They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

I was angry that you couldn’t just say the right words to make him stop. It didn’t occur to me to be angry at him.

In 1882, America enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first significant race-based immigration ban in the country’s history. America later extended the ban to all of Asia.

The belief that we were exceptional protected us. Until it didn’t. Because stories designed to uphold hierarchies protect only one group—those at the very top.

The myth forces our minds to forget that which our bodies cannot: that belonging is always conditional.

The British justified colonizing India by drawing attention to the burning of sati, the esoteric Hindu practice of widow self-immolation. Although Europeans had hunted witches and burned the accused alive at the stake, the British used the ritual to cast brown men as barbarians from whom brown women needed saving.

I realized: I had struggled to articulate my own story because, when I spoke, my words took on meanings I did not intend. My speech was trapped behind two dueling narratives that claimed to speak for me.

The world we live in, which demands perfection and achievement, teaches us we cannot love ourselves as we are. The myth teaches us to think greatness always resides outside us instead of within us. We must become stronger, taller, richer, thinner, smarter, prettier—and perhaps then, we think, we may be worthy of love. Yet we cannot love ourselves and we cannot love each other well so long as we are preoccupied by the desire to leave ourselves, to abandon ourselves in search of something beyond ourselves. Serving the myth teaches us how to belong but severs our ability to connect.

I wish I could tell you now that I love my name.

When your parents died, we would meet your grief like strangers.

Please remember: There was a time when my outspokenness brought us together instead of tearing us apart. There was a time when speaking my mind was received not as a threat but as an act of love.

Your love was stable, which made it expected and ordinary.

Your love was so synonymous with safety and warmth that I didn’t have words to describe its power until I mourned your absence.

I didn’t know how to get the girls in my class to see me as special or good, but I learned that winning over adults was easy. I wanted to feel special, always.

Now I wonder if Papa ever thought about what it might mean to raise a daughter in a land of ruined women.

When the British colonized India, they co-opted this ancient game into Snakes and Ladders and stripped it of its spiritual mission, modifying it to teach what Against Meritocracy author Jo Littler calls “Christian-capitalist moral instruction.” In the British game, ascension no longer meant enlightenment; instead, it signified rising to affluence through punctuality, perseverance, and opportunism.

The board-game characters remained white until 1974, when Black children were told that they, too, now had a chance to climb the ladder to attain wealth and fame. It was around this time that America advertised itself as a place where people like us could advance, unencumbered.

He slipped into authority like a tailored suit.

But I yearned for the freedom that I associated with whiteness.

With his one comment, my pride at having run so far turned to shame. The threat of what could happen to my female body overshadowed what I had actually achieved with my body.

I believed that my ugliness repulsed nearly everyone who was forced to look at me, and they were just too polite to tell me so.

Moments like this form my strongest, most intimate memories with you. I used to believe that was simply because we shared a gender. But now I see a deeper reason: These memories stand out because they are the few in which we were alone, unsupervised by Papa. Free to be ourselves. The rituals of femininity were the only moments between us that Papa did not insert himself into.

It was too painful for me to consider that a part of you chose to accept mistreatment rather than to leave, that you later chose to protect him instead of protecting me.

Even while Papa criticized aspects of Americanness, he had molded us to succeed in white America.

You subtly exercised your influence within our family system. In these moments I see your resilience. Now I see that your decision to endure, too, was a deliberate choice.

I wanted to keep things peaceful and my needs small so that he could do his important, lifesaving work as a doctor. I thought this is what it meant to love someone well.

This is what I believed it meant to be okay: the ability to convince everyone else I was okay.

Again and again, I was told that what I called mistreatment was a misinterpretation of the lengths to which my father had gone to ensure that I succeeded.

In our family, loving someone meant rescuing them or letting yourself be rescued by them.

I had spent a good portion of my life feeling cheated out of the exceptional family I was told I had.