Chavi Khanna Koneru

Interview Details

Interviewee(s):

Chavi Khanna Koneru

Interviewer(s):

Maydha Devarajan:

Date of Interview:

October 7, 2021

Communities:

Asian American, Hindu Punjabi, Indian American, Sikh, South Asian, Telugu, India

About

Chavi Khanna Koneru is co-founder and Executive Director of North Carolina Asian Americans Together (NCAAT). Koneru was born in 1983 in Oakland, California and moved with her family to Durham, NC in 1989. She describes the culture shock she experienced upon moving from the comparatively racially diverse environment of the California Bay Area. Koneru elaborates on feelings of non-belonging and cultural isolation as well as practices of code-switching and living between two cultures during her childhood. She also recounts how her racial and ethnic difference was assimilated to the Black/white binary of the American South. In 2001, Koneru enrolled as a journalism major at UNC Chapel Hill and later graduated from UNC law school in 2009. It was there that she discovered a much larger community of South Asian and Indian American students and began participating in campus cultural organizations. For Koneru, college marked a pivotal moment in her process of identity formation and sharing her experiences of the unique set of circumstances that come from being a second-generation immigrant. As Koneru continues to discuss South Indian social communities in NC, she recounts issues of colorism, anti-Black racism, and discrimination, particularly from North Indians towards South Indians. Finally, Koneru describes how her later work with the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice influenced her understanding of Asian American as a political identity and a larger pan-Asian community. She also recounts her personal experiences with racial discrimination in the South and the uptick in aggression in the wake of the 9/11 and the 2016 election. Koneru concludes by considering how issues such as the American tax, model minority myth, and similar issues will impact her children’s lives and identities as southerners.

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“I couldn’t claim this place and I didn’t feel like it could claim me. But I do now.”

Chavi Khanna Koneru has a complicated relationship with the South.

From being transplanted across the country as a child to North Carolina and growing up as one of a few Indians in her classes, to serving as co-founder and executive director of a non-profit civic engagement group for Asian Americans in the state, Khanna Koneru knows what it means to exist in and stake out spaces that are not traditionally meant for people who look like her.

Khanna Koneru was born in 1983 in Oakland, California. In 1989, her family moved to Durham, where her father, a professor, would start a position at Duke’s Asian and African Languages and Literature Department.

The shift from West Coast to East was stark. She recalls the Bay Area neighborhood she grew up in as being “incredibly diverse.”

In North Carolina, at the small, private Carolina Friends School where she attended high school, it was more of the same, she says. She recalls comments and expectations from non-Indians that she and only other Indian kid in her grade should date or that she must be related to the handful of other Indian students at school.

With more overt experiences of racial discrimination, Khanna Koneru says she just simply took those instances for granted as part of “the American tax” she had to pay growing up in the U.S. as the child of immigrants.

Khanna Koneru said, as a kid, she would often code switch — the practice of switching between expression, behavior, speech, languages and other forms of communication in different contexts or social settings.

Specifically, she says she remembers feeling “so internally frustrated at the fact that there was no clarity around where [she] was supposed to belong.”

Khanna Koneru eventually attended college at UNC-Chapel Hill in the early 2000s, which was an entirely different experience. Suddenly, she was thrust into a world where not only were there multiple organizations specifically meant for South Asians, she was expected to know and understand nuances within the community — the different countries of origin that South Asians belonged to, the distinction between North and South Indians, the experiences of being a religious minority in a particular ethnolinguistic group, etc.

“We are Hindu Punjabi. My grandmother’s family was Sikh and, you know, went to the gurdwara. So there’s a portion of my family that is turban-wearing, you know, like very religious. But I fell in this like in-between place, I mean, particularly in North Carolina and the South in general, the majority South Asian population is Gujarat. I didn’t even know what that meant.”

In Khanna Koneru’s words, she dove “headfirst” into this newfound community, becoming an active member of Sangam, UNC’s South Asian interest organization, and choosing to spend all her time with other Indian students.

Arriving in a space where suddenly there was a large, engaging South Asian population was exciting. But it also came with “drama,” Khanna Koneru says, remembering self-segregation and exclusionary practices that were present in the Indian student population.