Insightful, relevant reading for these times.
A former Harvard professor ruminates on race in America from her perspective as a Southeast Asian woman.
Before Sen, the executive editor at large at Harvard University Press, immigrated to the United States in 1982, she had never used race-based labels to identify herself. In her native Calcutta, people identified each other by the languages they spoke or the gods they worshipped. Through a series of four intertwined personal essays, the author traces her evolution from Indian immigrant to resisting “Not White” American. Sen begins in 1970s India, which she recalls as a place where a child’s future success depended on getting into schools that taught English. By knowing a few words of this colonial language, Sen was able to matriculate at a Catholic school where the main divide was between Hindu and Christian Indians. After relocating with her parents to Boston, Sen realized that she and her family—who were neither “chic expats [nor] political dissidents with lofty ideologies”—were in America for the most mundane of reasons: to improve their economic status. Desperate to fit in, the author immediately set about “acquir[ing] a new American accent” by watching shows like General Hospital and Happy Days. During high school, college, and graduate school, Sen became increasingly aware of the American minefield of race. As she “silently accepted the badge of honorary whiteness,” she also learned to expose small parts of her culture in ways that made her seem less like an exotic “other” willing to play into pre-existing Indian stereotypes and more like “a brown woman mimicking a white man pretending to be a brown man.” She eventually channeled her rage at being forced into whiteface performance by calling herself “Not White.” In naming whiteness, she realized that she could challenge both the dominant culture’s “powerful invisibility” and its monopoly on the title “American.” Timely and eloquent, Sen’s book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature that engages with the topic of race from outside the white/black binary.
Insightful, relevant reading for these times.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-313138-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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