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