ABSTRACT
This is a tale of “race”, “colour”, privilege, class and confusion. When young, I would have said that I was middle class because we would travel 80 miles to Toronto to go to bookshops. Later, it meant that there was never a doubt that I would attend university and aspire to some type of “professional” standing. Yet my family did not seem to fit in, we were “betwixt and between”. Being middle class always seemed problematic, and the uncertainty appeared to centre around colour and “race”: I was told quite openly that I didn’t fit into the standard categories of my small Canadian city. At the age of nine, I heard that I was a “Paki” and at the age of 13, my classmates surrounded me and said, “We’ve been talking about you and we’ve decided that you must be Chinese ‘cos you don’t look Canadian.” To one extent or another, ethnicity (“race”) has mediated my social position in three different countries: Britain, Canada and the United States as well as my place in my family in India. The process of locating oneself is a political, as well as a geographical, act. As Hall says, “the ‘I’ who writes here must also be thought of as, itself, ‘enunciated’. We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context’, positioned” (1994:392). I assume “race” to be a social construct, albeit one so deeply entrenched in theoretical and experiential literature that it becomes difficult to avoid granting further legitimacy simply by employing the term. I have begun to use the term “ethnicity” in preference to “race” although this term has also taken a battering from theorists in the recent past.
