Nikesh Shukla > Quotes

“To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don't really belong to either.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Integrate well. Move upwards in society. Be praised – until people worry that you’re doing too well, and then they remember that you’re foreign." (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Musa Okwonga, the poet, journalist and essayist whose powerful ‘The Ungrateful Country’ closes the book, once said to me that the biggest burden facing people of colour in this country is that society deems us bad immigrants – job-stealers, benefit-scroungers, girlfriend-thieves, refugees – until we cross over in their consciousness, through popular culture, winning races, baking good cakes, being conscientious doctors, to become good immigrants. And we are so tired of that burden." (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“I do think it’s interesting that this idea of being a model minority is tied up with essentially being quiet,’ she says. ‘Just sitting back, not complaining about stuff, and getting on with making money. Being quiet is considered a really good quality.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“I had long since realised that if there was greatness in Britain, then it lay in its everyday citizens, and not in its institutions.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“This is the absolute truth of grief. It is never linear and it is never proportionate or understandable. Especially to other people. It never happens when it should. It doesn't seem to make sense to anyone else.”
― Nikesh Shukla, Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home

“Fitting in, it turns out, is a very physical process. I have spent years in a battle with my body, trying to make it compliant to the needs of others. I have tried to shrink it as though that could shrink my difference. Am I more welcome if I take up less space?”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“I see coming back to my village as significant, thanks to my privilege of being able to leave. But also because I can simultaneously cherry-pick my favourite aspects of my culture for anecdotes back home and social media, and keep the private, painful reflective ones for myself. This is what so many second-and-third generation immigrants experience visiting their homeland. We fine-tune the ability to find the nuances funny, deflecting the crushing weight of displacement and diaspora drama that becomes part of our everyday.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Our identities as people of color should not be defined solely by our struggles. But, as we are perpetually made to feel like others in this country, that’s how we are taught to understand ourselves. There’s so much love in my race. I’ve been trying to think of my race as a site of joy. The feeling I get when I see a South Asian or Muslim person succeeding, like I’ve swallowed a handful of fireflies, lighting up my stomach. I glow into the night. When an older South Asian woman I’ve never met calls me bayti and she transforms into my auntie.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“Where are you from?” usually bothers me, but tonight I note his brown skin, and I know it’s not the same thing as a white American asking me the same question. I note his Muslim name. His question is not an attack but an invitation, a cup of tea, from someone who also feels lonely in this country and is looking for a bit of home.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“The fetishisation of the sexuality of black people comes from centuries of dirty dark shade. It starts with sleazy old jokes that black men have huge cocks, or that black women are hyper-sexual, and it festers to become something toxic and sinister. This continues now, mostly unquestioned, with the sexual objectification of women, rounded fat bottoms and full lips all across the media industry. But once the canned laughter dies down or the fashion shoot is done and dusted, and you stop and take a cold hard look at the root history of these jokes and stereotypes, it all comes from a shade so bleak and so ignorant, that it has a sub-human subtext to it –brown people for sale in a human pet shop window.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don’t really belong to either.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“His Indian/ British accent was a map of where he’d been and what he’d seen. He travelled from our village in Bahowal to Delhi, to Southall, to Calgary. His voice mirrored those journeys, a living imprint of his memories, and revealed the things he didn’t about himself.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“We’ve never really been split, never been cut in half, we’ve just been silent about how we’ve been empowered because we haven’t always felt it, have been too busy being good immigrants, not making a fuss, and quieting down when people felt uncomfortable.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“There is a dream, a grand idealism, that mixed-race people are the hope for change, the peacekeepers, we are the people with an other understanding, with an invested interest in everyone being treated equally as we have a foot and a loyalty in many camps, with all shades. We are like love bombs planted in the minefield of black and white. It is as if our parents intended to make us, with courage, and on purpose, as vessels of empathy, bridges for the cultural divide and diplomats for diversity and equality." (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Half the time I want every single one of you as my kin, and half the time I want nothing to do with you. Perhaps this is the source of my loneliness: belonging and not belonging, always, to you.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“You must really like curry” is the kind of lazy, unimaginative racism I’d naively assumed people outgrew.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“As a minority, no sooner do you learn to polish and cherish one chip on your shoulder, it’s taken off you and swapped out for another. The jewellery of your struggles is forever on loan, like the Koh-i-Noor. You are intermittently handed this Necklace of labels to hang around your neck,”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Oriental’ has connotations of bamboo and flutes and red sunsets. It should only really be used to describe carpets, as the word has an inherent exoticism that I’m not sure a boy growing up in Wiltshire can ever fully embody. In the US ‘Asian Americans’ have rejected the term ‘oriental’. Here, the Chinese (at least) have positively embraced it, because we appear to be a pragmatic species and aren’t known as the ‘model minority’ for nothing.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“There is no ‘Aum’ without Indian dharmas, as there is no ‘Allah’ without Islam, nor ‘Pull-up!’ without UK Garage, or two hands coming together to form a W without Wu Tang. That is to say: You cannot have meaning without knowledge of the environment from which it stems.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“We'd taken up our positions on the benches between the school hall and a newly-installed outdoor basketball court. Being hip-hoppers, we were obliged to be obsessed with basketball. None of us had a ball.”
― Nikesh Shukla, Coconut Unlimited

“It’s a tree falling in a forest conundrum: if a white kid raps all the lyrics to ‘Gold Digger’ and there isn’t a black person around to hear it, is it still racist?”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“I was proud to be brown in my own way. Well, I was at school; at school I was brown about the funky stuff that came with being vegetarian, like being really arrogant about it, declaring proudly to a room full of beefeaters when Mad Cow disease initially broke that it was 'Vishnu's way of telling y'all to stop eating and start worshipping'.”
― Nikesh Shukla, Coconut Unlimited

“Tell me about Gang Starr,' said Nishant, in an effort to start a conversation I'd be interested in.
'One MC, one DJ...'
'Classic combo,' Anand affirmed.
'No hype man?'
'No.'
'What do we need Anand for?' Nishant shrugged, ever the pragmatist, never the catcher of feelings.”
― Nikesh Shukla, Coconut Unlimited

“In 2013, 2.4 million heterosexual interactions on the Facebook dating app ‘Are You Interested?’ were analysed and showed that ‘all men except Asians9 preferred Asian women’. 10 ALL. The fetishisation of the Asian female body is highly problematic. Sexual submissiveness, sexual voracity, and voicelessness is a particularly tricky and damning combination.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Ravi, you big massive racist. Rap is the music of revolution. Rap is the reason we have rights.”
― Nikesh Shukla, Coconut Unlimited

“Sometimes I got angry with the singing chanting white kids and tried to hit them or throw things at them. As a result of this, as well as singing chanting white kids calling me a chink or a Jap and hurling allegations at me about the cleanliness of my knees, my world suddenly seemed to fill up with red-faced white adults shouting loudly at me that I needed to learn not to lose my temper when white kids were calling me a chink or a Jap.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“When I was 10, a man who worked with my father called for him on the house phone. When I answered he said, ‘Oh, I must have the wrong number. How can a child that speaks like you have a dad that speaks with that ridiculous foreign mess?’ The mess was not that my father pronounces ‘hatred’ to sound like ‘hatriot’. Rather, that there is a whiteness that exists to be so tone-deaf it cannot make out our words, nor our lamp-fixtures, gods, nor our names –where all are as good as the dog-whistle without the Labrador.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“I learned to be who I am by approximating who others are.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“Racism in society often works through a divide and conquer strategy, more often than not it is also intertwined with classism as well as other forms of oppression. Structural racism can divide a community that would be stronger together, by keeping individual groups entrenched in their own class —in this case, caste discrimination.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant