by Hari Ziyad
“It didn’t help when we had the carpets throughout the whole house cleaned,” Mata began to explain before Daddy finished for her: “At that point, everything we did was like, are you working hard or hardly working? We weren’t allowed to remove the carpets, so we knew we had to move.” Even though, he continued as Mata laid her own ailing body down in their bed, they didn’t really have the money for this.
“We were looking at homes in East Cleveland first,” Mata said. East Cleveland was the first established suburb in the Cleveland area. It is just as neglected by the state as Cleveland proper, and—or because—it is even Blacker, the state has successfully redlined and drained it of resources through their anti-Black systems of urban planning.
“We wanted to be part of a Black community. But all of our applications for houses in East Cleveland fell through.” Eventually, they applied for a house in Cleveland Heights, a more “diverse” suburb nearby that wasn’t yet fully drained of resources by white flight. But as more Black people have trickled in during the past few decades, they’ve fallen prey to predatory banks and police looking for ripe targets. The house on which my parents ultimately put a down payment required a lot of fixing up, “which is part of how we could afford it,” Daddy explained, revealing that they also received assistance from a government housing program. We stayed in the upstairs apartment of my godmother’s duplex in East Cleveland for a year while the house in Cleveland Heights was fixed up.
“But really, it was the devotees who helped us make that move possible,” Mata said. “A lot of that work on the house they did for free.”
Because our religion reached its pinnacle of popular-culture awareness in the seventies, many people still associate Hare Kṛṣṇa devotees with chanting monks in saffron robes who handed out books at airports and who were so easy to parody in films of the time. But most devotees—and particularly those of us who didn’t live in insulated temple communities—are people with typical jobs, dress, and problems. And though devotees are supposed to be beyond race because we’re taught to believe that we are all just souls trapped in differently colored bodies, we have always had typical experiences with it, too. But many members of our religious community—which genuinely has shown up for our family’s material needs more times than I can count—obscured the reality of our racial experiences under the guise that following a religion that considers people as spirits instead of bodies meant that they could never hold anti-Black beliefs.
Mata ran weekly Hare Kṛṣṇa programs out of different devotees’ homes (most often ours) from the temple in Cleveland’s closure just before I was born until she traveled to India for her cancer treatment. “Class,” as we called these programs, began every Sunday at 3:00 p.m. Devotees would assemble to listen to a teacher, usually Mata, as they led a lecture on the Bhagavad Gītā. This was more or less my only exposure to non-Black people before moving to Cleveland Heights, and it helped lay the foundation for my belief in the respectable quest for Black exceptionalism, the idea that I could become somehow different and more deserving than the Black people around me if only I met certain criteria. It was the clearest message I received from the distinct treatment of my family by the devotee community, in contrast with their treatment of the Black non-devotees living around us.
“When Charanjit Swami came for a class at the old house,” Mata added from her bed, referring to a renowned Hare Kṛṣṇa guru who is white, “he told me it was time to find a better neighborhood, so I knew we had to.” It was the third explanation for how we afforded to move to Cleveland Heights, and all three of them rang true: God’s mercy made it possible. We had to move to save my life. Because a white man didn’t feel safe in a Black neighborhood (although Mata insists this wasn’t what the swami meant). But none of them answer how we afforded what we paid: a deeper connection to ourselves and to each other that I had experienced before moving to Heights.
When Mata and Mother Bhūmi first learned about the man who would later become their guru, Srila Prabhupada, who was also responsible for bringing this branch of Hinduism from India to the States and much of the rest of the world, it wasn’t as if they were under the illusion that anti-Blackness magically bypassed the Hare Kṛṣṇa community even while having obviously influenced the lives of everyone who converted into it. After crossing paths with Hare Kṛṣṇa preachers and being enraptured with what they heard about this exuberant song-and-dance-centered path to self-realization, Mother Bhūmi and her children sought membership in the old Cleveland temple. When they arrived, they were stopped by the temple president, who told them in no uncertain terms that Black people were unworthy of being in Kṛṣṇa’s presence. When Mother Bhūmi protested, the temple president called the police and had them arrested.
This familiar violence didn’t deter my mother and grandmother. They interpreted the temple president’s actions as a mere perversion of Prabhupada’s teachings, and Mata later wrote her future guru a letter to make sure he knew the discrimination being done in his name.
“He wrote back and said, ‘If someone discriminates against you based on your skin color, that’s their problem. If you let it get to you, that’s yours.’ I’ll never forget that,” Mata recalled with adoration.
I wanted to ask how she could find liberation in a belief system that puts the onus of eradicating anti-Blackness on those who are destroyed by it, that asks that they achieve excellence by skillfully overlooking their own destruction. I wanted to ask what we are supposed to do with the Black people who don’t or can’t overlook this violence, like Korryn Gaines, like our neighbors in the “dangerous” Cleveland community we moved away from, or—in my wildest thoughts, which I was often too afraid to speak growing up—like me.
I wanted to ask how she could still perceive these words as so admirable when her own mother was proof the problem was around long before any of us “let it get to us,” proof that being exceptional in the amount of suffering we can accept is never going to save us. I wanted to know what she would say it looked like to refuse to let someone who is denying your existence, or abusing you or threatening to harm your children, get to you in the first place.
But I already knew what it looked like; it was lying down in front of me, trying to appear strong when she was sick. Trying to reconcile her earthly Blackness and desire to be “part of a Black community” with the transcendent idea that “we are not these bodies.” And I already knew how she could consider this liberating, too; it was the same reason I tried to find liberation in my separation from my childhood. We had been conditioned to recognize Black life only if it came alongside Black pain, and so we embraced these painful dissonances in an attempt to stay alive.
In 1990, Kīrtanānanda Swami, one of the first white devotees Prabhupada initiated into the Hare Kṛṣṇa religion and the former leader of one of the largest Hare Kṛṣṇa communes, New Vṛindaban in Marshall County, West Virginia, was arrested on charges of racketeering, mail fraud, and conspiracy to murder two devotees who were killed after criticizing him. Steven “Sulocana” Bryant and Charles “Chakradara” St. Denis had tried to expose Kīrtanānanda for his alleged persistent rapes of young boys in the community, the beginnings of a global child sex abuse scandal that would show this sickening violence to be as pervasive throughout the Hare Kṛṣṇa community as anything the Catholic Church has ever seen. Kīrtanānanda was initially convicted on nine of the eleven counts related to Bryant’s and St. Denis’s murder before hiring Alan Dershowitz, who would later defend Jeffrey Epstein against child sex abuse accusations, to lead an appeal that resulted in the ruling being overturned, and the swami later pleaded guilty to racketeering during the retrial.
We visited the New Vṛindaban community more than once a year growing up, and although Kīrtanānanda had been belatedly expelled from the movement by then (only after he was officially charged, despite the accusations and suspicious murders that had been occurring for years), many members of the community’s leadership who have been accused of cover
ing up his abuses remain in positions of power—including Charanjit Swami—and other child abuse cases have arisen in Kīrtanānanda’s wake. Charanjit never suggested Mata and her young children leave this dangerous place for a “better neighborhood,” because misafropedia means endangering Black children is always more acceptable than the danger thoughtlessly ascribed to them.
Although Mata would later go back to that same temple led by the white temple president who hated Black people with Prabhupada’s blessing—and although she heeded Charanjit Swami’s concerns and moved away from the Black community in which she said she wanted to build a home—her closest devotee relationships were always with other Black devotees.
The Cleveland community that Mata led still has a larger percentage of Black Hare Kṛṣṇas than almost any other Hare Kṛṣṇa community in the States, and I don’t think her recruitment of souls trapped in Black bodies was ever a coincidence. Her relationship to race and religion is more complicated than any simple criticism. It would be easy to judge her for the mistakes along her own journey to make herself whole again, but I think it’s time I learned from them.
Just before ninth grade began, I finally won. I had been pleading with my parents for the previous four years to let me attend school with my friends, and after all that time and effort and tears, they had relented at last. Mata usually allowed her children to enroll at a school outside the home when they reached the ninth grade, but this still felt like a hard-fought victory. I had forged my weapons for this battle meticulously. As a last-ditch effort, I spent weeks writing out a precocious three-page letter listing all the reasons why I should be permitted to go, giving myself debate prep worthy of a presidential candidate before turning it in to my parents.
“You should trust me,” I wrote in conclusion, “and everything you taught me. I know who I am, and I won’t let any environment take that from me.”
The reality was that I knew myself less than I ever had before, but the letter was enough to sway my parents. I can still understand the desire I had to spend more time around my peers back then, especially as my last two older siblings who were living in the home, Ganga and Ghanasyam, were gearing up to head for college. But if I had the choice now between being with my mother and being forced for the majority of the day to work on things in which I had sparingly little interest, I would make a very different one. What I would do to have it.
That isn’t to say I didn’t thrive in high school. My friend Betty constantly referred to me jokingly as a “homeschooled jungle freak,” referencing Lindsay Lohan’s character in the movie Mean Girls. But like Cady Heron, I didn’t have too much trouble making friends, even if I also experienced an array of identity crises in my attempts to fit in. In another similarity, I would ultimately end up being crowned homecoming king, although I surely benefited from a nominal voting turnout propelled by the fact that ballots weren’t collected in class as they had been in years past. I also had my horde of siblings and my friends across the Hare Kṛṣṇa community, and Mata had scraped up what I didn’t know then was far too rare money for me to take tae kwon do classes and play rec-league basketball for years, which helped make developing relationships with kids my age fairly seamless. Many of the friends I’d collected in these activities ended up at Cleveland Heights High with me.
My class of 2009 was one of the first at Heights to be split into five “small schools.” Administrators said this would make the institution, which held two thousand students, a more manageable size, because a student’s classes would be primarily in the section of the building where their small school was housed. But most of the honors and advanced placement classes were conspicuously situated on the first and third floors, in the Mosaic and Renaissance schools. These were, coincidentally, the small schools that almost all the white students—who made up only about 20 percent of the school but more than 50 percent of the suburb—chose to attend.
Mimicking a group of my friends, I picked the Pride school. (In hindsight, this was a fitting choice, in light of my burgeoning queerness.) Pride shared the second floor with the equally Black Real school, so the small school split didn’t much help the commutes of Black students in honors and AP classes, who still usually had to journey to other floors to reach them. The students who previously would have been sent to the recently closed alternative school Taylor Academy were automatically assigned to Transition, which was immediately stigmatized as the “d*mb school,” and so it certainly didn’t help those students either.
In fact, it seemed small schools functioned to give white students yet another way to separate themselves from the rest of us, the administration’s solution to appeasing the increasing numbers of white parents who would send their kids to private schools to avoid exposure to Black people. It also perpetuated separations between “high-achieving” and other Black students, ensuring white wholeness and cohesion by paying with the currency of Black division. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but this experience was a predictable evolution of anti-Black school-zoning laws, the charter-school push, and redlining, all of which have had a similar effect of continuing the separate and unequal access to schooling between Black and white families that is worsening today.23
For the first semester of high school, I shared more than half of my classes with Betty, who was also Black and in Pride. Her jungle-freak quip didn’t start off as a rib nudge between good friends—it was anything but. A grade ahead and only five feet tall, I was small even for my thirteen years, and given the unfortunate popular styles of the time and my assimilationist willingness to unquestionably adopt them, my clothes usually swallowed me whole. In my oversize Girbaud jeans, knockoff T.J. Maxx Iverson jerseys, and fitted caps that didn’t really fit because I had stolen them from my brother Mohan, I looked flimsy and breakable next to Betty. She was tall and boisterous and willing to get hood if the moment called for it, and sometimes even when it didn’t. She made me feel as insecure as Roberto had, and I was well on the way toward being unable to reckon with those feelings without wrapping them up in righteous superiority.
Though she excelled academically, Betty hadn’t initially shown any interest in competing with me, but that didn’t stop me from making sure I beat her. When teachers passed out graded homework, I’d try to burglarize a peek at Betty’s results, smiling smugly when they fell beneath mine. I felt vindicated whenever I could correct her, and so I made it my mission to correct her regularly.
I didn’t question why I did these things, but it felt right. Betty had unjustly become a representation of all my worst fears—that even if I was smart, I might not be smart enough, that even in white spaces, I might still be too Black—and so I did everything in my power to distance myself from her and the possibilities she offered. No one corrected me. If anything, teachers encouraged my efforts to be better than the Black people around me, of whom Betty was but one example. And she was an example who was also considered “gifted,” so you can imagine the distance I sought to make between myself and those who weren’t.
“You aren’t like these other Negroes,” a Black high school guidance counselor once told me with a laugh and a pat on the back. I was trying to prove him right. Being unlike everyday Black people—or even just Black people whom I could position as more everyday than me—was what it meant to succeed in the culture I was learning to be part of at this school. It’s what respectability politics always means.
To be Black and exceptional in this world requires seeing yourself not in your people but in whiteness. I wiped that mirror over and over again to find a face less like those of the other Negroes looking back, pressing harder and harder with every unsuccessful motion across it, until the mirror cracked.
Freshman year, I had two classes with Paul, which we both shared with Betty, too. Paul was a white boy who was even smaller than me, wiry enough to twang if you flicked his arm. He wore round glasses that made him look like a skeletal Harry Potter. For the entire school day, he carried around a viola strapped to his back,
the instrument twice as big as his body. It admittedly made for a laughable sight, but I pitied him when the chuckles came his way. I assumed he had some sort of social disorder, as he didn’t seem to be able to engage with anyone, and I pitied him for that, too. I leaned into the same ableist ideas about disabilities being to blame for unwanted behaviors, the same ideas I’d wielded against my grandmother. It was as easy for me to shower Paul with pity as it was for me to be afraid of Mother Bhūmi or to resent Betty. Maybe even easier.
“Give me my viola!” I heard Paul’s nasally voice pierce the laughter of a crowd in the hallway. I could just make out his instrument floating above the crowd like a thundercloud, and I groaned as I stepped closer and saw the person who had created this storm.
“Give me my viola!” Betty repeated, mocking him, as giggles rippled through the small crowd again. Paul bounced up and down like a bespectacled grasshopper, but he could not make up the distance created by Betty’s towering figure.
“Give it back to him, Betty,” I implored.
She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Or what?”
“Or . . . or we’ll all be late to class,” I said, my brief burst of “bravery” deflating. “Just give it back to him and let’s go.”
Betty looked from me to Paul, who just kept jumping and clawing at her arm, face redder than a well-fed mosquito. The crowd had already begun dispersing.
“Here,” Betty said, smacking her lips, thrusting the viola into Paul’s arms, nearly knocking him over backward in the process. “Say ‘excuse me’ next time!”
But Paul said nothing, just scrunched up his face and powered directly toward me, no “excuse me” as he crashed into me either.
“Bitch,” I heard him mumble in Betty’s direction as he walked by, taking me aback.
“I swear to fucking god. He bumps into me every day. Every day!” Betty threw up her arms, exasperated. “Racist motherfucker.”