Some people would be surprised to see an Indian American studying African-American lives in one of the most depressed areas in the country, and seeing that person become a professor of Afro-American studies at Columbia University.
(Chuckles) I think it has to do with me growing up in Orange County in California. I was about five when my parents migrated from Chennai in 1971 and while they had a few Indian friends in the Los Angeles area, I grew up with hardly an Indian friend.
I always felt like an outsider and I was naturally interested in others who I thought were outsiders like myself. My father (Alladi Venkatesh, a business professor) had encouraged me from my very young years to read voraciously.
He also told me to read extensively outside school and college history books, it took me some time to know why but surely he was getting me to know how American society had treated, over the decades, people who looked like outsiders.
I think my father was trying to get me realise that it is easy for some Americans to dismiss a part of society that looked alien to them, as if those people (the newer immigrants including the Mexicans and Asian Americans) weren't part of the larger mosaic, as if they were not contributing anything substantial, as if they were here just to make money.
Image: Immigrants listen to speakers during a press conference hosted by the Coalition of African, Asian, European, and Latino Immigrants of Illinois. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images
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