27. The times were never normal
so let's not go back to them
I’ve experienced overt racism exactly three times in my life. Two were to make fun of the way it was presumed I talk. And the other one is a story I like to tell at parties. That’s how damaged I’ve been by it.
I don’t need one hand to count the number of times my race has been an issue for me, positively or negatively. My mum experienced more racism in a single day as a half-Chinese girl in Scotland than I’ve experienced in my entire life.
Growing up in Canada I assumed racism was a thing that mainly happened with our neighbours to the South. Then I took part in a knowledge exchange between Chinese students and the Squamish First Nations. I learned firsthand about the impact of Canada’s “founding” on the country’s first peoples, their cultural and physical genocide at the hands of the church, the centuries of family separations, rape, and murder in the name of God and progress.
Systemic racism means watching your language disappear when its last speaker passes away. It means that within living memory it was once entirely legal to kill members of your tribe. It’s an eradication of personhood at a level so profound it reaches into the future and destroys unborn generations.
Chinese people started arriving in Canada in significant numbers during the gold rush and building of the railroad. We were blown up in mines as a dynamite delivery system, charged a head tax to enter the country (the only ethnic group to pay one), and, between 1923 and 1947, effectively banned from immigrating at all.
A Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration declared, in 1902, that Asians were "unfit for full citizenship ... obnoxious to a free community and dangerous to the state”.
If you hate this country so much why don’t you leave?
But we didn’t leave. We opened businesses and, when we were finally allowed to, bought property and established homes. Our children, driven by the immigrant need to prove themselves, took up the piano and violin, became doctors and engineers and lawyers. Our parents wore hockey jerseys during the playoffs and adopted names like Tim and Maggie and Susan.
We were the model minority.
So what happened? How did we go from being “obnoxious to a free community” to preferred citizens?
The simple answer is, Chinese people were treated better when it was economically and politically expedient to do so. The gradual lessening of racial policies allowed us to believe we were succeeding on our own terms. That we were just better at playing the game.
It was boiling the frog in reverse. They gradually dropped the water temperature and we thought we’d made a liveable pond on our own.
We never experienced the kind of sustained and brutal racism black people have throughout history, and we failed to see its terrible echo in the treatment of our First Nations. So we considered ourselves inherently superior.
To us, First Nations people were lazy alcoholics. Black people were criminals and thugs. These ignorant declarations fell off our lips so casually we barely bothered to open our mouths.
We did not see ourselves in their treatment because to do so would mean we were not special, that we were not crowned by the glory of our hard work and dedication. To recognise our own otherness would mean facing up to why that otherness was eventually tolerated when for so many it was hunted down to extinction.
We were just the ones they forgot to hate.
I have the privilege of not presenting as any of the things I am. A privilege that I’ve subconsciously fostered my whole life. To paraphrase a housemate, people probably don’t relate to me as a queer ungendered racially neutral person because I look like a heterosexual cisgendered Eurasian.
The truth is, no one cares enough to oppress me because my life follows the prescribed narrative. My queerness has always been in private. My mental health struggles in the shelter of my room. And my race, when it’s mattered, almost exclusively to be told I don’t seem Chinese.
I think about how different my life would have been if I’d had to constantly justify my right to exist. Where would I have found the strength? And the time to do any of the other things I’ve done?
I don’t know about the entire world, but I know for me there is no returning to normal. Normal was and continues to be bullshit. I’m sorry it took yet another police killing to make me feel this way.
You can’t care about everything. You can’t do everything. But systemic racism–oppression at an institutional and government level–is a fucking cancer. Black Lives Matter is not a controversial statement. Ending systemic racism matters more than all the other things we’re told matter. The longer it goes on the worse everything gets.
Starting this year I’ll be giving 5% of my annual earnings to organisations dedicated to fighting racial inequality. This was belatedly inspired by my friend Luke’s discussion of his own giving. It is the least I can do. And I’ll continue to look for ways to do more.
2020 has been terrible. Wouldn’t it be just like us if it was also an inflection point for things to get better?
Two additional notes:
On 4 June 2020, Chantel Moore, a 26-year-old woman from Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation in British Columbia, was shot dead by the officer who came to her home to conduct a “wellness check”. As reported by CBC.
The Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation have asked that no images of her be shown, so I won’t link to any news sites which have all spectacularly failed to respect this request.
If the juxtaposition of a “wellness check” ending in someone being shot to death doesn’t destroy your brain, consider why a police officer was even tasked with doing this in the first place. We fund the police. We don’t fund social services.
Police funding gets you elected. Government policy decisions are literally killing people for votes.
A quick test from Jane Elliot, the teacher behind the blue eyes/brown eyes discrimination lesson (via kottke.org):
I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society in general treats our black citizens — if you as a white person would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand.
[Nobody stands.]
You didn’t understand the directions. If you white folks want to be treated the way blacks are in this society, stand. Nobody’s standing here. That says very plainly that you know what’s happening, you know you don’t want it for you. I want to know why you’re so willing to accept it or to allow it to happen for others.