Not Quite Not White

by Sharmila Sen

  Goddesses were not the only women allowed a little bit of rage in my adolescent universe. Epic heroines could rage freely as well. Draupadi, the wife of the five Pandava brothers in the Indian epic the Mahabharata, always appealed to me more than the long-suffering Sita in the Ramayana. Sita might have walked through fire to appease her husband Ram’s insecurity, but Draupadi speaks up when her husband stupidly loses a game of dice and makes her the property of his cousins. She does not accept her degradation silently. She leaves her hair undone and announces that she will tie it up only after she has washed it in the blood of her tormentor. Draupadi, as every little girl who pays attention to the Mahabharata knows, holds on to a grudge, refuses to take the high road of forgiveness, and exacts her revenge. When the great war is over in the Mahabharata, Draupadi finally gets to wash her hair in her enemy’s blood. She was no Angel in the House.

  Right around the time I started reading the Mahabharata in various Bengali editions prepared for teenagers, I also discovered Louisa May Alcott’s nineteenth-century classic Little Women, written for children of a different country, of a different era. The Mahabharata offered in print a world with which I was already acquainted. When my mother fed me lunch, when my aunt combed the tangles out of my wet hair, when my grandmother rubbed Jabakusum hair oil into my scalp, they told me stories from the Mahabharata to distract, educate, and entertain. If there was a time in my life when I did not know that Bhima defeats Duryodhona or that Karna is Kunti’s first-born son, I do not recall that time. American children’s books, in contrast, transported me to an unknown terrain through the printed page. When I read the Indian epics, printed words gave shape to emotions, smells, and sights already familiar. When I read American or British books, the words on the page made the unfamiliar recognizable. As a result, when I immigrated to Jo’s New England later in my life, I saw the landscape, tasted the food, and felt the chill on my skin first through Alcott’s words. As Prospero teaches Caliban to name the sun and the moon in The Tempest, Alcott gave me the first words to name things in my new home. The dove-colored book Marmee gave Beth revealed a New England shade that no Pantone color will ever capture.

  Jo March’s temper fascinated me. Her mother, Marmee, was no stranger to anger herself. Mr. March and Professor Bhaer trained their wives to control that temper. As much as I loved reading about Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, and Laurie, I always disliked the pedantic, priggish side of the novel.

  When I first read Louisa May Alcott’s stories, I had only the vaguest sense of their context. Unburdened by knowledge of New England, the American Civil War, or nineteenth-century American society, my adolescent imagination relocated the March family to the same magical place outside of time where the Pandavas and the Kauravas, or Ram and Sita, or Ali Baba and Sinbad resided. In India, I had read Little Women as an allegory—much like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the book the girls receive as a Christmas gift from their mother at the beginning of the story. When the specific is unknown to us, most of us are tempted to reach for the general. Novels about “foreign lands” are often read as full-blown national allegories by literary critics. The four girls, their parents, their home, their travails were a fuzzy stand-in for all of America.

  Once I understood why the Civil War was being fought, I came to see that the March family represented only one part of America—white, northeastern, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. What is more, I started to perceive that the book was written from a very specific perspective as well. These little women no more represented all girls in the United States of that era than the narrator represented all possible narrative voices. The first part of the novel we now call Little Women was published in the United States in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, and five years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared “all persons held as slaves” to be “forever free.” As a young girl living in independent India, I was unaware that the America in which the March sisters lived withheld freedom and full citizenship from so many of its inhabitants because of their race. Today, I try to imagine an all-black-cast production of Little Women. How would a black Jo fare in the United States during the 1860s? Or a Hispanic Jo? Or an Indian Jo? Or a Chinese Jo? How would Jo write her story if she was not white? How would she write her story if she was one of the Hummels, a first-generation immigrant?

  * * *

  • • •

  In 1982, a little over half a million legal immigrants entered the United States. The numbers are surely much greater if we include the undocumented in this rough tally. Some stayed and flourished. Some left after a while. Others fared poorly and were disappointed. Many of their descendants are American citizens now. I arrived in the United States during the second week of August in 1982. I was nearly twelve and accompanied by my parents when we landed in Boston’s Logan International Airport. Before arriving in Boston, I had never left Asia, or even traveled beyond the borders of India. That year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service provided us aliens with many forms, a Social Security number, and occasionally a Resident Alien card. I received a bonus gift from the INS that year. I got race.

  The uniquely American concept of race that I inherited upon arrival was shaped by two symmetrical genres of early American writing—the captivity narrative and the slave narrative. Both genres racialize religion and religionize race. In the last couple of decades another type of race narrative has appeared on the horizon—the clash of civilizations theory. This theory has made explicit the implicit intertwining of race and religion in the West since the Protestant Reformation. If you listen closely to American race talk today, you will hear the echoes of old slave narratives and captivity narratives; and you will also discern shades of the idea that Islam and Christianity, much like the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire, are locked in perpetual enmity.

  The election of the forty-fourth president of the United States led some to declare that race was a place best glimpsed through the rearview mirror. The election of our forty-fifth president cautions us that the postracial world, should we wish to enter it, remains a mirage shimmering on the horizon, redlined and gerrymandered, walled and banned. Even though race is largely understood as a biological fiction by scientists, even though many American writers have questioned the fact of whiteness, racism is as much a social reality for my generation as I suspect it will continue to be for my children’s generation.

  I am a Hindu, with no cross or crescent, no church or mosque, no covenant with one true god, no commitment to the doctrine of sola scriptura. There is no exact equivalent for “religion” or “race” in my mother tongue. Multiple languages and writing systems—Bengali, Hindi, English—have formed the ideas, including that of race and religion, that I carry within me. What happens when race is not inherited at birth, but acquired, even chosen, later in life? What happens when you get race after you arrive as an immigrant to the United States? Throughout this book I will use the odd formulation of getting race because I want to show you how I once perceived race as an alien object, a thing outside myself, a disease. I got race the way people get chicken pox. I also got race as one gets a pair of shoes or a cell phone. It was something new, something to be tried on for size, something to be used to communicate with others. In another register, I finally got race, in the idiomatic American sense of fully comprehending something. You get what I’m saying? Yeah, I get you.

  While most native-born American authors write about race—angrily, passionately, elegiacally, tersely—as something they did not really choose but had forced upon them since birth, I will write about race as something once alien to my universe and later naturalized. Looking back to 1982, I now realize that race was the immigrant and I was the homeland where it came to rest. Instead of rejecting it as I once did—most of my Indian intellectual friends would consider it a silly American affectation to identify as a “person of color” and prefer instead to think in terms of social class, of majority and minority religions, of imperialists and s
ubalterns—I eventually chose to keep race, despite its unlovely history, its elusive and fictional nature. It is not the accent I carefully picked up from watching television after school, or the way I learned to talk about books at Ivy League universities, or the way I copied the food and drink habits of those around me, or even the way I learned to make the right mistakes in English (because only ESL speakers use perfectly starched and ironed English), but getting race that made me fully American.

  In order to tell this story, I must steal some ire from the gods and epic heroes. Let Draupadi hold her grudge as the war of Kurukshetra rages. Let Durga slay the demon Mahishasura this autumn and every autumn to come. Let Kali rage, unchecked by Shiva. In their cozy American parlors, let Marmee and Jo not be hushed by Mr. March and Professor Bhaer. In Bloomsbury, London, let the Angel in the House breathe her last once more. Let Achilles rage outside the walls of Troy so a new story may be plotted.

  This book is an immigrant’s pagan confession, an assimilationist’s tongue-in-cheek DIY manual for whiteface performance, and the story of an American’s long journey into the heart of Not Whiteness.

  Chapter One

  Enter the Dragon

  I had never seen a black man in person until I was twelve years old. If I search my memory hard enough, I can see a few faded newspaper photographs of West Indian cricketers in the Statesman. I can see dark-skinned Africans within the panels of my beloved Phantom comics. There are faint recollections of black James Bond villains in Live and Let Die. If I squint even more, I can remember the evening when we crowded into our neighbor’s drawing room, watching Pelé on a black-and-white television set, the first procured in our middle-class neighborhood. The first flesh-and-blood black man I saw was standing outside the entrance to the U.S. consulate in Calcutta, which is located on a street named after Ho Chi Minh. At the entrance to the consulate where Ma, Baba, and I had gone for our visa interviews, I saw two men in spotless uniforms. One was the whitest, blondest man I had ever seen in real life; the other was the darkest black.

  The consulate smelled like America in my childish imagination. The air-conditioned halls, the modern plastic and metal furniture, a water cooler from which I eagerly poured myself some water even though I was not thirsty. I breathed in the scent of wealth in there. It felt like newness on my skin. Everything was hushed, ordered, brightly lit. Not like my own loud, bustling city. Even the local Indian staff seemed to behave as if they were actually living in America.

  I stood at the entrance of the U.S. consulate in Calcutta in 1982. In 1965, American immigration laws had been rewritten to allow for a greater number of non-Europeans to enter the country. Not only were Indians and other Asians considered unwanted newcomers before 1965, even naturalization—the process by which a foreign-born immigrant becomes a U.S. citizen—was disallowed for most who were not white until the 1950s. I knew little of this history when I entered the consulate with my parents. I did not even know I had something called race. Race as a category had not been part of the Indian census since 1951. I was about to move to a nation where nearly every official form had a section in which I would be offered an array of racial categories and expected to pick one.

  In 1982, as it happens, it was not clear which race should be affixed to my person. Since the number of Indian immigrants was fairly insignificant in the United States until the latter part of the twentieth century, the census barely took notice of us. At the time of the first U.S. census in 1790, there were essentially three races acknowledged by the government—white, black, and Indian. My kind of Indians, the ones from the subcontinent, however, fell into none of these categories. No matter how mysterious our race, we were not considered white during most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the American courts. In 1970, the U.S. Census Bureau declared people from India to be legally white. A decade later, in 1980, we were officially reclassified as Asian by the government, at the insistence of Indian immigrant groups who believed that the new classification would afford us greater affirmative action benefits. Yet, what was to be done with the decision to make Indians white only a decade earlier? What would happen to those white Indians? “Self-reporting” was the Solomonic solution to this problem. In order to satisfy the demands of the diverse Indian community, after nearly a century of shuffling people from the Indian subcontinent from one racial category to another, the U.S. census had finally thrown up its hands in despair and asked us to “self-report” our race. In the 1990 U.S. census, of the native-born population with origins in the Indian subcontinent, nearly a quarter reported themselves to be white, a tiny minority (5 percent) reported themselves to be black, and the vast majority chose to report their race using terms that pertain to South Asia.

  Such an astounding array of choices was not always available to people from India who found themselves in the United States a century ago. If Ma, Baba, and I could have embarked on a time machine and arrived in the country eight decades earlier, we would have found ourselves in a different situation. If I had immigrated in 1909, I would have been labeled “probably not white,” but a year later—when the U.S. courts decided to change their opinion on the matter—I would have been “white.” If I was Sadar Bhagwab Singh in 1917, or Akhay Kumar Mozumdar in 1919, or Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923, I would have been “not white.” Naturalization in the United States was reserved mostly for whites between 1790 and the middle of the twentieth century. Non-white immigrants could not become naturalized and partake of the rights reserved for U.S. citizens. Indians were not allowed to become naturalized citizens until the 1940s. They could, however, toil in American factories and fields, offices and streets. So Indian men such as Singh, Mozumdar, and Thind kept trying in vain to prove they were white in order to become naturalized citizens. But what actually made a person “white”? Could you be both “Caucasian” and “non-white”? As Singh, Mozumdar, and Thind all found out, yes, you could be Caucasian and also Not White. The courts ruled repeatedly in those early decades of the twentieth century that naturalization was for “whites” only, and some “Caucasians” were not truly “white” enough to qualify.

  That the two words—Caucasian and white—are used interchangeably today would come as a bittersweet surprise to all who were caught in the deep chasm between those labels a century ago. Yet, that is exactly the chasm in which people from the Indian subcontinent, an area that is second only to Africa in its genetic and linguistic diversity, were placed by the U.S. courts. In those early years of the twentieth century, miscegenation laws could have prevented me from marrying a white American in states such as South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. The former governor of South Carolina and the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, identifies herself as “white” on her voter registration card. Of course, according to the laws of this country, Haley can legally self-report her race any way she pleases. The former governor of South Carolina was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, daughter of Punjabi Sikh immigrants from India, and the racial category she chooses for herself tells a complex story of the state where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, and where even today West African–inflected Gullah culture (brought by black slaves) does not easily mix with white French Huguenot culture (brought by white slave owners).

  A hundred years ago Indians immigrated to the United States in very small numbers. They were mostly agricultural workers who traversed the networks of the British Empire, sailors who stayed behind in American ports, or Hindu holy men who were invited to lecture in cities such as New York and Chicago. The Immigration Act of 1917 placed India squarely within the Asiatic Barred Zone, an area from which immigrants were not allowed to legally enter the United States. This zone would not be legally unbarred until 1946.

  Contemporary racial labels used in everyday American parlance are an odd amalgamation of the geographic (Asian), the linguistic (Hispanic), and the pseudo-biological (black, white). The rise of Islamophobia threatens to racialize Islam and conflates race with religi
on. This, however, is not a new phenomenon in American history. Early-twentieth-century America was still in the old habit of seeing Jews as “Hebrews”—as much a racial label as a religious one. It also happened that many Jews themselves preferred this system—until the murderous actions of the Nazis in Europe—because Judaism cannot be folded neatly into the box we call “religion” today, a box whose dimensions are largely of Protestant specifications. Similarly, “Hindoo” was as much a racial label as a religion in early-twentieth-century America. Today what is considered my religious background might have been seen as my racial identity had I arrived in America at the beginning of the last century.