I Don’t Need the Bar Lowered for Me, Thanks

As a minority woman who rightly developed my own self worth and sense of belonging, special treatment is another way of trying to other me, for no one’s true benefit.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

Day 33/100: Gratitude today for no longer letting myself feel on the outside.

When I was young, open racism was rife. I couldn’t go a day without being called racial slurs and being told to go back to my “own country”. I was pushed around, beaten up badly once and vividly remember, with my sister, scrubbing out a racist message for us all, written on the ground outside our front gate, before my mum saw it.

Another memorable experience of racial aggression happened when I was about 7 years old, during break time in the school playground. A fight broke out. Everyone crowded around the action. I was trying to get a look-in in between the tightly packed bodies, who included a bigger girl with a large, light brown afro. I remember her noticing me and violently pushing me backwards, telling me to “F-off, Paki!” I was so shocked by this. I thought for a second, then something came over me and I moved towards her again; I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and glared at me. And from I don’t know where, my voice spoke up: “Excuse me, I’m not a Paki, I’m Indian.” And incredibly, her scowl relaxed as she took in my words and said, “Oh. Sorry.” And she turned back to the fight and didn’t bother me again.

That memory came back to me many times over the course of growing up, partly because, as I grew older, it struck me that I had had an expectation that we minorities stuck together and understood each other’s plight. But what I came to realise later was that, this was not a game of sides with whites on one side and non-whites on the other; mistrust was thick in the air those days and some formed “tribes” that they firmly stuck to and policed. While racial minorities were sometimes grouped together under varying collective labels in the UK, that themselves changed over the years and eventually I felt that it was more helpful to not be over focused on them.

Labels are something we do to create order, like in our kitchen cupboards. But when we get attached to them ourselves and we use them to create defence lines, we are serving nothing but our fears of loss of control and potential attack. We create imagined wars through philosophical idealisation and that invariably, ironically, leads to more discrimination.

While myself and my friends saw the UK employment equal opportunity drives gathering steam in the ‘90s, some of us from racial minorities weren’t so keen on their monitoring. For me, it should have just been about merit. I wanted a true level playing field from which to progress. Where my name didn’t render my CV to a rubbish pile before my abilities spoke for themselves and where I wouldn’t be categorised as a problem for complaining about the racism being openly shared in the white male dominated office I worked in. All I wanted were equal rights. And to feel safe.

There was a period of time where things seem to get better, at least in the workplace. I was hired easier. I was seemingly judged for my performance. And in that easing, I found myself free to deal with my underlying personal self consciousness — symptomatic of having lived most of my life feeling both othered and sometimes punished for that. Out on the streets, the racism became different, more repressed. Masked. I could feel it but I preferred that to the earlier open abuse. I noticed different kinds of racism. The less confronting type derived from an ignorant curiosity. Initially, I would take offence, wondering why people would ask the kind of questions that instantly put me on the outside of everyone else. Like, whether I celebrated Christmas in my culture, though I was as British as they came. Or when they showed an over-interest in my country of origin and expected me to know both insider details about it, and have a willingness to get into a discussion about it. It used to infuriate me. When my then Caucasian boyfriend’s grandmother commented on my unwillingness to ‘take a pee’ in the bushes during a road trip pit stop, declaring that I was “definitely not an English girl”, his family were mortified, apologising profusely, while I was smouldering.

Years later, I developed a different perspective: I saw people from all over the place, even white Scottish, Irish and Northern English people being spoken to in just as awkwardly insensitive, sometimes mocking ways. Not to mention all the ginger haired individuals who, to this day, are openly insulted. Of course, some of my contemporaries would say we, of colour, had it worse due to the historical subjugation — and that may be true on a certain level. But I was starting to realise that comparing pain and constant looking back was not helpful to our kind. It just kept us trapped in helplessness and blame. And it undermines the suffering of other people.

I was starting to question if it were possible that my traumas, some including physical racial abuse, had scarred me with a hyper-sensitivity to being singled out, exposed and potentially rejected? Of course. That would be a natural result of the complex post traumatic disorder many like me unconsciously experienced. And I sometimes wish that is what we invest more in helping people deal with. Does that let the micro-aggressors off the hook? No, but it gave me an insight into how I allowed my past trauma responses to dictate my present life experiences. You see, I gave full reign to my hyper alert internal radar to detect who I perceived to be potential threats. The trouble is, that made me prone to suspicion and the inability to have realistic relationships where we all sometimes say things without meaning to offend. Really, it was not a healthy way to live. Letting it go – using the specific technique widely written about by Dr David Hawkins – allowed me to focus more on intention, both other people’s and my own, rather than let my wounded inner child lead the way.

With these new lenses, I was able to come down from my high pedestal of judgement and see people for who they were and, in turn, they me. As the perfectly imperfect humans that we are. Rejecting the tendency of the inflamed inner (and outer) critic to constantly look backwards and to use a victim status to reclaim power that it feels empty without. Instead, embracing forgiveness, both of others and myself, led to healthier interactions allowing me to find the belonging that had eluded much of my life and to form friendships with people who I might have formerly overlooked and perhaps vice versa. People who, it turned out, were not so different to me.

What I recognised happening in the last decade or so though has shaken me, as I recognise the exporting of a similar hyper sensitivity that I once fell prey to, but infinitely more radicalised, which made it a challenge to have these more honest relationships where allowance for just being human took precedence. Where outing racism as a social scourge is the greater goal than finding common ground and breaking barriers that have boxed us in. Where expecting the world make reparations above and beyond helping oneself progress and heal along with it, was also becoming a popular demand. The result, I have noticed, is seeing a spreading fear, among all so called races, of being smeared and tainted as a bigot. Of being on the wrong side of the divides, so to speak. I have experienced friends pointing out to me when someone was allegedly treating me as an outsider, when interactions were apparently blemished by racist or sexist views. But in doing so, what I noticed, was an extreme shift in energetic frequency where it felt I was expected to become “The Victim” like being graced with the lead part in a show; a big charade. And that felt limiting to say the least. It also felt like being indoctrinated. There seemed to be an expected response from me to the supposed bigotry.

In this climate I see the bar being lowered for people like me. Where we are encouraged to fast track into places that seemingly crave that diversity-inclusion stamp of approval. And somehow that doesn’t appear to help in the long run. After a lifetime of being singled out, largely negatively, the last thing I want is to be “othered” in another sense, out of someone else’s fear of offending me if they are not vigilant to potential mistreatment or neglect of me as a minority individual. It feels fake, unrealistic and missing a huge point. Which is that it holds someone like me back. In fact it pushes me back to the start, to those times when I was just a label and one that was perhaps assumed to be less-than and less capable. It panders to my own former fears of being unworthy instead of encouraging me to use my natural abilities to compete at the same level as everyone else and to build self esteem. It prevents me being self accountable and encourages me to over analyse my feelings; to hand responsibility for them being hurt solely to someone who might cause offence, intentionally or not. It removes the choice I have to not take offence if I want. And it uses my so called racial status as an excuse to name and shame people who apparently don’t give me this preferential treatment or raise a red flag whenever they perceive an injustice has occurred.

In this climate, I am wondering if this means I should then “cancel” my Asian parents and probably most of my larger family and friends for saying the purported wrong thing or not calling out racism, which they possibly often do. Or would they get a free pass because they are perceived as foreign and therefore culturally or socially less sophisticated. If there is a logic, I am still not clear about it.

What I do know from my experience is that it all often feels condescending, contrived and built on a shaky foundation of paranoia and blame. Often, it feels far away from equity. And therefore it doesn’t help any of us heal or grow stronger, unified communities where we can move forward together. Where we can stop obsessing over distractingly multiplying man-made labels and focus on just being what we all are: humans with a responsibility to make this world better for all.

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