Cursed and Blessed

My name is Vinita Ananth, I’m a brown woman of south Asian origin, an immigrant and an aspiring ally to the Microsoft BAM(Blacks at Microsoft) community. I am at the intersectionality of several minority communities and have experienced some discrimination and everyday microaggressions due to one or more of these identities. And while I have experienced discrimination due to my gender, immigrant status and color of my skin by police, at the airport and sometimes in the workplace, I will never be able to fully know or relate to the pain and trauma carried by our colleagues from the Black community. I am incredibly proud of Microsoft and our leadership for being a genuine and outspoken voice of systemic change, for recognizing the endemic nature of racial prejudice, and for committing to learning, listening and affecting change. As I processed the events that unfolded over the past weeks, I wrote a poem, and with your permission I’d like to share it with you.

CURSED and BLESSED — from an ally of #BlackLivesMatter and someone who lives at the intersectionality of being an immigrant, a woman and person of color.

I hail from the south of India, I am dark-skinned not “fair”

I was born “karuppu” or “kaala”, to my mom’s despair

Being the darkest girl in my family, I sometimes heard the silent prejudice

the omnipresence of judgement to one’s color and cruel chastise

Raised in a middle-class family,

I was truly blessed with a boon and a stroke of luck called Brahmin Privilege

It came with a blessing of scholastic learning

I doubled down with hard work, diligence and an innate yearning

At my engineering college from a class of sixty-three, thirteen STEM girls found each other in glee

we worked twice as hard, to prove to the world that we were marque

Being a minority is not without strife

I accepted and acknowledged it as the way of life

From a country where colorism is insidiously systemic

With its evil roots in ancient times, wide-spread and endemic

I have been witness to colorism — some blind spots, some complicit

I have been pained and embarrassed at my own action or inaction — some explicit and some implicit

In my adopted country of twenty-three years

Black people are disproportionately disadvantaged, no cheers

Power, privilege and prejudice is institutionalized and systemic

Equality, fairness and justice for Black people needs change that’s seismic

It is a tipping point, a rallying cry, time to learn and transform,

My mother and my daughter educate and remind me, bold steps don’t conform

Vote and fight for every voice to be heard, be inclusive and anti-racist

Try to be better tomorrow than we were today, actively lead with small tweaks or big changes

With that I pledge to be an ally, to lead with empathy and support to make Microsoft a great place to work for the black community and all minorities.

Although all of us will inevitably make mistakes, no matter how well-intentioned we are, I encourage you to explore and embrace these important and relevant conversations.