ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between anti-Blackness and the racialization of those of Indian descent in the United States by looking at the case of an Indian grandfather who was assaulted by the police when visiting his son in Madison, Alabama. I argue that the anti-Black logics of policing create slippages at particular moments when some Indians are interpellated as proxies for Black bodies. However, instead of fighting such racial foundations of policing, Indian responses to police violence tend to amplify their racial difference from the Black community. Representations of the heteronormative, cohesive, economically ascendant family play a central role in presenting Indians as ideal immigrant or citizen subjects who, despite their racial difference, strive to follow “American” ideals. What remains unsaid in such articulations is the continued scripting of Black people and communities as economically unproductive, sexually unrestrained, and un-normed by nuclear family ideals, which render them unworthy of recognition and legal protections that accrue to familial American subjects, both White and non-White.
