I am Filipino. I come from a nation colonized since its inception. My people went through three waves of invaders, one after another, before we found freedom hundreds and hundreds of years later. This history has ensured an imbalance–the people in power are corrupt, many with families who have acquired their wealth by taking advantage of the people with the colonizers’ blessings. The common person barely has the advantage. People can spend years and so many resources getting higher education, and make pennies that barely put a roof over their heads. If you’re one of the few who can secure employment, you could spend years saving money and building a life, only to have it all disappear in an instant–medical emergencies, natural disasters, crime can render it obsolete. Life is both expensive, and cheap.
Millions of my people have fled, and continue to flee, these horrid conditions to seek shelter elsewhere, everywhere; this means building a life in a foreign country where they are often invisible, reduced to grunt workers who support the lifestyles of richer, luckier, more privileged people. A good portion of the resources we acquire in these foreign countries is sent back home, to support our own. In the meantime, we build our lives between these cracks, with thriving communities under people’s noses. We laugh our struggles off. We call everybody–even the ones who exploit us–friend. We allow abuses to happen to us because it is a survival mechanism. Let them walk all over you, we tell each other, and they’ll leave us alone. It’s how we survived those hundreds of years before.
This highly simplified summary barely touches the tip of my people’s struggles, nor should it; we are composed of millions of different stories, each one different and unique. But I felt like I needed to write it in order for my point to come across more clearly. That is, why PoC need more nuanced stories. Why “diversity,” especially diversity written by someone who doesn’t understand a people’s struggles, is not exactly what we need right now. We need representation coming from our own. We need inclusion. We need to be normalized, not othered. People are complex, rich, multi-layered, and yet to live as a PoC in this world is to know that many don’t see this when they first meet you.
The other week, I wrote a story on Twitter about how a man trying to find customers for his gutter-cleaning business had to ask my husband, while he was working on his car in our driveway, if he was the homeowner “or just a worker.” He didn’t ask our white neighbours this question. Yesterday, my husband ran into the same sort of issue at the recycling depot. There were workers with aprons, and customers without aprons, and out of all the people there, a lady chose to approach HIM with the assumption he worked there.
Two months ago, in Scouts, my husband was one of the people tasked to ferrying kids to the lake to canoe. The grandmother of one of the kids sat in the backseat, and then, realizing her error, laughed and said she didn’t know why she did that. Privately, we wondered if she thought he was a taxi driver.
That split second is all it takes. If you are lucky enough, all you get are racist insults and tirades. For others, it’s a matter of life or death. People are denied promotions, or don’t get jobs because of these assumptions. People get accused of crimes they didn’t commit. Far too often, they get killed.
Entertainment is one way we can fight back. But we don’t need patronizing stories of people calling us “Not evil after all.” We should be well beyond that. Most people know that racism is wrong, but they don’t understand the nuances because…these nuances aren’t portrayed very well in media, if at all. People of colour don’t get to see the various shades of hopes and dreams and struggles we know we have; we are at best the decoration, the background noise. And because of this, many people go through their every day not realizing we are people just like them, too. They make assumptions, even if well-meaning. And they still don’t understand how hard it is. How every day you have to straddle the line between rage and productivity, and smile at the people who hurt you with innocent questions. I’ve run out of the number of times I’ve had to defend my culture because people think we’re heartless, dog-eating savages.
Yesterday, a throwaway comment on Twitter started trending. “Where then are the books meant to come from?”
I glance behind me, at the hundreds, thousands, of struggling PoC writers. Where, indeed. And I wish I could explain to the horrified people how more common this is than they realize. To many, PoC don’t write, many can’t even grasp the concept that PoC can read, and the idea of PoC as an audience is a baffling idea at best. If people truly, actually believed in the struggles of PoC writers, after all, we’d see more of them published, we’d see more of those books read widely and promoted by those with the power to talk about them, we’d see…numbers in the publishing industry that reflected reality.
I spin in circles whenever I try to explain all of this. Some people understand. So many don’t, or refuse to. “I’m brown,” my husband tells me, “so does that mean I don’t get respect? Ever?”
I tell him to hide his anger, because we don’t have the privilege to show it. Let them walk all over you for now; we need to survive tomorrow, too.
My own rage gets poured into my writing. Hundreds of thousands of words playing catch up, trying to paint my experiences, what I know of the world with a detailed brush…colonization, politics, poverty, helplessness…knowing that someone else, reading it too fast, will dismiss it with a single sentence. My worldbuilding is dense, people say. It’s intimidating. And I know for many, it doesn’t fit the neatly simplistic view they have of the lives of PoC. Complex hopes and dreams? Nuance? But if I don’t show it, many will never know.
