India Today

Losing Race

SHARMILA SEN doesn't define whiteness beyond the material trappings of the cultural elite. She protests too much when she claims that the "smiling member of the model minority can seem uppity in a heartbeat". Is her place in America so insecure?

Privilege is a peculiar possession, writes Sharmila Sen in her migration memoir Not Quite Not White. To those who possess it, privilege is weightless, tasteless, odourless, soundless and colourless. Those who have least access to it are painfully aware of its mass, density, taste odour, texture, sound and colour. Sen's premise is that her family's migration thrust race and minority

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