portrayal of Hinduism. More than betraying a complete cognitive understanding of how the representation is negative, which is understandable, they articulate their felt sense or conative inkling of something being wrong with the picture. They already feel that they are being “othered” and discriminated against, and they speak about bullying. One can also see that they can decipher a connection among the negative portrayal, bullying, and hatred against Hinduism, which they are beginning to experience from their non-Hindu peers. Here is an example:

I am learning about Hinduism in class. In the current books and upcoming editions, Hinduism is very poorly represented. Photos about Hinduism are negative. It shows something near the trash. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anything positive about Hinduism in my textbook. It is common for other kids in the class to look down upon me or my Hindu friends and our culture since it is misrepresented in the textbooks. It leads to bullying.¹⁹

A couple of sixth graders, however, speak about the conflation of Hinduism with the caste system, dirt, filth, and poverty. Of course, they do not know they are being fed a colonial discourse almost two hundred years old. Still, because of the consequences of the sanitized discourse on them, they recognize that the text is discriminatory. Here are their testimonies:

My school uses the McGraw-Hill text, and I am starting Ancient India and Hinduism next week in class. I went through the materials in advance and felt from the very beginning that the text made me feel discriminated against. It starts with a story about caste, something we have never discussed at home. In fact, caste doesn’t impact any aspect of my life.²⁰

I am highly flustered and alarmed about false pictures of modern India. In my class, we are learning about the caste system. My classmates happened to think that Hindus have an unfair belief in which one group has more power than others. Also, the textbook McGraw-Hill has two pictures: one is of ancient India, and the other is of modern India. I cannot tell the difference. Why, you ask? Because there is no difference, even though modern India should be displayed on a higher level. In fact, India is one of the most developed countries in Asia.²¹

In addition to feeling the negative consequences of the conjoining of Hinduism with the caste system, it is incredible that these sixth-grade students are already identifying the trope of “timeless India” frozen in backwardness, poverty, filth, and caste system, which Mill had meticulously crafted that is reproduced by McGraw-Hill. There was another student who, apart from mirroring the above discussion, was quite candid about the lowering of her self-esteem that the textbook materials could produce:

This summer, I read the history textbooks…which made me feel low in esteem seeing my motherland, India, and the disgrace of its culture and Hinduism. I am worried that my friends will make jokes on my country and its religion, and they would start bullying me by keeping names. As a student and as a child, I don’t want my morale to go down. How will I study in such an environment, and this could also happen to other kids? Hopefully, you all understand how bullying can affect the growing kids and their parents. My concern is when all the true facts about other civilizations are given, then why not Indian civilization?²²

Seventh and Eighth Graders Report Contempt and Bias against Hinduism

We analyzed the testimonies of 13 seventh and eighth graders. All of them articulate their concerns about the negative, inaccurate, derogatory, and misrepresentative portrayal of Hinduism. Some of them state that textbooks manifest and promote hatred and bias against Hinduism and report that their lived experiences of Hinduism are contrary to the textbook discourse. Showing the photocopy of one of the pictures in a textbook, which, if not critically examined, could only lead to the conflation of Hinduism with filth and dirt, a student questions in exasperation: “These books are biased. Until and unless they are driven by utmost contempt, how could anybody write such discriminating books?”²³ A couple of them also point out that the textbooks specifically target Hinduism, noting that whereas the other religions are idealized and shown in a positive light, Hinduism is represented in a derogatory fashion:

When I was in sixth grade prior to the Hinduism unit, I was excited to expand my knowledge about my religion. However, after reading the chapter, I was shocked to see the negative portrayal of Hinduism. This affected me personally. My peers would ask me questions about Hinduism that made me feel awkward. On a test, I wondered whether I should put the answer that matched up with my beliefs or the answers that came from the textbook. I have nothing against other religions, but as the year went on, I observed that the other religions in the textbook were idealized, whereas Hinduism was described as a negative and unclean religion.²⁴

Because of this representation, they speak about either bullying, being mocked, feeling unsafe and insecure in the environment, or all the above. They express feelings of inferiority and shame regarding their religion. They talk about their pride in their religion and culture getting hurt and the possibility of developing an inferiority complex and other psychological issues, quite akin to the consequences of racism, though none of them use the term racism.

I am here to express my concern about how derogatory and stereotypical content about our particular culture in textbooks has a long-lasting impact on the students. Students belonging to that culture are not able to understand and appreciate the richness of their own culture and end up developing an inferiority complex about it. Students from other cultures form wrong impressions and ideas about them. It severely hampers their learning process. It also encourages bullying and other bad behavior towards the students of the affected culture. Hence, it is very important for you to ensure that no hateful or biased materials find their way into the new textbooks.²⁵

The Hindu American Foundation (HAF), in the summer/early fall of 2015, conducted a national survey among 335 Hindu American students in the grade range of 6–12 concerning their experiences at school. This was part of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI). It reports six key findings:

• One out of three respondents said they had been bullied for their religious beliefs, while about half of the total sample size indicated feelings of awkwardness or social isolation because of their religious identity.

• More than three out of five respondents said that their schools focused on caste and Hinduism, including claims about the religion and Indian social practice that have been long debunked.

• About one in eight respondents said their teachers made sarcastic remarks about Hinduism in front of class.

• About one out of every four respondents surveyed said she/he was put on the spot or singled out by a teacher when the section on Hinduism was discussed.

• About one in four respondents said they had been bullied within the past year, with about a third saying those who bullied them were “making fun of Hindu traditions.”

• Of those who had shared anecdotes in the short answer, most highlighted a sense of alienation for being a different religion, particularly one not understood well in most U.S. classrooms or textbooks. As a result, some respondents said they hid their religious identity in order to prevent or stop bullying. As one respondent said, “After being made fun of by people I thought were friends, I didn’t tell anybody else I was Hindu so I don’t experience problems so much as I feel awkward sometimes.” Others also reported deep emotional scars from bullying incidents.²⁶

It is general psychology that it is not easy for children to speak about their bullying experiences. It seems that most of them used the HAF report to talk about their own experiences, in all probability using the defense mechanism of displacement. However, there was one student who candidly shared his experiences of bullying as he demanded changes in the textbook:

I would like to talk about the problem of bullying of Hindu American students as a result of information in the sixth-grade education system. I suffered first-hand experience from this terrible outbreak of bullying of Hindu American students. I do not want other students to feel the pain and shame that I did. If textbooks indirectly encourage kids to call Hindus untouchables or tell them that all Indians grow up in slums, it is an injustice to the rest of the population. It is an injustice to know that many Hindus will be bullied like me, and it is certainly an injustice if other kids must feel all the wretched feelings that I had to feel, and this must change now. I advocate for all the changes that my fellow speakers have made and much more.²⁷

There was an eighth grader who, citing the HAF report, stated that due to the negative discourse, many of her friends had disconnected from their Hindu identity. When subjected to a racist discourse, this is very similar to what, at times, non-white children, as Tatum stated above, develop as a defense mechanism against racism: assimilation and racelessness. The issue of the denial of Hindu identity progressively becomes worse as the children grow up in age.

A bullying report on Hindu American children says that one female in 12^th grade “noted that her classmates had frequently tried to convert her, and instructional content only created more negative impressions of Hinduism.” She says, “Having an incomplete, brief, and completely generalized unit which only focuses on negative aspects of Hinduism does not help to dispel the persistent stereotypes. I have seen too many friends give up on their faith and hide their Hindu identity to avoid being socially isolated.”²⁸ As a student, at this age, I have also seen this happen to many of my friends.

High School Students Point Out Racism and Hinduphobia in the Texts

The students from the ninth grade to twelfth grade spoke up against the negative portrayal of Hinduism and all the consequences that emanate from it. Given that they are more mature than the elementary and middle school students, almost all of them cited the HAF bullying report as they spoke about their own experiences of bullying and those of their Indian American peers. Some of them were astute enough to identify that there is inherent racism in the textbook depictions and that they are Hinduphobic in content. They were also not afraid to speak about the negative psychological consequences—shame, low self-esteem, embarrassment, emotional scars—that they or their fellow Hindu American peers experienced due to the racist and Hinduphobic content. Here are two ninth graders calling a spade a spade and mincing no words in identifying racism and Hinduphobia that underlies the textbook discourse.

Drafts from National Geographic as well as McGraw-Hill…have blatantly racist content that promote Hinduphobia. If accepted, these books will continue to initiate bullying and create tension in schools for Hindu children. A report from the Hindu American Foundation says that one in three Hindu American children has complained of bullying based on their culture and beliefs. That is not a statistic to be proud of. I stand here in support of my fellow Hindu American children who stand victim to such hateful content.²⁹

I felt my presence is needed here today because of the hatred, racism, and prejudice that is being instilled in today’s young adults. I believe that nobody is above the law, so why do we allow such big textbook companies as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill to break the law by discriminating against hard-working Americans just because of their race or skin color? If this is the type of learning that we are instilling into our children, no wonder they grow up to learn that just because somebody is of a different skin color, they are lower than us.³⁰

There is another one speaking about similar issues, though in the context of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) draft textbooks that the Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) had rejected that SBE was reconsidering. This validates what we have been saying: All the textbooks emanating from the HSS Content Standards and HSS Framework have colonial and racist discourse; we took the example of McGraw-Hill only to keep the discussion from becoming unwieldy.

About one in eight people who responded to a bullying on Hindu American children survey said that their teachers had made sarcastic remarks about Hinduism in front of the entire class. A student quoted in the report mentions, “After being made fun of by people I thought were friends, I didn’t tell anybody else I was Hindu, so I don’t experience problems so much as I feel awkward sometimes.” There have also been reports of deep emotional scarring because of bullying incidents. Being a Hindu girl myself, I know that I was crushed inside when I learned information like this and when these incidents happened to me and…I am grateful to IQC for rejecting two of HMH’s programs, which are blatantly racist and Hinduphobic.³¹

The high school students were also more forthcoming about the psychological consequences of the discourse. This is understandable in that, developmentally, they have already begun their identity formation phase. They talk about their identity and how their identity formation is getting hurt by the colonial-racist discourse. Let us look at some of their testimonies:

I am here today to stand against the bullying of Hindu teens. The negative portrayal of Hinduism in the textbook causes one in three teens to be bullied. As teenagers, students like me try to find our identity. If students are being bullied for expressing their religion, they grow up feeling embarrassed about their beliefs and identity. We want to build a nation with confident citizens rather than ones with low self-esteem.³²

In sixth grade, I was excited to learn about my culture, only to be met with ignorance and disgust from my classmates after reading the textbooks. My classmates confused Deities for demons and mocked cultural dances. In response to this behavior, I felt ostracized and ashamed of my religion. Hindu students surveyed across the United States also feel the same, experiencing awkwardness and exclusion, and they deal with depression due to this bullying.³³

We quantitatively analyzed the seventy-two student testimonies also. Eighty-three percent discussed discrimination, 75 percent discussed bullying, 40 percent discussed feelings of shame in their heritage, 24 percent discussed feelings of inferiority, and 18 percent discussed being mocked.

More than 80 percent of the students providing testimony were in middle or high school, had experienced the teaching of these materials directly in the classroom alongside their peers, and were speaking from that traumatic experience. If we look at this group, 74 percent reported experiencing bullying, 41 percent experienced feeling shame in their heritage, 88 percent experienced discrimination resulting from the teaching of these materials, and 20 percent were mocked for their heritage resulting from how India and Hinduism are taught relative to the glowing terms other world religions and ancient civilizations are taught.

Approximately 15 percent of the students providing testimony were in elementary school and were speaking based on their siblings’ experiences as they saw and heard their brothers and sisters describe their experience at home when the materials were being taught. These students were worried about what would happen to them when they reached the sixth grade and were taught these materials. In this cohort, 82 percent reported fear of bullying, 55 percent were concerned about experiencing discrimination, 45 percent reported fear of feeling shame, and 9 percent were worried about being mocked.

The remaining students didn’t specify their age or grade during their testimony but are less than 3 percent of the testimonies we analyzed.

The experience of the high school and middle school children giving testimony is different: Thirty-six middle school children were recently taught these materials, ranging from the year of their testimony to two years before the testimony date. On the other hand, high school students were taught these materials three to seven years before their testimony. Despite the time gap, the impact of the materials left such a lasting impression and ongoing experience that as many as twenty-three high school students chose to travel for hours and spend the day in Sacramento to give testimony. Similarly, the fear of experiencing these materials was so intense that eleven elementary school students also traveled to Sacramento and overcame their fear of public speaking in a formal forum to give testimony.

Conclusion

The knowledge of Ancient India and Hinduism, which the textbooks through the curricula they receive from Education Boards, is far from objective. It has the veneer of being veritable and putative, but it is the fabrication of momentous proportions, as we saw in the earlier chapters. It comprises shadows and projections, inhering within itself profound epistemological violence. It is wholly and comprehensively racist. The reality or the truth of the situation is mired in “mystifying amnesia,” to use the words of Leela Gandhi. Colonization has made the world forget the facts of Ancient India and Hinduism.

A mere sanitization of a discourse that is blatantly colonial and racist does not take away the consequences that colonial and racist discourses are known to produce. The colonial-racist lesson that the Indian American children are being fed hits them at two levels: external and internal. On the external front, they encounter bullying, taunting, teasing, mocking, and ostracization from their peers. In the inner universe, they begin to feel shame and embarrassment about the religion and culture of their ancestors. Their identity formation begins to get affected, manifesting in lower self-esteem. Given the reports we had from the children above, the impact is so profound for many that they disconnect from their Indian roots altogether. They do not identify themselves as Hindu, if they are one, and struggle with identity issues for the rest of their lives: quite similar to assimilation and racelessness that a racist discourse is known to produce in people of color. They develop a hatred towards Hindus and Hinduism. In the case of being a Hindu, they develop hatred towards themselves, with consequences certainly not favorable—we reserve the investigation of the psychological effects on adults who disconnected from Hinduism due to the textbook discourse they encountered in grade school for a later time, though we already have a good sample size of anecdotes from adults that validate our claim.

Through a postcolonial analysis, we have made visible what is suppressed, subterranean, forgotten, and hidden. After writing the paradigm-determining text on India, James Mill became invisible because his fame and reputation got boxed between two stalwarts: Bentham and his own son, John Stuart Mill. His invisibility, however, did not ensure that the juggernaut of a narrative that he had set in motion would not continue to crush the Indian people and people with Hindu ancestry. His legacy does not even spare children as young as ten years old. The ghosts he has left behind begin haunting the Indian American children almost as soon as they start developing cognitive abilities. These phantoms trail them and decisively influence their middle school and high school experience and, if we take the anecdotal accounts of countless Indian American adults, the rest of their lives. Racism, which is invisible and underground, is even harder to deal with, for while it is staring in the face of these Indian American children, it does not have a name. Through the journey we have taken our readers through, we have exposed the ghosts and phantoms that haunt the Indian American children. We have revealed the ugliness of the sinister container in which the discourse was framed in the nineteenth century. A mere polishing of the exterior does not take away its inherent ugliness. It profoundly affects the core of the children who have barely set their feet in the world.

It is time the concerns that the Indian American children are raising are listened to. Through the testimonies that they tendered, they have laid bare their soul as to how the “Ancient India and Hinduism” discourse is negatively impacting their lives. Curricula and textbook materials based on falsehoods cannot be allowed to promote shame, embarrassment, low self-esteem, and an inferiority complex. Schools are temples where lives are made; they cannot become dungeons where bullying and harassment occur. They cannot be places that the Indian American children dread to venture into; they do not have to kill an integral part of themselves to get educated. Schools are places where identities are formed, not decimated. It is a serious matter when nine-ten-year-olds express dread and horror at progressing further in education. We ardently hope that the organizations and publishers involved in producing the discourse on Ancient India and Hinduism will take note of our postcolonial deconstruction and engage in a course correction.