Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Raj Patel

By Andrea Plaid

Raj Patel. Photo: Eliot Khnuner. Via Twitter

When I watched the documentary Payback, based on Margaret Atwood’s book about debt and forgiveness, I really wasn’t there for Atwood. I’ve never took a liking to her literary self since developing an intense dislike for her most famous work, The Handmaid’s Tale. The book rubbed my proto-anti-racist self the wrong way when I read it years ago. What I didn’t expect is to have her introduce me to my latest infatuation, Raj Patel.

A sect of people think he’s a god. No, seriously: a New Age sect believes Patel is a messiah predicted by their leader in 2010. Patel graciously and firmly stated at NYT.com that he wasn’t whom that set of faithful folks were looking for:

“It’s incredibly flattering, just for an instant,” Mr. Patel said of his unwanted status. “And then you realize what it means. People are looking for better times. Almost anything now will qualify as a portent of different times.”

What set off this whole series of unfortunate events is not only a set of coincidences about Patel’s life that coincide with the prophecies about the sect’s savior but also Patel’s political stance on food, activism, and development. To call Patel a “food activist” may be a bit facile: it’s more like his ideas form a unified theory of action on how food, poverty, capitalism, development, and activism is and what it needs to be.

Patel describes his own background in a 2010 interview as:

I was born in London, but I’m a mutt.  My mother was born in Kenya, my father was born in Fiji, my ancestors are from India.  And I grew up in London and spent, basically, most of my time in the basement of the convenience store that my parents ran.

His activism-framing moment came, he says, when he and his family visited India:

Growing up in Britain, but as part of a south Asian family was big in ways that I didn’t expect.  There was this transformative moment for me that I remember – I think I was about six years old.  My parents had taken me and my brother to India so that we would ‘know what is it to be Indian,’ and we would learn some Guarati, which is the language my parent spoke at home.  And we were at a stop light in Bombay, I think, and we were inside a taxi and it was raining.  And all of a sudden, there was this knocking sound at the window, a sort of tap, tap, tap.  And outside the window was a girl, I would imagine she was an adolescent, and in her hands was a tiny baby and the baby was crying and crying and crying.  And there was screaming outside the car and she was tapping on the window asking for money.  And soon there was screaming inside the car because I was howling.  I wanted it to stop.  I wanted my parents to give her some money.  And then as we drove away from the lights, I kept on howling.  And I wanted to know why that was?  Why was she on the outside of the car and why were we on the inside?  Why does she not have a home and we did?  How come we could afford to fly to India and she was begging at a street light?

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