Race for acceptance

Ms Sen writes that as a student, her "cheeks hurt from smiling too much". Angry immigrants, she'd learnt, made Americans uncomfortable; they got labelled as jihadists

Not Quite Not White

Losing and Finding Race in America

Sharmila Sen

Penguin Viking

224 pages; Rs 599

Some scientists think of race as a social construct, bereft of biological meaning. In politics and popular culture, especially in the US, race is almost always a black/white binary. Sharmila Sen’s timely memoir, Not Quite Not White explores some of the deeper nuances of race from the perspective of the Other. Executive editor at large at Harvard University Press, Ms Sen immigrated with her parents to the United States in 1982. At that time, like almost every Indian 12-year-old, she had never used race-based labels to identify herself. Instead, she found herself out of the comfort of her home in Calcutta, in a bewildering environment where every single form she filled asked for her race. As an outsider who was neither black nor white, she set about her own examination of race, first from the perspective of a bright and curious child, then as an immigrant adult, and finally, as the mother of three children who think of themselves as Americans rather than Indians. 

In her initial years in America, Ms Sen made a conscious decision to “fit in”. She used all the tools in her arsenal of assimilation — television soaps like shows like General Hospital and Happy Days, jello, nylon socks and pop music — to become as American as she could, and as quickly as she could. Later in the memoir, Ms Sen has included an unofficial field guide for “going native” in America, which is hilarious, until one feels the sting in the tail. 

From the young girl so keen to embrace America in all its glory, Ms Sen’s journey of assimilation took on a sharper edge as she grew up. She writes that as a student, her “cheeks hurt from smiling too much”. Angry immigrants, she’d learnt, made Americans uncomfortable; they got labelled as jihadists. Instead, she learnt to hide the anger she felt at being discriminated against, or condescended to, because of her race, behind a smile. 

The experiences she writes about are deeply nuanced and indicate an inordinate degree of self-awareness. Indian readers will be especially interested in the comparisons she draws between her life in the 1970s India and in the US. As a child in India, she was in a privileged majority, not only in terms of her caste, but also because of the fact that she studied in an English-medium convent school. In contrast, when her family moved to the US, they were neither “chic expats nor political dissidents with lofty ideologies”, as she puts it. Their more mundane desire for economic betterment placed them rather low on the social scale. Ms Sen, thus, experienced inequality from both ends of the spectrum, which has informed her perspective considerably. 

After spending her younger years trying to assimilate, Ms Sen spent much of her adulthood trying to strike a balance between her dual identities. The question that she obsessed about was this -- how could she stay true to her Indian heritage without appearing like an exotic “Indian” stereotype to her American friends? The trick, she writes, was to expose small aspects of her culture to her colleagues and friends in such a way that she came across, as she puts it, as “a brown woman mimicking a white man pretending to be a brown man". 

Ms Sen’s struggles with identity came to a head and also paradoxically seemed to settle down, when her children were born. As the mother to children who were born in America and thought of themselves as more American than Indian — but definitely not quite white, her experience of race took on a new dimension. Her resentment at what she earlier thought of as “whiteface performance” seemed to temper down a little. Instead, she came to terms with the idea that perhaps race is on a continuum; that instead of only white and black, there are countless shades of “not white” and “not black”. 

Drawing from all these experiences, the author has been able to challenge the binary construction of race and also express it in emotional terms. In fact, this is what makes her exploration of volatile issues like cultural appropriation, class inequality and bias in America so fascinating. By running a parallel thread of thought about the inequities she has observed in India, Ms Sen raises the question: Indians don’t use the term “race” in their everyday life -- but can they be called, in some sense, racist in their behaviour? Indeed, as she dwells on in the almost institutionalised oppression of lower castes, women and minorities, not to speak of the preference for fair complexions, it is evident that she thinks so. 

This isn’t, however, a particularly original thought. Sociologist Gyanendra Pandey referred to it in his 2013 book A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States. Andre Beteille alluded to it as far back as 1990. Further, Ms Sen’s slightly obsessive self-awareness and existential angst could seem rather “American” to some Indian readers, perhaps tiresomely so. Having said that, the life story of the girl who smiled too much will resonate with many readers. For the world we inhabit has plenty to smile about — and Ms Sen’s aren’t the only cheeks that hurt…