Sankar Raman

YOU DON’T KNOW UNTIL YOU TRY

Written by Brian Benson; Photographed by Daniel Stark

When you meet Sankar Raman, in the lobby of a six-story building in Northwest Portland, he shakes your hand, deflects your compliments, and says, no, the honor is his, he’s been eager to meet you. You’re not sure why. You, after all, didn’t immigrate from a tiny town in India with little English and make a life as an American engineer; you didn’t found a thriving nonprofit dedicated to humanizing immigrants in response to skyrocketing xenophobia. You’re just a white guy with a notebook, a bike bag, and a sweaty forehead. Still, when Sankar says it’s an honor, you believe him.

The two of you end up on the fourth floor, in a bright room with floor-to-ceiling windows, through which you can just make out the southern tip of Forest Park, perched like a mohawk atop the city skyline. This building, according to a photographer you just met, was once full of artist studios, but has in recent years been colonized by Amazon. “Nowadays,” he says, “it’s all fulfillment.”

The two of you settle onto a couch. Sankar smiles at the view, then at you. His resting expression seems to be a warm, gentle smile, and you can’t help but respond in kind. You open your notebook and begin asking questions. You’re hoping to do for Sankar what he has done for so many others: tell a story, make a portrait, so all may know and see him as he’d like to be known and seen. As he talks, though, you notice something funny: he keeps pointing the conversation away from himself and toward other people. Like, for example, MrBeast.

“You know MrBeast?” he asks.

Somehow, you do not.

MrBeast, Sankar tells you, is a young white guy and the world’s most popular YouTuber. He makes loads of money filming videos of himself performing silly stunts and also engaging in high-visibility, ethically questionable philanthropy. (Later, you’ll look at his feed and find “I Paid a Real Assassin to Try to Kill Me” sitting just above “1,000 Blind People See for the First Time.”) “I wish I could have a conversation with him,” Sankar says. “He could teach me something. Millions of people follow him. But I look at my videos, which are, you know, survivor stories, some serious stuff, and I get 200 hits.”

Sankar pauses for a beat. Then says, “That’s what we are fighting against.”

For six years, through The Immigrant Story, the volunteer-run nonprofit he founded, Sankar has been fighting—against racist politicians and complicit media networks, and for the attention of an oft-distracted, apathetic public. Through profiles, pictures, podcasts, and live events, Sankar and his team give immigrants and refugees the chance to tell their stories in their own words. The idea, Sankar says, is to create a counter-narrative to xenophobia, one immigrant voice at a time. “How close can you get [the audience] to the story?” he wonders aloud. “Because when people get close, they are more apt to take social action—to do something without us even having to tell them.”

It all began, he tells you, in the wake of the 2016 election. Up to that point, Sankar hadn’t seen himself as a political person. After emigrating from India in 1980, he’d seen himself, mainly, as an Intel engineer, though he also dabbled in photography, which he fell in love with as a child. Then came a fateful trip back to India, where he took tons of photographs, only to develop them and discover, to his dismay, that he’d unwittingly adopted the colonial gaze of early idols like Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson: he’d gotten so many shots of strangers driving rickshaws and working in rice paddies, but few of his family simply talking, laughing, living. In the coming years, Sankar eschewed that exoticizing aesthetic—brown-skinned people shot from below or above, doing “traditional” things white westerners expected them to do—and developed a style all his own: he’d build rapport with his subjects, ask them questions, photograph them at eye level. He was still honing his style in late 2016, when a candidate campaigning on anti-immigrant rhetoric was elected president.

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In the face of so much hatred, Sankar committed to helping his fellow immigrants, the only way he knew how: storytelling. “When I was younger,” he says, “listening to stories wasn’t only entertainment—it was a lifeline. It’s how you honored each other, by hearing those stories.” In this spirit, in early 2017, Sankar connected with a cohort of refugee students, intending to photograph them and help them tell their own stories, on their own terms. So he asked them, “How do you want to take a picture? How would you like it to look?” One girl said she was going to church that Sunday; she’d be wearing her traditional clothes. “Why don’t you come,” the girl asked, “and take my picture?”

“So I went,” Sankar says, smiling.

Over the ensuing six years, Sankar and his team have met, photographed, and helped tell the stories of hundreds of immigrants and refugees—many of them survivors of genocide—and they’ve shared those pictures and profiles via The Immigrant Story’s website, podcasts, and live events. Sankar feels more passionate than ever about this work, though he also acknowledges that it takes a toll. “When you hear those stories,” Sankar says, “you are taking on at least some of that trauma.”

You ask Sankar how he stays healthy and hopeful, and he points out the window. He regularly goes to Forest Park with his wife, to walk and take photos of moss, fallen leaves, tangled roots. “You can forget about the stress, pamper yourself,” he says. “The Japanese call it ‘forest bathing.’”

You say you love Forest Park, too. For a moment, you both look out the window at that bushy green eyebrow atop the city skyscape. Then your gaze falls back to the city, to the buildings and cranes, the ceilings and walls. You find yourself thinking, again, about Amazon, about MrBeast, about who and what gets to take up space in this city, this world. You ask, again, how Sankar stays hopeful.

The work, he admits, is difficult. And it costs money, which presents problems, as he doesn’t want to charge people to access content and isn’t adept at asking for donations. Yes, The Immigrant Story has received several awards and grants over the years, but they need so much more support, more visibility. They can’t manage to get into the Willamette Week’s Give!Guide, a lifeline for Portland nonprofits. Can’t get in a year what MrBeast gets in a day.

Still, Sankar says, “Portland is a rich town, for our practical purposes.” He finds hope in all the support he’s received from writers, photographers, Northwest artists of all stripes. He has so many dreams for The Immigrant Story—bigger events, a series on migrant workers, chapters in other cities—and you know he’ll fulfill them, so long as people keep volunteering, donating, subscribing to the channels and offering their precious attention.

When you ask what’s felt most surprising about the impact he’s had, Sankar doesn’t hesitate.

“That you could actually do it,” he says. “You don’t know until you try.”

You’ve heard this sort of thing before. Too often, you’ve dismissed it.

When Sankar Raman says it, though? You believe him.

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