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Scrawny women with big hair sat round the table, flirting with their austere Caesar’s salads. A friend with connections in the haute arty places in the American capital had invited me for a lecture at the superb National Museum for Women in the Visual Arts. A baker’s dozen (all white, mostly blonde and on the fringes of, if not part of, the Beltway’s power elite) stayed on for lunch in the chandeliered cafe. The mandatory discussion about the lecture over, conversation veered towards the personal.

The lady next to me began with the usual polite conversation you carry on with someone from India—about maharajas and elephants and all that. But by the time coffee arrived she felt comfortable enough to talk about what bothered her about India. It had to do with the dreaded C word —caste. She had recently been at a dinner party in Washington where two Indian families insisted on being in different rooms: they had asked their American hostess to separate them because they belonged to different castes and couldn’t share the same air.

I found the story a bit hard to believe. Or should I say I did not want to believe it. Indians can be incredibly excluding—racist even. We also tend to carry our prejudices wherever we go. But thinking about it a little longer it gradually dawned on me that our casteism was a cousin of their racism. With a major difference:political correctness often masks the racism in this country, especially amongst the liberal, soi-disant sophisticated elite.

In a country in which the most powerful woman in the political pantheon is African American (Secretary of State Condolezza Rice) it is easy to forget that just four decades ago her kin would not have been allowed into most restaurants. Apparently when told that African diplomats going to New York for a meeting at the United Nations from Washington DC by road would be shown the door at any restaurant enroute President John F Kennedy coolly suggested they fly.

At the time I was in school here, and many of us “embassy children” would often go to an amusement park in Maryland, on the outskirts of the capital where non-Caucasians were refused entry. We were, I now guiltily recall, proud to “pass” as white. How often do we hear an Indian acclaim proudly that he or she was always taken for an Italian, a Mediterranean type and seldom as an Indian.

The long-forgotten words of an African American friend came back to me last week when I watched a rivetting new six part documentary series called Black White, currently being televised on FX channel.My age and several shades lighter in colour, she had expressed shock when she learned that Indians were allowed into the amusement park.

In this reality series two families, one black, one white, trade places, swapping races so to speak to discover what it’s like on the other side of the race divide. Hollywood make-up magic (spray paint, wigs, contact lenses) transformed the Wurgel-Marcotulli family of three (including Wurgel’s blonde teenage daughter) into a black family and the Sparks with their teenage son into a white one. Fortunately, it isn’t the in-your-face kind of racial bigotry but the subtle side of racial prejudice and conflict that RJ Cutler, the documentary’s director, explores in this revealing series.

Passing for white Brian Sparks has a salesman in a shoe shop actually solicitously put a shoe on his foot: as a black he would just be handed the shoe to put on himself. Again, as a “white” man participating in a group discussion on race, comprised only of whites he hears a young man confess that despite himself he always wants to wipe after shaking hands with an African-American.

The white family, unaware of the subtler forms of racism, believes that it’s all about perceptions. For the black family a salesperson approaching them is only “checking them out”. For the white family, he is only doing his job, paying attention.

Issues of race and intolerance of the “other” seem to be occupying the American media these days. The much-acclaimed Oscar winner film Crash also addresses the uneasy state of peaceful co-existence between different races and ethnic groups. Set in Los Angeles (a city that has seen many racial riots), Paul Haggis’ film (a tapestry of many interweaving little stories that tie up beautifully at the end) shows Latinos, blacks, whites and Iranians clashing with each other. A traffic jam can be like a critical mass—all the corseting of restraints implodes. The unuttered is uttered.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com