User:Pritalal

I'm a student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and pursuing an M.A. degree in South Asian Studies.

I am the child of Indian immigrants and was born in New York City but raised in Columbus, GA. Growing up, I dealt with oppression from two main fronts: one, as a non-Christian person of color living in a conservative, Bible belt town, and two, as a working-class South Asian who had to deal with the elitist and rather clueless nature of my South Asian community. From a very young age, I developed empathy for those peoples excluded from society and an immense interest in struggles against oppression and fighting to change an unjust system.

I did my undergraduate at Tulane University and majored in French and Anthropology. I began tutoring students in the impoverished New Orleans community and saw first-hand the effects of institutionalized racism. I also became involved in movements aimed at addressing the root causes of poverty by analyzing the power structure and the foot of oppression. I took courses in the African and African Diaspora Studies Dept and explored interests in Francophone Africa. I studied in Paris, France during my junior year and I interned with an anti-racist, civil rights organization called SOS Racisme in Paris. After graduation, I spent 6 months in Dakar, Senegal working with various NGOs in schools and with street children.

Upon my return from Senegal, I moved to New York City and began working with two different non-profits. One is called the National Employment Law Project, which is a legal and policy advocacy organization that advocates on behalf of low-wage immigrant workers and the unemployed. I'm a paralegal and I work with the Litigation Director on a large class-action lawsuit involving grocery delivery workers predominantly from Francophone West African countries. These workers delivered groceries at stores such as Food Emporium, Gristede’s, and Duane Reade and received wages of $1-2 per hour and worked 80 hours a week. We have received back wages from the employers and are currently working on distributing the money to the class members. The other group I work with is called Andolan: Organizing South Asian Workers. Andolan is a grassroots worker-center founded by low-wage South Asian workers in 1998. It’s an organizing group that seeks to empower and unite low-wage workers following the leadership of the workers themselves. I am officially the bookkeeper, but I engage in a wide array of tasks in this organization, as delegated to me from the workers.

I began the master’s program last fall and continue to work part-time at both organizations. For my thesis, I am interested in exploring how globalization has negatively affected the lives of low-wage workers and caused them to become “invisible refugees.” I am also interested in exploring how organic intellectuals perceive social change themselves and juxtapose this model to the model established by legal and policy experts. Another current interest of mine deals with power dynamics. My whole life I always felt more like an oppressed person than an oppressor, however, my work with low-wage immigrants in NYC has made me realize the unearned privileges I’ve been accorded in society and how this comes into play in my interactions with workers. I’m interested in exploring mechanisms to address these power differentials so that they do not work to silence the voice of the workers.

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