Internalized Racism

Disclaimer:

1. What is written below doesn’t represent my conscious thinking most of the time. I am generally a positive and cheerful person. This is me trying to explore the other ‘underexplored’ side of myself

2. I have different motivations to reduce suffering. Me wanting to imbue meaning into my suffering is just one of them.

3. Please take time to read it, and try not to judge. It is more an emotional brain dump than rational thought through things.

4. This is a dark and depressive piece that deals with issues of race, gender, and mental health. It contains offensive language. If you are sensitive to these things, please read when in a safe environment or avoid.

How you can help:

1. Let me know that I am not alone, at least in some aspects

2. Let me know that I am not broken beyond repair, that there is hope

3. Let me know that it is okay to feel this way.

4. Let me know that you heard me
And now I exist, a little bit more than I did.

5. Anything else you would want to do to help

♢

The topic today is the fact, that, I had strived to be better by being white. I had seen success and comfort as being white. I wanted to be white.

yes. yes. Here I am sitting in an office in London, listening to Western music, drinking Western alcohol, wearing Western styled clothes, and writing in a Western language,

my mind, westernized,
neurons rebuilt.

Mother, did you know that I looked into the mirror and found myself ugly? Uglier than white people?

Did you know that I found myself ugly, on the inside? Because I wasn’t cultured. Because my culture is just not worth as much. It’s just less than. Because our songs are less good. Our movies are less good. Our working life is less good. Our conversations are less interesting. We don’t have values. We don’t have aspirations. We just want to survive.

We just get to survive
and they get to live.

We are in a cage, locked, bounded by bars
and they are outside the cage, free to explore the world

We are blinded by ignorance
and they are blessed with the truth

We are slaves,
corporate slaves, who work 9 hours a day, six days a week,
and they are our masters,
who writes the rules

They build, with creativity, grace
and we copy, with shame, despicably

We have no true intelligence,
Just a lack of morals and institutions
that allows us to catch up.

♢

China’s economic growth
Was built upon
Openness to trade and
Cheap labor

The Chinese identity
Is built upon
Absorption of Western standards
The disappearance of the human

This pain that I feel. It is not just my pain. It is the pain of our entire country. Thousands of years of history traded off with materialism.

We prioritized economic growth. How did we grow? Cheap labor.

THAT’s what we are. Cheap. Labor.

This is why I feel less human than you. Inferior. I am labor. You are human.

I want to exist as a human, rather than survive as non-cheap labor.

I thought becoming white would grant me this. How naive.

Still a laborer. Until I have the courage to live otherwise.

This is our new identity, in the post-modern, post-industrial, whatever you want to call this world that we live in.

This is the identity we gave ourselves, you gave us.

And we thank you for it. Because it allowed us to grow, and become more powerful than before. We have tried so hard to affirm ourselves, to prove that we exist, to prove that we have meaning, that we are not trash.

I am a proud cheap laborer who has worked her way up
to become a perpetrator of the system.

Fuck, it pains me. Fucking stab in the heart.

♢

So yes, I wanted to be white. I wanted to be free. I wanted to be me.
But I didn’t become me by being white.
I became the product of a long production line, perfectly built, ready to be sold.

But other than a nice brand, packaging. I have no substance.
Where the fuck is my substance
Mother, father. Give me my substance.
I want my ugly yellow skin and my ugly yellow flesh to have some sort of substance, that is more than trash.

I want it to be worth something.
I don’t want to just survive.

I want to exist.

And dare I?
Dare I, live?

LIVE?

Do I have the right to live?

Me, a yellow woman, who dresses up and pretends to be cultured, intelligent, not ugly. A better person, with white values, speaking white languages, studying white theories, working with white people.

♢

Colors. Colors blind me. Do colors mean anything? Words on paper, black and white. Eye to eye, black and white.

They don’t mean much. Until we let them.
And I let them. Us, those inside the cage, we let them.

Because you, you outside this cage. You built this fucking world that I have to live in.

I have to tear down this cage,
but this cage, you see, it was also my clothes.
And now I am cold,
exposed,
vulnerable.

But, fuck, I will walk out naked. All that I have lost.

Nothing left.

Culture, identity, whatever the fuck else. Let’s pour out the trash and take her out. Let’s take march out this confused load of emptiness.

but this cage, you see, it was also my clothes.
And now I am cold,
exposed,
vulnerable.

♢

White men,
I put you here, you see? Above me. When I see you, I kneel. One knee down, on the ground. Voluntarily.
You speak, I listen.

I listen, I nod, I think,
“this is truth”.

Even if it is wrong, I don’t pity you.
Whereas one of mine, when they don’t see the world, I pity them.
I pity them because I think that they miss out on the better part of the world, the real world.

I think of myself better than them.
And you, better than me.
Better than, superior than, higher than.

Some one, many one, put this hierarchy, this ranking, order, in my head. And it stuck.
I want to tear it off.

Everything that I enjoyed, as a child, a teeneger, adult, had been western
My best memories
My first love
My friends
My studies
The media I consume
The products I use everyday
The languages I think in
The shoes I walk in
They are western.
Yet I am not western.

I have small eyes, ew.
I have black hair, ew.
I am written inferior all over my body, every inch of my skin. My face, my nose, my mouth, my teeth, my hands, my boobs, my bum, my foot. All of it. All of it. All of it.

I hesitate before I speak.
I carry trauma, extra weight.
Self-doubt, extra weight.

My heart, it is..

It is..

What is it?

I had waged war on my own heart.
I had locked it up, punched it up, over and over. I tied it up in ropes,

And a white man had untied it.
And now he’s gone, reinforcing this world.

Another white man gave it a try.
And now he’s also gone, reinforcing this world

I don’t want to fall in love with another white man.
But I cannot bring myself to fall in love with an inferior race.
I think I deserve better than an inferior race, my own race
because I have worked so hard to be superior. I see an Asian man. I just don’t get the same awe.
I don’t kneel. I don’t bow. I just look down at them

This is the fucking story I tell myself.
My subconscious tells herself. Twenty-three years. Can’t do anything fucking thing about it.

I disgust myself.
My asian side disgust myself.
My judgemental side disgust myself.
My white side disgust myself.

I double, triple, quadruple, fucking disgust myself.

This is why I want to tear apart my hair and skin at night. This is why I get lost in black hole of thoughts and a hurricane of darkness.

No, I don’t deserve to heal.

I deserve to burn, in hell. If one exists.
I deserve to burn in white hell, because hell is a white fucking concept anyways.
I will go to a white hell, meet white god, and burn. burn. burn. burn.

BURN – the ashes of my yellowness transformed into dark smoke, in white hell.

♢

I ask myself over and over and over again, why I even deserve to exist,
what the fuck, is this,
weird, bizarre, agglomerate of substance.
Suffering.
Just here, suffering.
Living.

Contributing to GDP growth.
A number on a chart.
I’d rather not.

Exist.

I’d rather not.
Contribute to this GDP growth.

I’d rather take my heart,
and set it free

♢

Be positive, they say
Be grateful, they say
Love yourself, they say
Accept yourself, they say

You try.

You try growing up in a rubbish bin thinking that you are rubbish, with nice clothes on, scared for every moment they will smell you and throw you back into the rubbish bin.

You try.

You try having three wounded kids in your brain, howling for attention. You shut them back in, but everyone someone is nice to you, true to you, they come out and ruin everything.

You try.

Being constantly scared that you will be alone, forever, because you don’t deserve any single existing human being. You have betrayed our own kind, and you cannot fit into the other kind. The only thing you deserve to be alone, miserable, staring at the terrible judgements and choices you made.

Accept my fucking ass.
My quadrilingual mind is so fucking lost and confused that I’d rather not exist.

Why the fuck do people exist if this world is full of suffering?
If people are just walking around lying to themselves, unable to see the truth, the stories they tell themselves?

I just want to, for a moment, have someone who understands the truth, be brave enough to tell it. And accept me, and my wounded kids.
Mother, father, you never accepted me, I don’t think so. You don’t accept yourself.

Maybe, one day, I can accept myself. And accept you, too. If I survive, exist, live, till then.

I want to stop fleeing, and start existing, and eventually,

start living.

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