Nov 27, 2015
On cultural pride, imposter syndrome, getting over my own racism and community radio
Keynote speech for the National Ethnic and Multicultural Broadcasting Youth Conference
Thank you for having me at this conference today and let me begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land, the members of the Kulin nation. We are meeting here today as they have met for thousands of years and I pay my respects to their elders,past and present.
It seems faintly ridiculous that I should be lecturing a room of community broadcasters about my career because frankly it wasn’t so long ago that I was in your shoes. Nonetheless, I will attempt to reflect on community radio, my life as Sri Lankan Tamil girl living in Melbourne as well as my career so far.
One of my favourite commonalities between most ethnic groups is the reverence for older people and love of grandparents. Whether its a nonna , an abuela or in my case an ammumah, if you come from a migrant family and you’re lucky enough to have them around, your grandparents are a big part of your life.
My ammummah was 95 when she died earlier this year after a life hard work and dedication. She was an English teacher in Sri lanka and as well as a mother and wife, a human who lived through one world war and a long civil war and the person who taught me how to read and write, how to use words.
To me, being a part of ethnic community radio was always a love letter to her. Cliche as it may be she along with my parents instilled in me not just the languages I speak but also two of the most important values the world of community media: inclusion and perseverance.
On the matter of inclusion, my grandmother was a dynamo. While conservative in some of the ways a woman born in 1920 could be expected, also held as one of her proudest moments being admitted as the first girl to the local high school. Until then only boys were given seconday education, but because of her exceptional grades and demanding nature she was let in along with the principal’s grand daughter.
And perseverance? My mother once told me a story about how ammumah helped her, heavily pregnant with my sister while fleeing the Sri Lankan government troops. They had abandoned everything, even the family dog to get on a truck from the top of the island where we lived in Jaffna to Colombo. She slept overnight in the only place that they thought would be safe, the verandah of a church.
Of course she chose to tell me that story after I’d done some light whinging about having a cold and being forced to sleep on the couch. Mums really do have a sense of timing don’t they?
For me at least, growing up in a house hearing stories like that, I couldn’t ignore them. I couldn’t ignore my identity or want to know more about it. Especially when so much of what I’ve told about the tragedy, the displacement of Tamil people, I felt a responsibility to keep that going and I’m sure that something that many of you have felt too.
So that why during uni, I hosted a Tamil youth-oriented show on 3CR called the iiO show. It was a zany name the founders came up with based on a Tamil phrase that kind of means “oh dear”. (Insert tamil pronunciation of iio)
The name and spelling chosen for iiO is kind of cringe worthy when I look back on it. It was a heady time. Most people hadn’t even discovered, and subsequently come to resent Twitter yet. But we were carving our own path. It’s not like we had generations of Tamil Australians who had been making political pop culture radio to look up to. We had to figure it out on our own, which is why I think community radio and TV has some of the most important and original stories in all Australian media.
It’s actually a message that applies across the board in media. A few years ago I wrote an article for Junkee called “We need more Brown people on Australian TV”. I talked about how the breakout non white characters on TV and in movies need to write their own characters to give themselves even a chance of seeming two dimensional and how that’s not a bad thing.
I wrote:
The comedian Nazeem Hussain has a great line about diversity on TV. He says “If you wake up and find yourself in a hospital with no Asian doctor, start running because you’re on a TV set.”
Hussain has had to write his own characters to get to where he is. And like Mindy Kaling, it is a cross I am truly thrilled for him to bear.
Being a brown person in a largely white country means I regularly look around and realise there is no one who looks like me in the room, or on the TV that is in the room. I’m lucky: I work in a tolerant industry, went to fancy schools and speak English well. But I can guarantee you right now there are brown kids in primary schools around the country looking at their non-white-bread lunches and wishing they had fairer skin. And I can guarantee you there’s a woman in a hijab somewhere right now wondering whether the guy at the cash register was rude to her because of her dress or because he’s in a bad mood.” The media can and does help make those people feel less alone. You do that.
Want an even more timely example? Let’s look at the rather unfortunate incident of the “awkward” Vietnamese name from this very week. On Monday, a story about a young Vietnamese man with a name spelled Phuc Dat Bich went viral. The man allegedly had to provide passport evidence to Facebook for them to accept that was his real name. But rather awkwardly, your might put it, for the many news organisations, including my own, that published the story, it turned out to be a hoax and the passport was a forgery. The man who now says his name is Tin Le, explained he was standing by people with unfamiliar surnames. “To those who do have culturally specific and spectacular names, ignore the ignorance in those who may try to put you down,” he wrote. What utter nonsense.
The people who are really fighting ignorance? SBS’ ethnic programming team who helped expose his hoax.
“SBS’s Vietnamese program found his name was highly unlikely to be real, given the name Bich was never used as a surname,” the article read.
SBS Vietnamese was able to give those of us who have grown up with mean-spirited and xenophobic jokes about our names a genuine voice voice as well as help put this puerile and childish prank in context.
So yes, your jobs help combat ignorance, racism and isolation. Your stories literally give voice to the migrant experience and are at the front line of multicultural Australia. But they can do even more than that, especially at a personal level. I asked one of the founders of the iiO show, Loga Prasanna, whose day job is now a political advisor felt he learned by setting the show up. Here’s what he wrote back.
“Being able to talk about issues that no one else was talking about. Bringing together people with similar interests. Being able to say I knew Bhakthi before she became the brown Annabel Crabb. Gave me a sense of community. Gave me an understanding of how to present an issue compelling. Taught me how much power the mainstream media had.”
Another co-host of mine, Kog Ravidran, who has gone to work for Australia India Institute said this: “I felt a certain satisfaction in knowing that I was filling a particular hole in the tamil community. Delivering tamil news in a way that I knew people of my generation would appreciate and in a way I thought the generation above me was not capable of. It also brought me closer to the news that I wanted to be on top of but that I wouldn’t have actively searched for otherwise.”
That’s pretty impressive for a once a week half hour show run off a monthly roster of volunteers who only occasionally met in dingy Fitzroy pubs.
I did community radio all the way through uni, but at the same time I was pursuing other opportunities, especially in student media which I see as a sister breeding ground for media tragics. The way I felt when I was writing or on radio, I knew I wanted to be a journalist for sure and it gave me the confidence to put myself forward into the broader media world.
I realised having a title, and a show or a magazine to reference meant I could start applying for internships at places that would probably never have taken me otherwise. Cutting a long story short I started getting in peoples faces. I interned at Crikey during the my year editing Farrago, Melbourne Uni’s student paper which has been instrumental to my journalism career, giving me some of my first freelance bylines and paying me actual money. The work on 3CR and SYN led to more prestigious fill-in gigs on RRR which directly led me getting a casual producing job at the ABC.
So love and community and perseverance and sheer luck got me those jobs. Of course they did. But in an industry where jobs can be scarce, there was one other really big thing I think that helped. A complete absence of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome, if you haven’t heard of it, is a state that affects a lot of succesful people especially women. It accounts for that feeling of “I don’t really deserve this” or “someone will find out I’m rubbish at this”. It is a feeling of being a fraud.
Successful people in all walks of life will say this is what keeps them up at night. Tina Fey, Chris Martin, Jodie Foster and even Denzel Washington have talked about imposter syndrome. Google it, it’s a thing. There are hundreds of articles out there imposter syndrome. As a young woman with anxious tendencies I am probably exactly the kind of person who is supposed to have imposter syndrome. But I don’t. I don’t feel like a fraud. I feel lucky and grateful, but I also feel that the jobs I have been offered are ones that if I work hard at are ones I can master.
You know who else doesn’t have imposter syndrome? One of my personal heros Kanye West. Don’t laugh. Look he might not be the most obvious presidential candidate, but he has plenty of lessons to teach for people of colour trying to crack into an industry. Kanye, if you didn’t know, studied fine art at university. And while he is best known for his music and rather spectacular rants, West often says what he loves most is fashion. The world of fashion however, did not love him initially. It did not take him seriously, partly because he is a man of colour, because he comes from the oft-mocked world of hip hop and perhaps also a little of his grandiosity. After all he is the kind of person who says things like: I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.
But it has been sheer self belief and a rather obvious lack of imposter syndrome that got him over the line, now a designer with his own lines.
When he recently spoke at a fashion school in the US. he said this:
“I have always had to fight to be accepted. Even as a successful musician, in order to make the transition it was really all but impossible.” He continued, “I empathise with anyone in this era who has ever loved fashion… when kids tell their parents that they want to be a fashion designer, it’s not usually met with the same response as the traditionally held career choices.”
Community media is also often not taken seriously. People in your life might thing this is a side project, something akin to learning to play the recorder. Hell, even the Government isn’t very good at taking community media seriously. But if making radio and TV makes you feel alive then you should work bloody hard, hunt down every opportunity you can and let the rest take care of itself.
One last piece of advice that is oft repeated but that I didn’t really understand until recently: there really isn’t anyone like you, even if they look or sound the same. Whenever I was in high school and would read a great novel by a South Asian living in an english speaking country, I would think ‘goddamit, there goes my book opportunity’. I thought when I got the jobs I wanted I would probably resent people from my cultural background for being in the same room, as if there’s only one job and the other brown girl and I would be competing for it.
What an absurd and racist fallacy I fell for.. We are stronger together. Mindy Kaling can have her kooky commercial rom com (The Mindy Project) and Priyanka Chopra can be the lead in an intense spy drama (it’s called Quantico) and Indira Naidoo can write adorable books about gardening and they can all be on my TV as much as they damn well please at the same time without being compared to each other.
So that’s what I wanted to say here today. Firstly, that community radio is beautiful. Cherish it. Secondly, embrace the freedom this particular world allows you to chart your own course and write your own characters. Thirdly, work hard and try not to worry about imposter syndrome if at all possible. It is a waste of energy. And lastly, never fall for the notion you are only competing with the other people of colour. Doing all of those things is an act of pride in yourself and your communities, and you have so much to be proud about.
Thank you for listening.
