Review | Indian migrant’s searing appraisal of race in the United States is manifesto for the next non-white generation

Not Quite Not White
by Sharmila Sen
Penguin Books

The first time Sharmila Sen saw an African-American was in 1982, outside the United States consulate in the Indian city of Kolkata, on a street named after Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh.

The man was a US marine guarding the consulate and Sen, aged 12, was there for an interview ahead of emigrating to America. “I saw two men in spotless uniforms,” she writes in her memoir, Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America. “One was the whitest, blondest man I had ever seen in real life; the other was the darkest black.”

White, writes Sen, is always the colour against which black people are seen. In this way non-white people are rendered hyper-visible while white folks maintain a “magic cloak of invisibility” that needs “no racial adjective, no additional colour signifier”.

But there is, Sen adds, another category for perceiving people who have dark or relatively lighter skin: “not white”. That’s how Sen, a Harvard University graduate with a PhD in English literature from Yale, identifies herself, although she is fair enough to pass for white.

Focusing on the word “white” forces the idea of whiteness out into the open, depriving it of its neutrality and making it “an other” – just like blacks and other minorities. “Naming the norm,” as Sen puts it, “robs it of its magic.”