The Hate U Give

The most powerful African-American voices you need to be reading right now

- Lindsay Pereira

Two things disturbed me more than the lockdown I had to deal with after a pandemic was declared earlier this year. First, an announcement that popular skin-lightening product Fair & Lovely would now be called Glow & Lovely to seem more politically correct. The second was an attack on students from Nigeria and Ghana at the Roorkee Institute of Technology in Uttarakhand. Both pointed to a subject that much of the western world has grappled with for the better part of 2020, and one that has failed to trigger any meaningful discourse in an India struggling to cope with a virus.

Racism continues to cast a long shadow on everything we do in our country, from the way we treat foreigners to how we frame matrimonial advertisements. We have internalised it to such an extent, unfortunately, that it has turned into a blind spot. It’s why multinational corporations can get away with inane new product names and absolve themselves of profiteering from our collective sense of insecurity as a people.

I thought about the theme around which this month’s magazine took shape. Yes, change is good, but any exploration – be it about the evolution of masculinity, or issues related to sustainability, inclusivity and gender equality – needs to begin with the asking of difficult questions. What #BlackLivesMatter did, for me, was raise questions I had simply never asked myself, about race, how I saw myself as a brown man, or whether my actions towards others carried prejudices I had no knowledge of. It was a sobering exercise aided in no small measure by some powerful writing from contemporary African-American voices.