Not Quite Not White

by Sharmila Sen

  * * *

  • • •

  Many years after my summer of passing had commenced, in a slim paperback novel that I had been assigned to read for a class, I came across this section:

  “It is a difficult thing for a white man to learn what a colored man really thinks; because, generally, with the latter an additional and different light must be brought to bear on what he thinks; and his thoughts are often influenced by considerations so delicate and subtle that it would be impossible for him to confess or explain them to one of the opposite race. This gives to every colored man, in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of dual personality; there is one phase of him which is disclosed only in the freemasonry of his own race. I have often watched with interest and sometimes with amazement even ignorant colored men under cover of broad grins and minstrel antics maintain this dualism in the presence of white men.”*

  These words were written by James Weldon Johnson in his classic novel of passing, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Johnson’s novel was first published anonymously in 1912. Scholars believe that he chose to keep his identity hidden in order to create buzz around the book’s mysterious authorship. Was it a work of fiction or nonfiction? Was it a true revelation of a dark secret or a fanciful tale? Many assumed the novel to be a true autobiography written by an Ex-Colored Man. When first published, the book did not become a bestseller, win prizes, or receive many glowing reviews. It predated the Harlem Renaissance by almost a decade. In 1927, when the literary scene in New York had shifted considerably and works by black authors were fashionable in some circles, the publishing firm of Alfred A. Knopf reissued the novel. The Knopf edition carried James Weldon Johnson’s name as the author of the book. By this time, Johnson was also the executive secretary of the NAACP, the first black man to hold this leadership position within the organization.

  Johnson had written a novel, not a memoir. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a deeply ironic work with a title that turns the theme of passing on its head. The Ex-Colored Man’s race, far from being a secret, is flagrantly revealed in the title itself. The novel is both serious and flip—a tragic story told with comic wit. It holds up to the reader’s gaze the limited story lines available for black male writers in early-twentieth-century America. The story itself, like its unnamed narrator, the Ex-Colored Man, has a dual personality. It teases us by pretending to reveal black secrets to white people. Is it written for a white audience only? Is it asking the reader to imagine what it is like to be a light-skinned black man? Or is it asking the reader—who might not be white—what it is like to be a white American who delights in peeking into black lives? In short, who is made to pass? The Ex-Colored Man or the reader? Who is made to traverse the dangerous fault lines of American civic belonging? The Ex-Colored Man or the reader?

  If I were to go native in America, I had to figure out two things first: Which native was to be emulated? And who was my audience? No performance is complete without an audience. In order to research my role, I had to identify my audience. I had to understand which plotlines were legible to those who would read my body and my actions.

  It was 1984. Ronald Reagan was elected to his second term after defeating Walter Mondale during the presidential election that fall. Though Ma and Baba were not eligible to vote, I eagerly watched my first American presidential elections on our black-and-white Sony television. Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman to be nominated for the position of vice president by a major political party. There was a lot of excitement over her. I understood that in America a woman could do many things that might have been frowned upon in India, but she could not become the head of state. Mrs. Indira Gandhi had been prime minister of India for much of my childhood years. As it came to pass, less than one week before Reagan defeated Mondale in 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in New Delhi.

  Earlier that summer, I had been glued to the television each day, following the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The USSR, East Germany, Iran, Libya, and a number of other countries had boycotted the games. In 1980, the Americans had boycotted the Moscow Olympics. I had read this in the Calcutta newspapers. A Russian scholar from Moscow who lived across the street from my grandparents had given me a commemorative pin from the Olympics. It was one of my most cherished possessions and came with me to Boston. A little golden pin with a cute brown bear—Misha—sporting the Olympic symbol as a belt. Anatoly, the neighbor who gave me the bear pin, also gave me a large pile of Soviet stamps for my stamp collection. I thought he was a very kind and generous man to give me such gifts. A few years later, removed from my native land, I was learning from television and school textbooks that communism was bad and the USSR was an enemy nation. America was where the good guys lived.

  This was the backdrop against which the Ex-Indian Woman would be born.

  * * *

  • • •

  At home when Ma and Baba spoke of Americans, pejoratively or admiringly, they really meant white Americans. No one had to spell it out. Most Indians of my parents’ generation, as well as some who are younger than them, continue to believe that “real Americans” are white Americans. All others are marked as deviations from the normative. American whites were not the only white people we knew. After all, the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British all ruled various parts of India since the sixteenth century. Nonaligned India had strong political, economic, and cultural ties with the Soviet Union as well. We categorized all these white Europeans as sahib in Hindi, or shaheb in Bengali. A white man is a sahib. A white woman is a memsahib. Derived from an Arabic word for “owner” or “master,” sahib did not have anything to do with race at first. It was a term of courtesy. In colonial India, however, sahib became a term used for white Europeans. Gora—literally “white”—is another word used by many Indians to designate white people. It is not a racial slur per se. Nonetheless, I know few Indians who would call a white person gora to his or her face, whereas in contemporary India, white men are addressed as sahib and white women as memsahib regularly. It is true that sahib, often shortened to saab, also continues on as a term of courtesy among Indians.

  After three decades in this country, my parents continue to think that real Americans are white Americans. Everyone else is Not Quite. In those early years, when Ma and Baba spoke of American food, American homes, American customs, American habits, it was implicit that they were not speaking of those Americans who also happened to be black, or Chinese, or Hispanic, or Jewish. Ma and Baba did not quite appreciate the distinction between Catholics and Protestants and, consequently, were not able to tell how one group of white Christians might differ from another, let alone grasp which group was considered dominant. Could Asia, the continent from which we had emigrated, provide a way out? If our skin was too brown for us to pass as white, and if we did not wish to be seen as black, could we become Asian in America?

  As a kid in Calcutta I thought I understood what the word “Asian” meant. I studied the geography of the continent. I knew about its physical features and political borders. My home state of West Bengal was ruled by the Communist Party of India. Consequently, as a young girl, I had studied the lives of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong. I’d memorized the cash crops of the major Asian nations. I knew the length of the Yangtze River. I had learned how the silkworm makes silk. I had stared for hours at images of Mount Fuji on Honshu Island through the lenses of my View-Master. I had once proudly worn my red cherry-festooned Japanese socks even though I knew the nuns would be displeased if they caught me without my regulation navy blue socks. India was part of the continent of Asia. I was born in India. Therefore, I must be Asian.

  Not Quite. In the United States, “Asian” was a code word for Chinese during the early 1980s. There was barely enough room for Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, or Filipinos to be included within this label. The Sinosphere loomed large in the mainstream imagination as the only way of understanding who was Asian. My Asiann
ess was measured by my proximity to Chinese culture by the dominant white culture of the United States. It was a test of Asianness unlike any I had anticipated when I lived in an Asian city facing the Bay of Bengal. India had fought two wars with China during the 1960s. Sino-Indian border conflicts had hardened our attitudes toward the Chinese in India. Despite the prevailing anti-Chinese sentiments that cast a shadow on my parents’ generation, who had lived through the Sino-Indian wars of the 1960s, older intellectuals such as my grandfather also reminded us of great Chinese scholars such as Faxian and Xuanzang who traveled to India during late antiquity. My grandfather even named Baba after a famous seventh-century Indian scholar at Nalanda who tutored the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang. These stories were largely forgotten by most people in India when I was growing up. Yet, occasionally, a granddaughter remembered the stories recounted by her grandfather at dusk.

  Chinese sojourners to India were not limited to Faxian or Xuanzang. The Calcutta Chinatown had a long history of Hakka immigration. Chinese women threaded Ma’s eyebrows in south Calcutta beauty parlors. We devoured chicken sweet corn soup in restaurants owned by Calcutta’s Chinese residents. My own upbringing in a Communist Party–ruled state also gave me daily graphic reminders that “Chairman Mao is my Chairman” and “My name and your name is Vietnam.” Those were the words written in Bengali on the walls of my Dover Lane neighborhood: Mao amader chairman. Amar nam tomar nam vietnam. Nonetheless, few Bengalis thought twice about using words such as “Chinky” to refer to the Chinese. Indian citizens from the northeastern part of the country—those areas bordering Tibet and Myanmar—are derisively referred to as Chinky on the streets of Delhi to this day. For the new Indian immigrant in the United States, being Asian suddenly meant becoming Chinky. The receiving country had its own terms and its own labels. To that we added the prejudices and the politics we had brought—along with those five suitcases and the green carry-on bag—from the sending country.

  Despite being born and raised in an Asian country, becoming Asian in America was neither simple nor always desirable in the 1980s. The CIA World Factbook’s term for the Indian subcontinent—South Asia—had not yet gained currency in the American mainstream. Asia held little significance to most Americans, despite the two wars fought in Korea and Vietnam. Asian American celebrities or public figures were largely unknown to me in the early 1980s. Deng Xiaoping had barely started his experimentation with capitalism in Shenzhen, China’s iconic Special Economic Zone. In the early 1980s, China and India were Asian nations known for their overpopulation, malnutrition, and low standard of living. With the exception of Japan, Asia was neither an economic powerhouse nor allowed a place at the high table of global politics. I had little incentive for claiming Asian American credentials.

  My family is no different from the majority of Indian families who immigrated to the United States after 1965 in at least one aspect—our anti-black bias is strong. When I tried to pass as white, or silently accepted the badge of honorary whiteness, I was trying to proclaim to our neighbors that I was Not Black, that I was Not Hispanic. Every news story we saw on television, every innuendo Ma and Baba picked up around the workplace, every suspicious glance we spied in grocery stores, every gesture I clocked in the schoolyard taught us that blacks and Hispanics occupy the lower rungs of American racial hierarchy. As aspirational immigrants we aimed for a higher rung, desperate to impress the dominant culture with our work ethic, family values, and the antiquity of our culture. Emigration itself is risky enough. Having embraced one kind of risk, the immigrant needs to assess all other risks judiciously. The black figure, etched against the backdrop of white respectability and normalcy, stands for preposterous risks—economic, political, moral—from which the new immigrant, regardless of the exact shade of her skin, tries to inch away. Once you see the American racial hierarchy through the newly arrived migrant’s eyes, you will understand why Toni Morrison once wrote that the road to becoming American is built on the backs of blacks. Many first-generation Indian immigrants in America boast of their low divorce rates and high household incomes; their old gods and their new-construction homes. Beneath these claims is a singular, fearful drumbeat refrain: We are Not Black, we are Not Black, we are Not Black.

  Some older Indian immigrants worry that their child will marry outside caste or religion or linguistic group. Others worry that their child will marry a white person. But the greatest anxiety is that their child will marry someone black—the person being arrested for drug possession on countless television dramas; the person politicians tell us inhabit hellish inner cities and have nothing left to lose; the person who is shot by the police with frightening regularity. Immigrants from developing countries such as India are often afraid of the negative images associated with black America. These images remind them of the daily degradations they hoped to escape through immigration. The white-collar Indian who desires the symbols of American success—the right accent, Audis in the garage, an upscale suburban home, granite countertops, freezers with enough food to last an entire winter, a wine cellar, en suite bathrooms, backyards with barbecues, second homes, and even a foreign au pair—also wants to distance himself from the symbols of American failure. Sometimes it also means steering clear of one’s fellow immigrant who has found less economic success in the promised land. Indian taxi drivers, gas station attendants, waiters, or hot dog vendors become less visible to the first-generation Indian immigrant who drives luxury cars, sends her children to private schools, and summers in Martha’s Vineyard, just as the children of the Calcutta basti disappeared into the background when I held Ma’s hand and walked down Gariahat Road.

  For most of my life I have heard vulgarities such as Chinky, Negro, Red Indian, and even the N word casually used by many educated Indians without any sense of regret. Racist attacks against African students and tourists are a tragic reality witnessed regularly in major Indian cities nowadays. Anti-black bias is present among Indians in the home country as well as in the diaspora. In some cases, such as in the British West Indies, it was a result of social engineering by the European colonial masters as slaves were replaced by coolies on the sugar plantations. In the United States, the anti-black racism that many Indians bring with them from the subcontinent—a mixture of homegrown color bias and Made in Europe racism—is hardened by the prevailing myth of the model minority. These new immigrants, as well as some of their children, envision themselves as the embodiment of neoliberalism’s promise. Judging their professional success to be a well-earned reward for hard work and merit, they remain blind to the historic disadvantages that prevent others from attaining similar success. To the white population the first-generation Indian immigrant wishes to say, “We are the model minority. The doctors who will heal you, the lawyers who will prosecute crime for you, the investment banker who will make you richer, the geek who will invent new technologies for your pleasure. We are the legal immigrants. Please don’t confuse us with illegal ones. We’re the good brown people. Please don’t confuse us with the bad black ones.”

  Not Black. Not Quite Asian. My pale complexion—once of great value in the Indian matrimonial market—gave me an advantage that many other Indians do not have. Ma is darker than I am. My husband, a Punjabi Sikh, is darker than I am. So are my three children. I inherited my complexion from Baba. His accent is distinctly Indian. His name is unmistakably Bengali. Yet, Baba is often mistaken for white on American streets. As a teenager in America, I realized I could pass. And it felt good to disappear into whiteness, to become invisible.

  * * *

  • • •

  The customs of the country, as I learned them, were in actuality the customs of white people I wanted to emulate—those who bought expensive suits from the store where Baba worked, who I saw walking around confidently in Harvard Yard, employers who determined who got a job and who was sponsored for a visa, those who handed out my grades and my parents’ paychecks, the people I saw reading the nightly news on television, the
authorities who wielded power.

  I began to construct an imaginary field guide for Going Native. Here is a small sampling from that old field guide, which I began in the 1980s. The invisible commentaries accumulated over subsequent decades as I tried to wear whiteface.

  Upon Accepting a Gift

  When given a gift always say thank you effusively. Hyperbole is useful—why be pleased when you can be ecstatic, elated, delighted, overjoyed, thrilled? Then open the gift and try it on, taste it, feel it, talk about it rapturously.

  In Calcutta, when given a gift, we barely say a muted word of gratitude and promptly put the gift aside, unopened, feigning little interest in it. It is considered bad manners to do anything else.

  On Thank-You Notes

  Write thank-you notes for gifts received, dinner invitations, and all other acts of kindness. Use very good paper to write these notes and send promptly.

  No one sends thank-you notes in India because the focus on goods received or meals eaten might make us seem greedy. In contrast, a well-crafted note of thanks is the mark of the socially well-groomed in America.

  The Proper Response to Thank You

  When someone says “Thank you,” you must immediately say “You’re welcome.”