Not Quite Not White Read online

  I stood in a corner of our kitchen—the same one where we found a white lace curtain and a half-empty container of Brigham’s strawberry ice cream—and watched Ma bring a pot of milk to boil. She carefully cut some limes into halves. When the milk was bubbling, she reduced the heat, then squeezed the lime juice into the pot. The milk curdled and the entire kitchen was filled with the aroma of citrus and dairy. Then Ma poured the curdled milk into another pot, straining the liquid through a square of thin muslin. The solids collected in the muslin, and Ma, with an experienced flick of her wrist, gathered up the cloth into a small pouch, squeezing the contents. The remaining liquid squirted into the pot. Ma weighed the muslin pouch down with a heavy plate. The brown-haired man was observing her every move with great attention, asking detailed questions. In Bengali we called this type of cottage cheese chhana. Since Ma’s colleague only knew it from Indian restaurants, he called it paneer.

  After a few minutes had passed, Ma unwrapped the muslin and a small disk of fresh white paneer was revealed from the inner folds of the cloth. She cut him a piece. He ate it deliberately, relishing each bite. The look on his face puzzled us. Today, I can decipher that look. Richard Burton must have had it when sharing a meal with the faithful in Mecca. Wilfred Thesiger too, when breaking bread with the Bedu in the Rubʿ al-Khali. We wear it when we take a wrong turn in a foreign city and find ourselves in a small alley with a little nameless café that has only four tables. We have it when we sit down at one of those four tables, the others being occupied by natives who speak in a language we do not understand, and point to whatever the others are eating. It is the look we have when we recall this meal in a nameless café in a foreign city and remark how very good it was to discover it before the tourists destroyed it.

  Ma wrapped up the remaining paneer and handed it to her colleague to take home. For months afterward we continued to laugh at the absurdity of that afternoon. In Calcutta, making paneer was as straightforward for Ma as making toast. In Cambridge, a white man had followed her home, sat in our kitchen, and observed her preparing it with the same gaze of admiration one sees around a circus performer. Ma knew it was all a bit of theater. The role was scripted by someone else, the scene was directed by someone else, and the audience was white. We knew that this theater was a trap.

  If Ma cooked as she did in Calcutta every day, if she made paneer every day, then we would remain authentic. That kind of authenticity is mute and keeps you imprisoned in a small kitchen in an attic apartment. It requires the seal of approval from the brown-haired white man. He speaks as our proxy. If we cling to that authenticity for too long, others would come to accuse us of not assimilating. On the other hand, if we cooked from recipes found on a Campbell’s can and on the back of a Bisquick box, then we would no longer be the real deal. We would be mongrels, hybrids, wannabes, Not Quites. As immigrants we were in a rush to fit in with the new country to the best of our ability. We did not wish to stand out, call attention to ourselves. The natives of the new country, especially the white ones, were rushing all over the world meanwhile, searching for the most authentic sashimi, for the truest sole meunière, for the most virginal of olive oils. Which natives were we supposed to emulate? Anti-black bias compelled us to differentiate ourselves from Americans of darker hues. Anti-Chinese bias made us hesitate to enter the big tent of Asian America. And in our attempt to go native, we turned a blind eye to other natives—the other Indians—who had been brutally pushed aside as part of the conquest of the wilderness.

  Once upon a time, a type of American story, written usually by white settlers, circulated widely in the colonies. It was called the captivity narrative—white European accounts of being held captive by the natives of the New World, the Indians. The most well-known of all American captivity narratives, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, was printed in 1682 by Samuel Green in Cambridge, Massachusetts, exactly three hundred years before Ma, Baba, and I arrived in the same city from India. Mary, as it happens, was a first-generation immigrant herself, landing in Salem from England sometime around her thirteenth year. The American captivity narrative is an inversion of the slave narrative. The author, usually a white Christian captured by Native Americans, offers a tell-all story of redemption and survival behind enemy lines. Slave narratives are also stories of captivity, with the important distinction that the captors themselves are Christians. The slave narrative works by appealing to the (white) audience’s sympathy for a person who can adopt superior Christian morals, even if her skin retains a darker hue. The captivity narrative works by appealing to the (white) audience’s sympathy for a person who bravely retains her superior Christian morals, despite being forced to live in a society of savages with darker skin. For one group, slavery is the smithy of the soul where the uncreated conscience of a race is forged. For another group, captivity is the smithy of the soul where the preexisting conscience of a race is tested.

  Going Native and becoming an Ex-Indian Woman in my quest for acquiring social privilege led me to scavenge for all manner of fragments so I could piece together what transpired in America during those intervening three centuries that separated the two immigrant girls—Mary and myself.

  * * *

  • • •

  Privilege is a peculiar possession. To those who possess it, privilege is weightless, tasteless, odorless, soundless, and colorless. Those who have the least access to it are painfully aware of its mass, density, taste, odor, texture, sound, and color. When I first came to the United States and suddenly became a minority, I felt the weight of a peculiar kind of visibility. Once I had worn the mantle of privilege lightly on my shoulders. Now I could not shake my awareness of the constant expenditure of energy required in everyday life when social privilege is taken away. Frantz Fanon, a twentieth-century black intellectual famous for his critique of colonialism, wrote that one of the long-lasting legacies of European empires was third-person consciousness. In his native Martinique, as well as in Europe and North Africa, Fanon argued, the black man always saw himself through the eyes of the white man. The black man always perceives himself in the third person. “Look, a Negro!” That is what a white child says to his mother while pointing to Fanon. “Look, a Negro!” That is what Fanon and countless other black people, enslaved and colonized, say to themselves. They become visible to themselves only as a figure one sees in a distorted mirror. They cannot look out and see the world without always looking at themselves first as that reflection in the mirror.

  To always think of oneself in the third person—she, he, it, they—is to lose the first person—I, me, we, us. This is the condition of being hypervisible. The hoodie, the beard, the turban, the headscarf, the burka, the burkini, and the bindi all set off alarms when we are scanned by the laser beams of surveillance. In the worst of circumstances, hypervisibility makes neutral physical markers—the color of our skin, the shape of our eyes, how we wear our hair, how we dress—glow with radioactivity. In the best of circumstances, hypervisibility sets the minority apart from the majority, the marginal apart from the normative, just enough so that bridging the gap incurs further expenditure of energy. Some people tire of these constant expenditures. They tire of the little glosses, the translations, the analogies, the spelling and pronunciation guides required for unusual names, the explanations that must accompany certain kinds of dress or hair, the nonverbal compensatory assurances that must be provided when a foreign sentence slips out. Hypervisibility is not celebrity or fame. The hypervisible person of color, following Fanon’s logic, is nothing like a movie star with millions of followers on social media. Imagine instead a world in which you have no words of your own to understand yourself. Imagine instead a world in which every word and every concept you would apply to yourself has been created by people who see you as inferior, as threatening, as other. Third-person consciousness makes me see myself only as others see me. I become foreign to myself.

  I wanted none of it. I wanted to see a
nd not bear the burden of being seen at all times. I did not want to stand out, marked as different. I wanted a little bit of the life I once had in Calcutta, where no one needed me to spell my name or ask me where I really came from. I wanted to blend in. The great current of American assimilationist ideals was flowing in the same direction. Immigrants are supposed to abandon themselves to the energetic whirl of American culture. Those who do not embrace their host country, who do not learn the language, adopt the values, or fly the flag, were considered as problematic thirty years ago as they are today. Failure to assimilate can lead to accusations of ingratitude, incompetence, or, worse, infidelity to the host nation. I learned to modulate my voice. I checked my clothes so that I did not leave the house smelling of cardamom, cloves, cumin, garlic, or ginger. I learned what to drink, eat, wear, and read as part of my DIY whiteface.

  At university I learned more tricks for manipulating language. Tricks that I could have never imagined when the best I could do with English was to identify a banana and name its color. I learned how to turn a noun into a verb. How to throw in a French phrase here. How to add a German word there. How to embellish a sentence with some Latin. Never would I add any Bengali or Hindi words to my English. Such things are celebrated within the fictional universe of Booker Prize–winning novels, but not in an American office or classroom. In the comforting privacy of countless student apartments, coffeehouses, and bars of New Haven I spoke in Hindi and Bengali to fellow Yalies who came from the same part of the world as me. To the very few black students I knew in my PhD program I could speak freely about our shared but distinct conditions of Not Whiteness. I asked these friends why my cheeks hurt from smiling. Everywhere else I tried to fade into the dominant culture of the campus. I wore whiteface.

  Did I become white? Was I trying to be white? That was neither possible nor desired. I was an Ex-Indian Woman who acted white. I was never admitted into the freemasonry of the white race.

  * * *

  • • •

  Acting white in certain ways, and achieving the financial success associated with white professionals, meets with resounding approval in Indian immigrant homes. One can go only so far, however, and then it is time to apply the brakes. Indians draw a distinction between light-skinned people like me and actual white people. An Indian woman whose complexion is pale enough to make her look like a “foreigner” back in the home country might be highly prized by grandmothers looking to arrange a marriage. Nevertheless, she must only look like a white foreigner, not actually be one. Religion, caste, ethnolinguistic groups still carry significant weight in the subcontinent, where many families look unfavorably upon interracial unions.

  I was an Ex-Indian Woman who was supposed to act white without actually becoming white. Perversely, this arrangement suited America’s dominant culture as well. After all, imitation is the best form of flattery. By acting white, I was flattering the dominant culture. And by remaining Not Quite White I posed no threat to white elites. I would forever be the light-skinned foreigner at the table. The one who appreciates all the good things about Western civilization—Doric columns, Shakespeare, democracy, good wine, high-quality cheese, essays in the New York Review of Books. And I would also remain a member of a race who did not invent any of these things.

  After so many decades, I had landed right back where Thomas Babington Macaulay’s plan started in 1835. The goal of English-medium education in India, Lord Macaulay had said, should be to create a class of Indians who would be interpreters between whites and natives. This creature would have English tastes and values, but Indian blood. Values and tastes, our colonial masters once believed, were changeable. Superior, white, Western tastes could be taught to inferior races. Blood, however, was unchangeable. In truth, neither bloodlines nor culture could be kept pure. Macaulay chose to ignore those people who were both English and Indian by blood. Instead, he focused on a different sort of mixing that would produce the interpreter class. The children of white men who went native—Miss Solomon, Merle Oberon, and others like them—were not the intended outcome of colonial rule. My ability to appreciate the proportions of Greek architecture, to relish the boldness of a Joyce novel, to think according to rules fixed in a continent far from my place of birth—these were all intended outcomes. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that the Ex-Indian Woman was all the British Empire intended. The seeds were planted centuries ago. The flowering occurred in the New World.

  When I was in New Haven, whiteface meant distancing myself from my Indianness while never being fully untethered from it. Whiteface meant being Not Quite White, Not Quite Indian, Not Quite Black, Not Quite Asian. It pleased the Indian immigrants with aspirations of making it and leaving behind a world that stank of curry. It pleased middle-class whites who glimpsed in my newfound tastes and habits a buttressing of their many convictions: Ben Jonson got it right when he said Shakespeare was for all time. John Winthrop could not have said it better when he preached that we are as a City upon a Hill and the eyes of all people are upon us. Manifest Destiny is the patrimony of all U.S. citizens.

  I was happy to please so many different kinds of people. Still, my cheeks hurt from smiling.

  * * *

  • • •

  My adventures in Going Native did not end there. There were further removes to be completed. The brown-haired man who came to watch Ma squeeze lime juice into boiling milk had already shown us the path. Ma was not the only one who had something to teach that afternoon when she made paneer. The brown-haired man had something to teach us as well. He taught us that loving lots of other exotic cultures is part of advanced DIY whiteface curriculum. In the beginner stage, people like me only know how to navigate between two poles—white and non-white. Understanding that there are diversities within each of these categories, and that they are available for us to breezily celebrate, consume, own, and master, is the real key to acting as a privileged white American.

  Mastering the English language, learning how to hold the fork with my left hand and the knife with my right hand, or drinking red wine from the correct glass was the first remove. If I truly wanted to act like the white customer who purchased suits from the store in Harvard Square where Baba worked during the 1980s, I had to learn how to hold chopsticks properly. What good is my knowledge of wines if I do not know how to order sake during a business dinner in a high-end Japanese restaurant in New York? What good is the ability to correctly identify the salad fork if I fumble with chopsticks during an important client meeting in London’s Hakkasan? Catching the allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost during a graduate school reception in New Haven might earn me a faint nod of approval from a professor. If I could respond with a carelessly tossed-off line from the great Portuguese epic The Lusiads, then I would make an even more favorable impression on the same faculty member.

  On Ivy League campuses, I encountered certain whites who held steadfastly to the idea that the entire world was waiting to be read, eaten, seen, photographed, tagged, analyzed, and known by them. Nothing in their lives contradicted this conviction. Often they identified as political liberals, forward-looking, open-minded, tolerant people. They broke publicly with those whites who had once believed that the Orient was inscrutable and Africa was a dark continent. They studied languages, traveled extensively, took pride in their adventurous palates, and decorated their homes with souvenirs scoured from bazaars and souks and tiendas spotted in the farthest corners of the world. Their bookshelves sagged under the weight of books printed in many languages, bearing the colophons of publishers from all over the world. No culture or people was unknowable to these people. They were experts on all manner of subjects, from the plight of the Rohingya refugees in Myanmar to the role of Kurds in Turkish national politics. They could read the inscriptions found on Shang dynasty oracle bones as easily as they could explain the Brazilian political economy. They could speak knowledgeably about ancient Javanese literature and the poetry of Pablo Neruda. The newly arrived
immigrant, meanwhile, could only move between two places—sending country and receiving country, my alpha and my omega. In graduate school, none of what I knew during the first twelve years of my life in Calcutta counted as knowledge. Trying to get ahead by increasing my knowledge of the West was like trying to earn a living by gambling in a casino. The house always won.

  Slyly, I shifted my focus from the West to the Rest: I began to learn about Africa, South America, the Caribbean, West and East Asia. I enrolled in classes where I read books written by men and women from Cuba, Barbados, Guyana, Martinique, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Egypt. I studied the art, architecture, cinema, history, politics, and languages of Ottoman Turkey, French Africa, and the British Caribbean. In these classes the students could be divided into two categories: One group could trace some part of their ancestry to the region and the other group was white. Minorities were free to pursue their “heritage”—a prefab house designed according to the prevailing wisdom of the dominant culture. Minorities were also free to study the West. Whites, on the other hand, could study anything they wished. The confusion always arose when one deviated from the color-coded pathways designed for us. The Indian woman who enrolled in a Francophone Caribbean literature seminar, or the Chinese man who wanted to learn Egyptian Arabic, or the Jamaican woman who set out to specialize in ancient Chinese history—we confused the system. In liberal arts schools, a certain amount of dilettantish range was encouraged. When it came time to hunker down and choose a major, to stake out one’s future professional turf, the old formula still held true—whites could roam freely all over the world, while non-whites had limited access. Non-whites could focus on the West and try to make their mark in it (and many did so exceedingly well) or they could inhabit those parts of the world where the natives most resembled them in race, religion, or language.