2009 Book Reading Event
The Indian Business and Professional Women and Silicon Valley Reads Annual Book Reading Event was held February 22, 2009.
Article from India West:
Silicon Valley Reads Event by IBPW
Indian Business and Professional Women (IBPW) and HSBC sponsored the annual book reading event held at India Community Center (ICC) on February 22, 2009 in Milpitas featuring Brian Copeland’s memoir, Not a Genuine Black Man: My Life as an Outsider. Shubhangi Vaidya moderated the panel discussion.
The Panelists
Mike Swift, demographics writer for San Jose Mercury News, who grew up in San Leandro like Copeland, recounted a life-changing experience: as kids threw stones at him when his bicycle broke in Egypt en route from Scotland to Jerusalem, someone took him home where a little girl asked, “Can I touch your skin, you are so white, and you are so beautiful!” Until then he never realized that he was different in the eyes of the world.
“Gender and race are the first two things we see,” he says; “however, clues such as these don’t always work here [in the Bay Area] where people with these can be billionaires because of their education.
Ulysses Pichon, a Language Arts instructor at De Anza College with Native American, black, Spanish, and French blood, identifies himself as black. Having grown up in Louisiana, he does not find it shocking that a policeman would accuse [an innocent] black boy such as Copeland of offenses he never committed. He shared little-known racial composition of his father’s generation: white, light black, and dark black; the two shades of black were segregated and could not intermarry.
Diana Rohini LaVigne, a journalist for India West and Indian Life & Style magazines, exudes pride of her heritage. As a daughter of a Native American-Indian mother, French father, and the wife of a South Asian Indian, she grasps the symbolism in Copeland’s memoir: Black “stands for strength, while white is without color, missing something.” She stresses the pitfalls of stereotyping groups as “family people,” “friendly,” or “being for education,” as these overlap.
Jana McBurney-Lin, author of My Half of the Sky, suffered same housing discrimination as Copeland’s black family. As a white American who had spent six years in Japan, she was denied an apartment because of her imagined tendency to set fires and cook smelly foods. Strangely, her Chinese-born future husband got the apartment with his perfect Japanese.
(About the author: Nandini Garud is a technical writer based in San Jose. Her articles have appeared nationally and internationally.)
