Back when the British weren’t using “their” Indians as a tourist attraction, or as a means of portraying the infamously insular island as “multicultural” (because people like curry houses and Bhangra pop), a pompous arse got in a lift with my  second generation Pakistani-Brit friend (then a teenager) and a tea-and-scones lady. In the characteristic understatement that his people are known for (and for which Americans continue to idolise the Brits), the Pomp turned to Tea and Scones and said, “Bit dark in here, isn’t it?”

When the lift doors opened, my friend shouted, “This man’s a racist!” But that’s all he could do.

While I was in grad school, our director of the graduate teaching assistants – a lovely woman whom I honestly believe meant well–regularly mixed up my name (Neelika) with that of the other person of South Asian descent (Shamim) in the programme. We did not look alike, sound alike (due to our different origins/countries in which we grew up), nor even study the same specialisation. So I looked at the Director and said, “Dr. X, are you mixing up your natives?” She reacted as expected: “Why Neelika,” she said, “what a terrible thing to say!” and looked back at me with shock and hurt. So: I was the guilty party for having pointed out, to a nice, older white professor – one who was a committed lecturer on US Civil Rights history – that though it is easy to mix up unfamiliar and ‘exotic’ names, she may be perpetuating some of the same problematic ways of interacting with the Other: errors she preached against.

But hooray: nowadays, kids in the Bronx don’t take that kind of shit lightly. The New York Times begins by staking pedigree: “perhaps few schools in the nation with as progressive a pedigree as Ethical Culture Fieldston School, where students are not only expected to live the values of tolerance and inclusion, but also to make the world more tolerant and inclusive.” So when a “popular but controversial” teacher at Fieldston reportedly said to two black students, “I hope I can tell you two apart,” they made an official complaint. The teacher, a 58-year old white man, was eventually dismissed from his position. And there’s more. The teacher, Barry Sirmon, is from South Africa; he has been teaching at this school for 11 years.  “He is a very anti-P.C. guy in a very P.C. school,” said one mother, who maintained that she was “not a prude,” but that “words matter.”

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