Plastic chairs

About four or five months ago, I went to go talk to Martin Macwan, the founder and mentor of many Dalit organizations, and the de-facto director of the vocational training center. He was dictating a document the NGO's secretary, and was sitting on two cheap plastic chairs, one stacked upon the other. I don’t remember what question I had for Martin, but halfway into my sentence he suddenly realized there were no chairs for me to sit on. “Sorry,” he said, “I was being a capitalist. Here,” now standing up, “Take one and have a seat.”

Recently I’ve begun to question the morality of living the “American lifestyle” I had been accustomed to. If I really believe in equality—and make it more than just a word, applying it to my own life—it becomes more difficult for me to justify, for example, spending a few hundred dollars on a snowboarding weekend, when people I have met and become friends with make less money in a year. Put another way, how many chairs am I sitting on? How many chairs do I have in the bank or in my wallet? How many chairs did I blow in Japan on food, drinks, and cover charges? A donation of a few hundred dollars to an organization that knows how to use it properly can make a huge difference, in all kinds of ways. The difference can even be quantified in dollar amount: books purchased, inoculations delivered, children sent to school, etc. Does the amount of fun I would have snowboarding outweigh that difference? A voice inside my head tries to argue away that problem, saying that I already give enough money away, that I spend enough of my time “helping people”, and I’m allowed to splurge. But these days, when that voice starts its familiar argument, a Lauryn Hill lyric from the song “Lost Ones” comes into my head: “Every man wants to act like he’s exempt.”

I don’t think I can keep acting like I’m exempt. I’ve seen so much injustice here that I don’t know what to do with it. On a train to Pune a few months ago, a ten-year-old boy, shirtless and barefoot, was crawling on his hands on knees down the isle, sweeping the floor—strewn with plastic wrappers, and sticky with tea and spit—with a short broom. After he swept by each person’s feet, he held out a dirty hand in the hope that a Rupee or two would be dropped into it. Sitting in the seat across from mine was another boy, also about ten years old. But this one was totally fluent in English because his parents had enough money to send him to an English-medium school; maybe they even spoke in English to him at home, because they had also been to English-medium schools. In fifteen years he will be an engineer or successful businessman. And where will that other boy—the one who is on his knees, now crawling down the isle with the broom in his hand—where will he be? It just feels different when you’ve seen the injustice in front of you, when injustice itself is at your feet and on the seat next to you, talking to you, when you can see the sweat on its back.

When we talk about solidarity, what do we mean? That boy on the floor was probably from the Valmiki community, whose caste-bound duty is to clean other people’s filth. Here in Gujarat and around India, many Valmiki children are made to sit in the back of the classroom, to sit separately at mealtime, and to clean the school’s toilets. What would I do if I were in that situation? Can I honestly say that I would stay in school and face the constant humiliation? When the script is written before a life even begins—when you can almost know how the child of illiterate Valmiki parents will grow up, just as you can almost know how the child of wealthier forward-caste parents will grow up—you want to do something to change that script.

Being a native English-speaker and having a college education made me qualified to be an English teacher in Japan, salary about $30,000, tax-free. My key skill, if you can call it that, was being able to speak my own language in my own accent. I know plenty of other people who can speak their own language in their own accent. Instead of being rewarded, they are punished, held back from decent jobs because they don’t know English well enough. Can I really still believe that I deserve all these chairs I’ve got stashed away?

When I can see in black and white the ways in which society can systematically include and reward—and also exclude, humiliate, and subjugate—it’s harder to keep living as if I’m exempt.


I wrote this for an AJWS assignment on Passover. The question was:

At the same time as we are instructed to experience liberation, we are also instructed to remember the suffering as our own. Because of our personal experience as slaves, we are commanded to recognize and rectify injustice. “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless; you shall not take a widow’s garments in pawn. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt…therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment (Deut. 24:17-18).” In what ways have you witnessed injustice in your experience this year? Does living this experience make you more obligated to address those injustices and in what ways? In seeing injustice on a day to day basis, do you feel more or less obligated to address those issues?