Wrestling with difference: power, privilege and positionality in the global development sector
Following the conversation with Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken on her podcast on decolonising consultancies and think tanks, I joined a discussion at the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations (TIHR) on Wrestling with Difference run by Coreene Archer and Steve Hearsum.
I felt a sense of dread before joining the call, indicating the difficulty of having conversations about diversity and difference. But amongst other things I got to think about my power, privilege and positionality, especially in the UK’s international development sector, and how this is enabled and constrained by parts of my identity which are both visible and invisible.
On the surface, I’m a tall man, with brown skin and rounded facial features, located in London, UK. English is my primary language and speak it with a slightly clipped Southern English accent in a tone that is softer than most. I also have a Sanskritic name. Below the surface, I’m heterosexual, university educated, neuro typical (I think) and an ‘only child’ brought up in precarious economic and emotional circumstances.
When people first see my name, they aren’t quite sure of my gender. In a European context, given it sounds like ‘joy’, people think I’m female. And then there’s its pronunciation, which many will know, can create all sorts of difficulties for both me and people who want to say my name. Although some might feel it important to get a person’s name right, I’m content if people at least try. If I’m sending in CVs and cover letters, as this BBC article suggests, I’m less likely to be shortlisted. But I’m conscious that those who have an Islamic or Arabic name are likely to be worse off, given the extent of Islamophobia.
I have privilege from my maleness, English being my primary language and my UK location, in a patriarchal context where power asymmetries continue to favour Europe and where English is often adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different. I get to think and express myself in my primary language and can therefore be more spontaneous than others.
However, my brown skin, coupled with my appearance, how I sound and my upbringing probably means I don’t have the same access to male privilege as say, white males. I recall the confusion amongst a community in Nepal when they were introduced to me, the only brown skinned member of a team of UK based researchers or the awkardness when brought in by a German funder via a Uk registered consulting firm to facilitate a group of business people in Egypt. In both cases, I wondered if people associated expertise with Whiteness.
In an Anglo Saxon context, people may (rightly) assume I have South Asian heritage. This attracts certain projections or associations (I won’t go into the projections that particular ethnic groups within the South Asia region receive). These include being reliable, well educated, hardworking, ‘business like’ and somewhat unquestioning. We are perceived to live in our minds (apart from when we play cricket) and sexually immature and clumsy.
In many ways, those with South Asian, especially Indian heritage, including me, benefit from some of these associations, at least superficially. We are seen as a ‘model minority’ are well represented in the professional services, at least in a UK context and therefore do well economically (relative to other ethnic groups in the UK). In some ways, these associations enable me to ignore or even deny my differences. However, society wide dynamics where working classes are seen as inferior, has meant that I grew up doubting my capacities, something I learnt from parents who lost social status on their arrival to the UK as immigrants and carried with them a sense of shame.
Although years of self- and group-work have helped me develop enough courage to take up my authority and, e.g. offer different perspectives (which is often the case when one is situated in the margins), the consequences of offering them (especially to people racialised as white) can be difficult. As I don’t have a booming voice, coupled with racial projections, people assume I’m likely to be gentle and passive. So when I do ask questions of those in authority in a professional context, people often meet me with a degree of surprise and even hostility - rather than with e.g. curiosity. I often wonder if I’m expected to be emotionless and withstand attacks – a bit like Gandhi and his campaign of passive resistance.
In addition, my height can provoke others (as being tall is often equated with being powerful, which I wasn’t supposed to be). I’ve had a man who passes as a European say I didn’t have the personality to suit my height, a white male manager ridicule me in front of staff about the length of my legs, while two white men have noted the power I have in being tall (these men have been shorter than me). All this has meant having to work harder to manage my and other people’s responses, which I’m not always willing or able to do.
But where do the associations about South Asians (and other groups) in particular stem from? Most likely this is rooted in a racial hierarchy established by European imperial powers in their quest for territory and resources. Although the British state colonised a large part of South Asia, historically, according to race science, a precursor of Eugenics, lighter skinned Indians from North India were seen as intelligent as white Europeans. And after Indians supported the UK during WWI, based on a quid pro quo, the British considered taking Tanganyika (now Tanzania) from Germany and giving it to India to manage – an idea which was shot down by white settlers in Kenya.
The British also positioned/mobilised South Asians to do work it was reluctant for its own people to do themselves – i.e. protect and expand its territory in both Africa and Asia. For instance, Amitav Ghosh describes how Indians were mobilised as soldiers to fight the Japanese at the expense of their own self-determination. In addition, Mahmoud Mamdani eloquently describes how the British facilitated the informal colonisation of East Africa by individual Indians, first as soldiers, to quell mutinies amongst African soldiers organised by the British, then as railway workers and shopkeepers and finally as administrators, clerks and teachers to help manage the their colonies politically and economically. Both the British as well as South Asians benefited from this arrangement. So you could argue that South Asians/Indians have both been colonised and were colonisers.
Arguably this plays out today in the workplace where people with brown skin are subject to associations which ‘lift’ as well as ‘threaten’ them. For instance, I suspect when I lived and worked in Kabompo, a rural town in Northwestern Zambia, for 2 years, I was seen by local Zambians as the ‘good Indian’ like the soldier who lived amongst African communities (white colleagues however, would often keep me at arms length). In urban areas, Indians were referred to as Mwenye, a word with Swahili roots meaning owner, stemming from the days when most Indians were shop owners. I wonder to what extent I was seen as the ‘bad Indian’, the shop owner or plantation foreman who specialised in extracting the last ounce of labour from their workers.
In places such as Nepal and Indonesia, while fellow researchers might have a degree of envy toward me, I also sensed they found a sense of solidarity with me, confiding with me about the frustrations they experienced working with White researchers or feeling a sense of pride that someone who had the same skin tone as them had in their eyes at least achieved something significant.
However, I remember when an Indonesian woman from an international organisation based in Jakarta got in touch with me by email asking if I had the contact details of a white male who was said to have experience doing political analyses in Indonesia. The white male had, as far as I knew, only been to Indonesia for a week doing some interviews for a paper I had led on about 6 years earlier. I know this sounds arrogant, but I had written a number of papers exploring Indonesian policy and politics and had visited the country several times. Although the organisation eventually commissioned me to do some work for them, I was left with a strong sense of injustice. I’ve documented other examples of my experiences elsewhere.
The ‘mobilisation’ of South Asians by those in power continues to play out: people with brown skin are often positioned to take up difficult roles often in high-risk situations. For instance, I was brought in by a UK consultancy to join a research project at short notice to supervise (which I later discovered), a very capable researcher/lecturer who had African heritage. In another example I was brought in by a Uk evaluation firm to lead a team to undertake an assignment for a historically challenging client, for which (I later learnt) two or three prominent white team leaders had declined the role. And within the same example, I saw a brown skinned woman with a South Asian accent carrying the weight of the client organisation (based in North America) in its quest for outcomes and results which she did so with impunity.
Being neither white nor black, but somewhere in the middle, leaves me feeling both resentful, ruing potentially unrealised opportunities as well as a sense of shame at being more privileged than others.