This discomfited Black Americans I met, it smacked of stolen valor. But it was instead a refusal of superior opportunities - education, housing, employment - offered to that racial group - Indians - deemed to be superior to Blacks. It was an act of solidarity.

In South Africa, where Zohran lived for a time while his father taught there, many Indian South Africans on the left identified as Black - a habit borne of the struggle against apartheid as a way to disavow the hierarchy of race it imposed.