Month: January 2019

I frequently recoil at articles about race in the US written by Indians who qualify because of color – hair, skin, and eyes – but little else. Many Indians speak good English, are highly educated (I know it’s a stereotype, but true), wealthy and don’t give a rat’s ass about other “poor immigrants or minorities” here. We, and I include myself here, are delighted we have made ourselves a comfortable nest egg, enjoy “snowboarding and crossword puzzles” (actually I prefer skiing!), and can afford the frequent trips to India where we still feel at home. We have our cake and we delight in eating it. We have a superiority complex regarding other South Asians, our closest brethren. Bangladeshis? They deserve our sympathy, poor things. Pakistanis? Thank God the US has finally recognized they are Al Queda in disguise. Nepalis? Naah, just a small tribe up north. Sri Lankans? I do want to visit their quaint island where my US dollars would be welcome. A friend of mine who lives in Calcutta was at Harvard Business school many years ago. He told me the story about how, during orientation, he proceeded to tell a fellow HBS student, an African American, that “discrimination” in the US was not a big deal, he’d never experienced much beyond skin color and where are you from? curiosity. His fellow student shut him up. Told...

In State College, Pennsylvania, five miles north of the airport, in a stately house on a street that hasn’t quite grown into itself—the trees are like shrubs, which is striking given the wooded expanse one hundred yards away—Jim lives with his wife, Shannon, and three children and one grandchild. The oldest is twenty-one and a problem. The two younger children, nine and eleven, are being homeschooled the “classical” way; they’ve just started learning Latin. At 2:30p.m. when school lets out, they race to the bus stop at the end of the street to find friends to bring home to play. Jim works for a San Francisco-based affiliate of Hewlett Packard and has a 415 number. Jim also has a side gig: buying and repurposing computer parts and reselling them on Amazon. He has just returned from a work trip to New Zealand and is jet-lagged. His wife has been alone with their four children for the past two weeks. If Chanelle, their foster daughter, hadn’t emancipated herself earlier in the year, after placing her own baby up for adoption, it would have been five at home with Shannon, a former schoolteacher with a graduate degree in education, pale skin, and blue eyes. When Shannon is pulled over for speeding, she cries. She is generally let off. *** I meet Jim in Chicago’s O’Hare. He’s standing with a guy named...