To be able to speak up can be immensely beneficial and is critical to our lives. What if you found yourself needing to go up against powerful men and powerful women? How do you get them to listen to you? In this Imagine Talks Podcast episode, one actress and activist had to do just that. She did this halfway around the world to stand against crimes. And, she did it again in front of leaders and executives to take a stand for organizational transformation.
Minita Gandhi is known for her work on NBC primetime television’s Chicago Fire, more recently as a voice actor in Disney animation, and has played significant roles as a first-generation Indian-American female performing artist. Minita represents a new voice in American theater who takes us on an epic journey of a coming of age first-generation Indian-American female. The “dark comedy” inspired by true stories takes us on a magical but tragic trip to India. Minita’s honored to perform Muthaland as a selected participant of the CAATA CONFEST hosted by Oregon Shakespeare Festival in October 2016.
Learn more about Minita Gandhi:
Visit her website 👉🏻 www.minitagandhi.com
Below is our edited transcript of Minita Gandhi’s talk, “The Responsibility of Privilege,” at the Imagine Talks Annual Symposium.
Fireside chat with Minita Gandhi
Francis Kong: Hi, Mita, how are you doing?
Minita Gandhi: I’m doing great, Francis I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. How are you doing?
Francis Kong: Well, we’re super excited to have you here with us on Imagine Talks. And I have all these amazing questions that I want to ask you. You do amazing work for the community and let’s just get started with this. The first thing I would love for you to share everybody is just can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you ended up now as an actor and activist and also a healer?
Francis Kong: Like, how did you come into those three roles now?
Who is Minita Gandhi?
Minita Gandhi: Thank you. So I think healing has been a big part of my life, I mean, it’s I think when I was young, if someone had a headache, I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I would be trying to send energy to them to make them feel better. And as I got older, I was also just always mesmerized and drawn to stories and storytelling. So I was the kind of kid who, you know, I’d ask my mom to leave the light on for an extra five minutes before bed.
And I have six books tucked under my pillow and then I would just voraciously try to read through whatever it was, and I was just enamored with words and what words and the power of words, what they could do. So I think that’s how I ended up coming into acting and writing.
It wasn’t something that I knew I could pursue as a career. I was born in India. We came to the States when I was pretty young and we were in New York. So we were on the East Coast. We were in South Bend, Indiana for about four years and then we were in the San Francisco Bay Area. And the whole time I thought, well, my dad is an engineer, everyone I know is a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. And I was really interested in English and writing and history. So for my parents, they were really surprised when I came home from college one day and I said,
“I took a theater elective. I got cast in the school production of Taming of the Shrew and I want to be an actor.”
Stories that can provide healing
And it was just—you could have, you know—a pin could drop and you could hear it, and then I just remember them both basically feeling like,
“What did we do wrong as parents? Why are you choosing this hobby?”
Minita Gandhi: They just kept calling it a hobby. I think up until a few years ago, my dad still called it my acting hobby, no matter what I did. But, you know, it was just such a strange avenue for them, which I know—thank goodness it’s not anymore. But I realized that through stories, stories provide healing, whether it’s on a personal spiritual level, whether it’s sociopolitical, it’s one of the only avenues we have to present something to somebody in an objective way so they can actually see themselves and, and write something that they might feel is wrong for themselves or in the world.
And I think that’s also where my activism stepped in. I believe that we all should be living the happiest lives that we can and that is everybody’s right. I believe that Joy is everybody’s right and I think that it is also our responsibility to fight for not only ourselves, but for our communities. And I think that’s also coming from a spiritual practice of I definitely believe that we are all connected. So if there is one person that is in pain, we are all in pain.
How can one become an activist and be able to speak up on behalf of others?
And so, you know, as a society, I really hope and try to push for making those pains, you know, go away for whoever we can. And sometimes those fights are and those battles are easier than others, which is why it’s important that we all stand up in the moment. I think there’s a lot of avenues for activism. I think art is one, healing is another. You know, standing up for someone you don’t know—in a moment where you see injustice happening—is being an activist.
Francis Kong: Okay, Fantastic! And—and when you’re now in Iraq and activists and you and the role of an actor and a healer as well, too, you do a lot of traveling, from my understanding, as you travel obviously back and forth between the states and also parts of India, right? And, you know, if I had this conversation before and this is especially relevant here from a collective experience and can take this word that we— I don’t think we ever use this word so much as we ever did in 2020, but the word privilege, right? And—and of course, privilege is relative, right?
Because you have to have privilege relative to someone else and that lack of privilege. Well, to someone else, right? So when you go back to India. You obviously have as an American citizen, even though you are in India and the city, you probably have a lot more privilege than the typical citizen. And you’ve also talked a lot about as an actor and as activist and a healer, that level—that connection when you say like, “When one person is hurt, everyone is hurt in the community,” that’s the—that implies to me as a huge level of responsibility that each person has the next person.
Speak up for survivors
What is —is —if there is, what is the connection between, in your opinion, and any stories and any experience you’ve had, what’s [the] connection between privilege and responsibility?
Minita Gandhi: I think there’s a huge connection between privilege and responsibility and I do— I have had— if I can travel, in itself, is a privilege and I’ve had the ability to travel in many places, whether it be for acting or writing gigs around the country or world.
Also, in my activism—one thing I should speak to—which speaks to your last question is, in terms of activism, my activism has over the years defined itself by—I’m a real big activist for women’s rights, I’m a real big activist for survivors, I am also a survivor and I’ll speak to that in a moment.
And I am also an activist in terms of bridging access and that has fallen into place in terms of my activism towards mentorship, that we should all have access to knowledge, we should all have access to jobs, we should all have access to all of that.
And I believe that mentorship really does create that level of access. When I go back to India, I do feel a certain level of privilege as an American citizen, at least I have in the past I haven’t been in the past couple of years, but specifically in 2009, when I went to India, I went for one of my brother’s weddings. It was a beautiful trip, but also in my spiritual journey, I wanted to go to a meditation center and my parents were a little apprehensive about me traveling alone in India, but, as a woman who’s traveled around the world, I fought really hard and I said, “No, I can I can do this.”
Speak up when you are being victimized against your will
Minita Gandhi: So my dad went with me, we took a sleeper train and he spent one night there with me and then he left. And unfortunately, while I was there, the doctor who ran that meditation facility came to my room at night and assaulted me and it was, you know, obviously a moment I will never forget.
I was able to maneuver out of it before it got to the worst of it. And— and after I escaped that situation, I remember feeling something I’ve never felt before, which is that was the only time in my life I’ve experienced being willing to die for something and I was willing to die to speak up versus just leaving the country, as what everybody was advising me to do, because the place where I was assaulted was attached to one of the largest Hindu temples in India.
So it’s like filing a complaint against the Catholic Church, and there’s so much reputation and money and privilege tied up into that—that nothing is supposed to mar that reputation. But I remember very strongly feeling as though I didn’t think it was the first time this doctor had come to somebody’s room this way. He was drunk and I, as an American citizen, knew that I would be able to leave the country, that I would not have to see this person again, and that I did have an opportunity.
Speak up during a confrontation
Minita Gandhi: And there was—and I felt a responsibility to speak up so that this doctor could not do what he did to me to any other woman or person. And even my own father was really against me doing that because he thought we would get killed. There was a feeling that we would be killed if we spoke up. And so I fought with my father and I said, “I will do this alone.” And he said, “No.”
So we luckily had some help from some strangers and we went to the temple and we filed a complaint at the temple. I was put into a room with 10 men—some of the headmen from the temple. They actually brought the doctor into the room and the doctor did not know that I spoke to Gujarati, which is my native tongue that I grew up with, and he started speaking in Gujarati and saying that I was an American actress and that I had called him over to my room in the middle of the night.
And he refused and went home to his wife. And I remember in that moment it was myself and this other woman who was helping me because I didn’t want my dad in that room, because I don’t want my dad to hear the details. I just remember thinking, “Am I crazy? Did I make this up?” Everybody in this room is looking at me as though I’m lying. This doctor is saying that I’m lying and I just remember sitting in that chair and I hadn’t showered.
The importance of asserting your rights during a confrontation
Minita Gandhi: You know, it was the next day and I hadn’t showered and I still had dried blood on my legs. I could feel all of this on my body and— and I stood up and it wasn’t a moment where I had thought about it. I just stood up and I started speaking and Gujarati very slowly. And I said that, “I speak Gujarati. This doctor’s not telling the truth. And if he doesn’t tell the truth, I will go to the police. I will go to the UN. I will file a public complaint and make a legal complaint.”
And that’s when the whole room shifted and their —and their response is— it still baffles me. Their response inside of a temple, these holy men said to me, “Do you want us to beat him?” And I just said, “No, we’re standing in a house of God, you know, beating him doesn’t take back what he did to me or give me back my integrity.”
They’re like, “What do you want us to do?”
I said, “I want him to tell the truth.”
So he just, you know, reluctantly said, and with a lot of apathy, I think, to just I remember him leaning back in this chair and he just said, “Fine, everything she said is true, as though that would make everything better.”
Gaining privilege by leaving the country
Minita Gandhi: And so I said, “I want his wife to know what he did. I want him not to be able to practice on women alone.” And I asked for fifty thousand rupees to be donated to an organization that the woman who helped me that she would choose. And they said, “That’s a lot of money. This is not America.” And then I just remember they stopped, you know, in the middle of saying America and they don’t know if it was the look on my face or what it was. But they stopped and then they just conceded.
And my dad and I left India switching bunks in the middle of the night, worried we were going to be followed and killed. And then we came home a few days later and it was around this time—that year in 2009, you know, it was—we spent Christmas in India, it was such a strange time and we flew home but I remember very strongly feeling I spent years healing from that.
That there, you know—I had a— I have a certain amount of privilege as an American woman in that—in that surrounding being an American woman did give me some level of privilege, you know, and being able to get away from that situation, literally, and leave the country gave me a certain level of privilege. And so I spoke out feeling that I was at least able to hopefully prevent somebody in that community who might not be able to speak out for whatever reasons, that hopefully they are protected.
Minita Gandhi as a minority
And I think—I think that’s really important. I think similarly, 2020 this dumpster fire of the year that we’ve had has also brought a lot of things to surface. We—we’ve definitely been all, you know— it’s not really all of a sudden, we are a country full of racial injustice. We are a country that is built on stolen lands and appropriated lands from indigenous people and are just— are just now, as a nation, really acknowledging it the way that it should have been acknowledged years ago.
We’re really just acknowledging the way we have treated our Black community and people of color. And, you know, I worked with an arts organization for about four years, so I started a mentorship program with a girlfriend of mine in Chicago.
Minita Gandhi: You know, I was working with a corporate company and I built a women’s leadership program. And one of the modules we had was on mentorship. I had presented on mentorship and leadership in the arts for women in business leadership, for women in the arts. And this woman approached me and said, “I like what you said. I would love to build a mentorship program with you. I got so excited because I never had a woman mentor, a woman mentor in the arts.”
And I thought, “Why don’t we give this to others?”
Inequity in an arts equity organization
And we built it together in Chicago and then my partner wanted to work with Statera Arts, which is the organization that we had met at where I was speaking, and they had had a mentorship program—put it on pause, and, you know, that’s all I knew about that program. So here we had built the infrastructure for this wonderful program in Chicago, and we were connecting women, the non-binary artists. And then they were excited that we had something that worked. So it all seemed to go together, now within that as I was entering that organization, I very much recognize that this was an organization that was led by all white women. And so I was going to be the only person of color working at that organization. And I say “working” in parentheses, because my first two years there, I was paid zero dollars.
We built a national program. By my fourth year in 2020, we had 60 regional coordinators underneath us and we had connected over a thousand women and non-binary artists over the country in 19 different cities. The fourth-year that I was there and doing all of that, I was making $625 a quarter—that’s it!—working 80-plus hours a month. And there was a huge level of inequity there for an organization that is an arts equity organization.
Speaking up against racism
Minita Gandhi: I think back on my four years there and the reason I bring all of this up is because, you know, a lot of times as artists, as people of color, as women of color, we’re sort of taught to be so grateful for the work. We’re taught that our generosity of spirit has no value and this doesn’t happen to white men, it just doesn’t. And so, after four years of being there and there are so many things that came up, but I don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of it.
The final straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was when the executive director of that organization wouldn’t allow my partner and I to put a statement in our mentorship email that said, Black Lives Matter. That said, “We support anti-racism. We are in solidarity with black indigenous people of color.” And she said that “They had a statement on the website and that was enough.” And that’s when I realized this very white woman with blond hair and blue eyes just literally didn’t know what it was like to exist in the world, not looking like her. And I just couldn’t stand for the level of her and trickle-down effect it was doing for the communities that we represented in our mentorship community.
Having to deal with majority fragility
So I wrote them a letter, I made a formal statement to the entire executive team. It was 20 minutes long. I gave them a number of calls to action, including change in leadership, financial transparency—I was met with all the things you read about in terms of white fragility, like tears, and I see you and I hear you. And these were women that I had affinity for, one of them was one of my closest, dearest friends. I considered her sister and—and so they all seemed ready to make the change, and I assume that they would because they had good intentions.
Fast forward about a month, you know, they couldn’t handle that part of being accountable was actually addressing the people that they hurt, people like myself and others in the community that had been directly hurt by the actions that they did or didn’t do, because inaction is also an action, and they took a lot of inaction at times. I paid someone out of pocket— $175 to transcribe the meeting in which I gave them the statement so that they could have all my calls to action. And I said I, I said,
Being in the presence of abominations
Minita Gandhi: “Fine, I will wait until this mentorship class ends to publicly resign. But I would like everybody internally to know about all of the things that have happened, because if you’re really here to do the work, people should know exactly where you haven’t been doing the work so they can help you be accountable and do better.”
I was met with, you know, shock. I was met with anger, I was met with language such as, “Please consider what is punitive versus what is generative.” I was met with, you know, “Minita, it seems to me like you want credit. And we were having some of these conversations before you made this statement.” And I just said, you know, “Everything that I can offer is in my calls to action.” I sent them the transcript once I got it, and the next day I woke up and I was cut off from my Gmail, all these communities that I helped build cut off to all the access to the Google Docs that I had helped create and some of them that I was responsible for originating and creating.
And —and I was given an email—in my private email box that said, “Effective immediately, we heard you that you no longer want to be part of mentorship. You are released from your duties. Please don’t— it is our expectation that you don’t contact anyone at this organization, anyone affiliated with this organization.” And in the same moment, they sent an email to everyone in the community saying, “We’re Statera Arts, we have work to do.” And then they listed almost all of my calls to action except for financial transparency and a change in leadership.
A recurrence of trauma and the need for confrontation
Minita Gandhi: And I remember receiving the email and I was crying. I mean, I felt so attacked and abused— it, you know, they’re very different situations but the trauma really triggered what happened to me in India when somebody just violates you in a certain kind of way.
And I realized when we talk about a very, very long answer about the link between privilege and responsibility, but the link between privilege and responsibility is if you have committed a harm, you have to be accountable, that is part of your responsibility is to not try to publicly put out all these accountability reports and save face. But it should be responsibility is about right relationship between the party that committed harm and the party that received the harm.
And I think right now, as a nation, we’re really struggling with that, we’ve seen a lot of organizations put up statements— we’re in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, we’re in solidarity with anti-racism, but it’s the actions that matter.
Having the privilege to speak up
Minita Gandhi: So activism is acting in the moment when the thing that happens, you know, when the wrong is committed—speaking up to it then and it’s also, unfortunately, as comfortable, as uncomfortable as it is, it’s recognizing, “Oh, my gosh, I didn’t see or I didn’t know where, I didn’t realize and I hurt you in this way. And I’m going to first make it right with you, and then—and then I will work on doing better in the world.”
And I think that that link about accountability is still missing. I also think privilege and responsibility is sometimes you’re going to have more privilege in the room than somebody else. So just take a moment, take—stop, recognize where you have more privilege because you have more money, because you have more power, because of race, whatever it might be, because of your job and where somebody doesn’t have that privilege and are they suffering and injustice in the room.
And you can use your privilege to eradicate that. And I think that is so important for all of us to do, not only for ourselves, but for each other.
Francis Kong: I love that and we’re definitely coming to the end of our time here. Do you have anything that you want to share in terms of the lessons that you’ve learned and how this translates into what you believe, that we could have all collectively gone through globally and as a community—as an Asian-American community as well too in 2020—what we’ve learned from this?
And what hopefully we can be like going forward from 2021 onwards?
Living in harmony with one's self and self-confrontation
Minita Gandhi: I think 2020 has been, you know, an unexpected pause for a lot of us. I think we talked about this before that, you know, up until this year happened and the pandemic happened, we were all moving towards certain outcomes, right? A lot of people tell me, especially my healing work, where this was going to be the best professional year of my life.
And then I lost all of my jobs or I was moving towards this thing personally and then this fell through. And so what it’s forced us to do is take the pause and really examine what is truly important to us. How am I living in right relationship with self and truth and purpose versus how am I living for others—other people’s outcomes, expectations? How much am I living through belief systems that have been put on me by media and family and friends versus what is right for me?
Pausing to think about what’s important
Minita Gandhi: So I think moving forward, take the time, take this time right now, because we probably won’t ever have it again. And if there is a silver lining up right now is that in this pause, we have the ability to take a moment, to be introspective, connect to our intuition, connect to our truth, and then live out of that purpose. That’s a beautiful thing we can do moving forward into 2021, and I think a lot of us will find that part of that purpose will be when we’re living in that truth and purpose will be kinder not only to ourselves, but to others.
We will be more forgiving to not only ourselves, but to others. And so I think that there can be a silver lining to right now if we really want to do the work.
Francis Kong: I love it. Thank you so much, Minita, for always sharing your journey, your wisdom, your insights. I have no doubt that that’s going to help a lot of people moving forward from this point onward, we have more wisdom now, we have new tools. And I really, truly believe that we can only get better from this point onward.
So thank you again for always being part of our community and helping us heal as you do so well. Take care and I look forward to seeing you, hopefully in 2022 on stage and in person.
Minita Gandhi: I would love that. Thank you so much, Francis.
Francis Kong: You take care. We’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye, Minita.
Minita Gandhi: Bye
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