Dear White People
I’ve grown up in largely white neighbourhoods for most of my life. It has taken me 25 years to finally articulate the toll this has taken.
As an East Asian woman who immigrated at a young age, who speaks English without an accent, I’ve had an easier time assimilating than many. Throughout my childhood, fitting in was all I wanted, which makes perfect sense because that’s how you get rewarded in North American culture. That’s how you avoid probing questions, teasing, or worse. That’s how you feel respected and seen. Later, I would also realize that’s how you ignore the grief of separation from loved ones, the loss of home, the guilt of never being enough of one identity. I step out of the airport in Hà Nội and get addressed in English. I step out of the subway station in Toronto and get told to leave this country.
The past few years for me have been a taxing process of reconciling my ideas of home, honouring the multitudes of my identity, and loving parts of my culture that I’d once rejected. For immigrant and BIPOC communities, it is a tale as old as time. This may sound like a lovely healing journey, and in many ways, it has been — but I’m not here to celebrate.
Dear white people, so many of you are eager to celebrate the good. You’re eager to enjoy our food, admire our clothing, and watch our films (when they win Oscars). How many of you are willing to hold space for the ugliness of anger when it flares up at a dinner conversation? For the rage of one micro-aggression after another? Are you ready to be called out and listen in the face of bitterness, shame, and sorrow? Or will we be risking our reputations and careers? Will we be removed from the room for calling it like it is?
Living in predominantly white spaces is exhausting. It is exhausting, because we have to act polite, and well-spoken, and calm in the face of debates about lived traumas. I am constantly on high-alert, not knowing when a simple conversation about Star Wars might turn into a debate about the validity of BIPOC bodies. Not knowing when I need to suddenly oppose someone playing devil’s advocate for fun — but only in a light-hearted manner. I play the safe feminist, never too radical, always careful to not offend crowds that love to say they don’t see colour. I deeply sympathize and cannot imagine how this discomfort must be multiplied for Black and Indigenous folks of varying intersections.
Dear white people, you speak so much of creating safe spaces. How can we find spaces safe when we cannot be ourselves? I check all the boxes of a model minority until I have to hold my tongue once too many. Then, I’m angry, impulsive, reactionary. I’m no longer the little girl determined to play fair by rules I never agreed to. What we call “politics” today hits too close for me to be otherwise.
Dear white people, if you want us to start feeling welcome, you need to take the first step. You need to call us in, because we often cannot contribute to conversations of cottage country, least of all while the world is burning. You need to ask the questions. You need to broach the hard conversations first, around current events and politics, to let us know we don’t need to tiptoe around your views. You need to ensure we know there’s a space for hard feelings to surface and be accepted, even if that’s at your expense. You need to know when not to challenge.
I have been fortunate to love and be loved by many people in my life who have honoured the good and bad of my identities, who have taken it upon themselves to learn and engage with issues of race and privilege so that I’m not the driving force of these conversations, who have leapt in to advocate on my behalf. It is not easy work — but that is your burden to bear.
Dear white people, we bear it every day.