by Sharmila Sen
But I see you as white. This is a veiled compliment. The speaker intends to say, “We will let you be on our team. For now. There will be conditions attached in fine print. Ignore them at your own peril.” But I see you as white. My husband and children have darker brown complexions. My parents’ English still carries faint traces of their mother tongue. My Sikh father-in-law wears a turban and has never trimmed his beard. My grandmothers wore saris every day. My aunts carefully placed a red vermilion dot on their foreheads each morning and blew on a conch shell to welcome Durga each autumn. My ancestors were barred from entering European clubs in colonial India, jailed by the British for demanding independence, and designated as terrorists by the British Empire. In the United States, Indian men and women were legally barred from naturalization until the 1940s. But I see you as white. Would the same be said of all of them?
I am the kind of Not White that makes human resource managers happy. I blend into whiteness when it is convenient for everyone else in the office. My presence increases diversity when the company is required to present official tallies of minority employees. When we attend conferences, my employers can suggest that I apply for financial aid reserved for minorities in my profession. My Not Whiteness can improve an accountant’s bottom line. I am Not Quite Not White. The kind of Not White who makes inclusion look easy and does not make people uncomfortable with her behavior. That is, until someone reads a newspaper article about unemployment in America, or listens to a political speech about the evils of outsourcing, or tunes into a radio program about Asians crowding American universities, or watches a television show about Indians winning the National Spelling Bee yet again. When this happens, I am just Not White enough to become the scapegoat. I am the immigrant who stole the jobs, the minority who gamed the system to snatch away someone else’s rightful place in college, the brown person who is unnaturally good at spelling unusually difficult English words.
The smiling member of the model minority can seem uppity in a heartbeat. During our interview at the U.S. consulate in Calcutta, I wish they had told me that I must avoid this sin at all costs if I were to be granted a visa. They should have told me to keep my success within limits, my intelligence in check, and my latent uppitiness under control. I would be at my most pleasing as long as I remained the salutatorian, the runner-up, the solid A minus, the magna cum laude, the Not Quite.
When white people simply “forgot” I was Not White, I did not want to smile any longer. I did not want to be the entertainer. I did not want to be the storyteller who spins a yarn as the earth flows somber under an overcast sky. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlow proclaimed that England too was once a place of darkness. I felt very clever when I first detected that line. In a building in Harvard Yard named after a famous American Transcendentalist, I used to teach this very line to my students, pleased with myself for having mastered the literary code of those who once colonized my ancestors. Now, I want that darkness back for myself. I do not wish to accord to white Europeans that which was once used to justify the plunder and conquest of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
I reclaim the heart of Not Whiteness for myself and my children. Race, once a puzzling, ugly, comic, ill-fitting concept, I realize today, was the immigrant. I chose to make it native to myself. Going against the grain of my education, I decided to naturalize the very concept I once historicized with clinical precision. My Indian past was my way of keeping race at arm’s length when I was new to this country. When I became the mother of three children, the future demanded something new of me. The immigrant’s story is often written by the second or third generation in America. The American-born child gives birth to the foreign-born parent. Elsewhere is assimilated into the here. The foreign plot is domesticated into the national mythology. Those of the first generation are often too tired, too afraid, too new to English to write their own story. They are busy being good immigrants. When I stopped smiling like a good immigrant, I risked becoming a bad American, an ungrateful immigrant—an angry brown woman. The smile was my road to becoming American. I did not know I would find anger at the end of the journey.
I did not become American by speaking with the right accent, or by dancing to Prince and Salt-N-Pepa, or by eating my steak medium rare and drinking my bourbon neat. Those acts merely Americanized me. And to be Americanized is precisely not to be American. I did not become American when I passed the naturalization exam, renounced my Indian citizenship, and swore allegiance to the flag in Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall. I became American by becoming Not White.
* * *
• • •
At the age of ten, I was asked by the Architect to write a letter to the man who was sponsoring Ma, Baba, and me for our visas. I was to write him a letter of thanks for his generosity. The adults around me offered many helpful prompts. I should include a little bit of detail about my life in Calcutta. I should tell him which aspects of American life I anticipated most joyously. I should show him that I had dutifully studied the history of Boston—the city where he lived—and knew the names of its famous landmarks. My letter was to be a demonstration of my worthiness as the young recipient of an American stranger’s generosity. Above all, my letter should be written in a neat cursive hand and contain no spelling or grammar errors.
I wrote many drafts of the letter on scrap paper before composing the final fair copy. I had to take out my father’s old dictionary to look up two English words: “emigrate” and “immigrate.”
Today I looked up those words again in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.
Emigrate—to leave one’s place of residence or country to live elsewhere.
Immigrate—to come into a country of which one is not a native for permanent residence.
In order to impress our unseen American benefactor with my knowledge of the English language, I was careful to distinguish between “immigrate” and “emigrate.” I wrote that I eagerly anticipated emigrating from India to the United States. When I had arrived in Boston a few years later, and the rules of grammar dictated a change of prefix, I became an immigrant.
Not many native-born Americans I know have opened a dictionary as a child in order to learn the meaning of the word “emigrant.” America, after all, is the land of immigrants. A few years ago, when my older son asked me of my first memories of this country, I told him about the bacon smell. “Were you happy, Mama?” my boy, then perhaps nine years old, asked me. He was learning about immigration in his school and the homework assignment was to interview an immigrant. An easy assignment for him since his home was filled with them. No, I wasn’t happy, I told him. Suddenly he was on alert.
I noticed that my little interviewer was getting visibly unsettled by the idea that his mother did not experience unmitigated joy when she landed in the country of his birth. In order to soothe my son, I quickly focused on a more upbeat ending. Yes, immigration can be a good news story. I switched to the third person. “Mama made many friends here. She learned to speak like everyone else. She got used to the food. She went to school and got jobs. She began to dream in English. And now she has you and your brother and your sister and your father and she is not lonely anymore. We can all learn to adapt when we move to a new place. And even if we are sad at first, we can eventually be happy. Just like you can be happy if you have to leave this place one day.”
“Whaaaat? I have to be an immigrant one day?” Clearly my happy ending made my interviewer even more unhappy. “Maybe you will have to go find a job in another country,” I replied. “Like where?” asked a scared boy who had been taught that the American immigrant story is heroic and Ellis Island is a cherished landmark.
In the United States, schoolchildren are taught that the American immigrant story has a triumphant ending. The progressive public schools my children attend teach them that we are all immigrants to this land. The uncomfortable question of Native Americans who were already here and Africans who were brought here as slaves
is hushed up momentarily. And it is only one sort of immigration that is celebrated. The kind that brings foreigners to these shores. America is the last and final destination. City on a Hill. Promised Land. It is where everyone wants to come. When they come here, they find happiness, equality of opportunity, and freedom. This is how the school textbooks are written.
Why do we only celebrate immigration as an arrival? Emigration is never really contemplated or made a subject in school. I suppose that is the privilege of rich nations—their children are never taught that one day they too might have to go learn a new language, eat new food, become a foreigner somewhere. Should we only teach our children to welcome strangers among us? Or should we also teach them that one day they too might be strangers in a strange land—pushed around the globe by forces of economics, politics, or nature?
Researchers tell us that temporary migrants outnumber permanent migrants worldwide. People do not simply move from one country to another and stay put. Most migrants are seasonal and keep shuttling between two or more places. Where I live in the United States, we focus mostly on permanent migration, and that too in one direction. This, of course, has to do with the historical reality of this country as well as with its foundational myth. Yet, populations have been on the move—in large numbers or small groups, voluntarily or involuntarily (the difference is remarkably difficult to parse, as human rights lawyers will tell us)—since the beginning of human history.
Perhaps my children will wake up one morning in a city halfway across the world to an unfamiliar smell emanating from a kitchen. They might wake up with great joy for having reached a cherished destination. Or they might wake up with a lump in their throat for they have left behind a familiar world. I want them to know that they—like their ancestors before them—will find success and failure, love and disappointment, and eventually go on to welcome other strangers in their new home. Perhaps my children or their children will become part of a new American diaspora. Perhaps they will carry a little bit of America with them wherever they go. Perhaps they will hide it, fearing to be seen as foreign. Perhaps they will nurture the little Americas they carry within them in the privacy of their homes. Perhaps they will teach their descendants of the home they left behind, even as they find themselves inevitably changed from the cousins who remained in the homeland.
Wherever you must go one day, I told my son who wanted to celebrate his immigrant parents and yet remained fearful of emigration himself, you will always remember how quiet it suddenly gets before a big snowstorm arrives, how the lily of the valley in our front yard always blooms around the first week of May, how maple syrup tastes when you pour it on warm pancakes, how nice it feels to hear the basketball players across our street on a hot summer night, how I told you and your brother and your sister the story of Hutum the owl each night at bedtime, how happy you felt during the car ride to New Hampshire the day we picked up our new puppy, how you must tell your teacher the correct way to pronounce your name at the beginning of each school year, how you were once ashamed to call us Mama and Baba in front of your classmates and insisted on calling us Mom and Dad, and how you outgrew your shame.
We have truly arrived when we are no longer afraid of departure. The emigrant once anticipated America. The new arrivant attempted to assimilate, donning whiteface and a wide smile. The American—with no further need for Americanization—knows that we carry our household gods, our Lares, within ourselves wherever we roam.
* * *
• • •
Did I really see a black man outside the U.S. consulate in Calcutta all those years ago? No, I did not see a black man outside the consulate, because I did not see race. I did not get race until I arrived in the United States. And when I did get race in all its many American incarnations—defined variously and contradictorily through genetics, linguistics, geography, and even, on occasion, through theology—I saw the man outside the consulate anew. Black is a color. Black is a history. Black is a politics. Black is a story. Black is a memory. Black is an emotion. Black is a language. Brown is a color. Brown is a history. Brown is a politics. Brown is a story. Brown is a memory. Brown is an emotion. Brown is a language. And so is white. White is a color. White is a history. White is a politics. White is a story. White is a memory. White is an emotion. White is a language.
Within the heart of Not Whiteness lies the power to name whiteness. By naming whiteness, I do not grant it more centrality or power. I give it shape and local habitation. I make it come down from its high perch of normativity and assume its rightful place among all the other colors. I contain it and domesticate it before it can contain and domesticate me and my children. I refuse to grant it the magic power of invisibility. I make it less free to move about without being stopped and frisked, without passports and visas. By naming whiteness, I do not allow it to lay sole claim to all that we choose to call American.
Once I thought that to be Americanized was to pass as white. Now I am American because I know I am Not White. The knowledge makes me grin.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The goddess of knowledge has a vast domain. Her flowers are enchanted. Miss Solomon and Hriday Singh. Jamuna, Mundi, and Prakash. All my teachers at the Pilot School in Cambridge. Sara Suleri Goodyear, Vera Kutzinski, Noelle Morrissette, Romita Ray, and Joseph Thompson. Homi Bhabha, Eileen Chow, Susan Donnelly, Lynn Festa, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Maya Jasanoff, Robert Orsi, Michael Puett, Sunil Sharma, and Helen Vendler. George Lucas, Sheila Moody, Oliver Munday, Elda Rotor, and Elizabeth Vogt. Gabriella Coniglio and C. Y. Lung. Ruchira Sen and Prabodh Chandra Sen. Chitra Banerji and Shantanu Kumar Banerji. Aparna Sen and Silabhadra Sen. Satwant Singh and Ajit Singh. Annmarie Charles. Rupinder Singh, Ishani Singh, Milan Singh, and Kabir Singh. And Atticus. You are present on each page of this book. In each pressed, pale orange marigold petal.
* James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 14.
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