My presence has never been quiet. Taking inspiration from the Indian women who raised me, I stack bangles and evil eye bracelets on my arms, slip on loud gold rings I’ve collected from flea markets and perpetually — even in the shower — keep on the long gold necklace and diamond earrings passed down to me by the women in my family who owned them before me. 

When I raise my hand in class, when I enter an interview room or when I move around the predominantly white world I live in, I make noise. But my noise isn’t just my noise. 

Throughout colonization, countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas were robbed of their natural gems. 

On Queen Elizabeth’s crown lies the Koh-i-Noor diamond — one of the largest cut diamonds in the world — which was stolen from the current prince’s mother of the Sikh Empire when the East India Company kidnapped her in 1849. 

Additionally, in 1907, while South Africa was under British rule, the Cullinan diamond — the largest diamond in the world, weighing 3,025 carats — was seized, cut into nine pieces and split among different British royal ornaments. 

The centerpiece for the Imperial State Crown also features a stolen gem, the Black Prince’s Ruby, from the Badakhshan mines of present-day Tajikistan and Afghanistan that was “gifted” to the British soon after its discovery in 1905.

The losses of just these three gems would likely amount to over a billion dollars in today’s economy. It is unfathomable to consider the sheer cost of the resources violently removed from the many countries that suffered through European colonialism. These nations have all become independent, yet they feel the long-lasting effects of colonization. 

In comparing these nations’ 2023 GDP per capita, India’s is about $2,480, South Africa’s is around $6,022, Tajikistan’s is about $1,160 and Afghanistan’s is around $415, while the United Kingdom’s is vastly greater at around $49,464. 

Fear instilled in post-colonial subjects about the constant possibility of loss has continued from generation to generation. But this terror has also materialized gorgeously. Marginalized people delicately get our jewelry made and pass it down, holding our family, history and culture close to our hearts. 

“Ice Cold: A Hip-Hop Jewelry History” by Vikki Tobak depicts the connection between Black American jewelry and ancient African aesthetics. 

“You see so many of even the hoop earrings for women from the Ashanti of a certain length, or ankhs, or Nefertiti, just the iconography can be traced straight back to elements of African culture,” said Tobak in an interview with Andscape.  

Black American history — beginning with the Transatlantic Slave Trade — is one of the violent destruction of culture, relentless exploitation of labor and continuous economic suppression. 

From redlining, to the school-to-prison pipeline, to the Reagan-era stigmatization of welfare and the recent overturn of affirmative action, wealth has been repeatedly and institutionally denied to the Black community. Gold hoops, diamond-studded chains and waist beads are active resistance against this oppression — a display of fought-for wealth and cultural memorialization. 

Often, people of color are taught to “keep their heads down” and take up minimal space in an unforgiving nation. However, by wearing our history on our arms, necks, fingers and ankles, we seize attention that we are supposed to avoid. 

The sounds that our bangles make, the way our chains glimmer, the cultural significance of a jade necklace and the feeling of safety brought by an evil eye on our wrists — accessorizing in these ways not only subtly fights back against legacies of oppression, but also sets up the power of cultural aesthetics in the neo-colonial world. 

I grew up in a predominantly white school, and as a child of immigrants, I grappled with the whiplash of a culturally rich home life and an education within a community that felt so distant from my home. It took me years to find confidence in my identity that felt so visible and targeted by the world around me. It was stacks of bangles and intricate earrings that showed me I should go by Anahita instead of Ana. 

By wearing my culture, I make sure it cannot be suppressed. I deny the pressure to assimilate. I cultivate accessories that take up space, a right denied to women of color and immigrants across the country. 

As our country is silencing its marginalized voices, from the attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil to the dissolution of the Department of Education, which will minimize a race-conscious education system, we must take up space in every way we can. Immigrants and people of color make America. We deserve to be seen, we deserve to be loud and we deserve to represent our heritage in every way we can.