Brown skin

MY BROWN SKIN DOES NOT MAKE ME IMMUNE TO INTERNALIZED RACISM.

It doesn’t make me anti-racist. I too was born and raised in this racist system. I too was educated by this racist system. What my brown skin does give me is direct experience of the pain caused by assimilation, discrimination, conditional and selective visibility, marginalization, exotification, tokenism, erasure, cultural appropriation, and colonization. It gives me empathy, anger as fuel for change, and opportunities to learn how to reclaim my voice and sense of self in the face of so many forms of widely accepted oppressive power.

But I too suffer from implicit bias and ignorance, and have to do the work of educating myself and extracting white supremacist ideologies from my own system so I can make anti-racist choices.

My brown skin doesn’t make me anti-racist by default. Anti-racism is a choice we can all make. Don’t know who needed to hear this. Maybe someone with white skin who still thinks racism is about you. It’s not about you. It’s about the system built on genocide and slavery that is still killing people everyday in so many ways, and none of us alive today created it but we are all complicit in upholding it unless we’re actively taking it down.

I feel you. I love you. I wish us all courage. I want to believe we’re giving birth to something better. Welcome to my Ted talk.

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