Welcome to our blog!
Our names are Kanmani Duraikkannan and Neha Thyagarajan. We’re Tamilians (from the state of Tamil Nadu in South India), who were born and raised in America and we have been pretty ignorant about systemic and systematic issues in our country until now. The Black Lives Matter movement has alerted us to the many injustices in our system, which many of us may even perpetuate, and we want to bring awareness to them.
We don’t want to live in a world where equality is a fantasy. We want ourselves, our communities, and our children to feel comfortable in their skin, irrespective of their race and skin color. Our intention with this blog is to raise awareness towards issues that specifically affect the Indian American community. These may include issues which negatively affect us, such as internalized racism, microaggressions, and racism, or it may include problems which we negatively contribute to as a community such as misogyny and homophobia.
Even if our blog will focus more on issues affecting us, specifically, it is important to be aware of injustices occurring in other communities as well, as they all tend to be interconnected. That is why we want to start our blog by talking about the oppression of Black people in America. They have struggled more than we have in this country, and they need our help. Many of the people in our community are not willing to have conversations about race, and that is detrimental to not only our community, but everyone our community interacts with. We don’t have much experience with advocacy, but we intend to learn and do our best. We may make mistakes along the way, but we will learn from them and correct them. Our intention is to reach an audience that Black people cannot usually reach themselves. We want to help and be vocal, but also listen to Black people’s concerns and cries, because our ignorance as a country is what got us to this unjust state in the first place. Let’s all do better, together.
We would greatly appreciate it if you come along on this journey with us and hope to see you every week as we update our blog and grow! Thank you!