It's cool that Vijay considers himself black. I know of dark-skinned Indians who wouldn't. To them, for example, "walking into a restaurant and being assumed to be black by Americans" (of which they might be one, incidentally!) is the real drag, and an everyday one, and not a one-off defense to an imagined attack.
I think it's only fair to make an effort to clarify if it looks like someone's identity was reduced or mistaken. I thought it was also clear that we were not calling BRB racist, but if the burden is upon us to clarify every time a response is made to a white man's unprompted comments on race, I'm happy to do so.
But to BRB's point: yes, you'd think that people who probably have faced their own stigmas of varying kinds would be more sympathetic when they see the same thing happening to someone else. This clearly isn't the case, though, and Vijay is a great example of that. Or to cite another one, Cam, who has always been an advocate for the black athlete in the US and black quarterbacks specifically in the NFL against all the traditional, racially tinged doubts about his smarts. You'd expect him to not double down when he makes a blatantly sexist comment, and then be stunned and humbled by the overwhelming criticism he then got. But it was actually news to him.
Racism, sexism, the various interactions thereof, these things are not exclusive to any one group. That's a valuable observation, and thank you to BRB and ColoradoHusk for raising it in this thread.
