On the Demon Called Racism, Part I

i need one year.
without
the dogs of whiteness.
trying
to devour me.
— the year (the unrelent)
by Nayyirah Waheed
To understand racism is to be completely heartbroken. Can’t get out of bed, not eating, sobbing, body feels like lead, can’t believe the sun is still rising, shocked that people are driving to work, heartbroken. To truly see racism in all its horror is to be a fish seeing water. To acknowledge the width and depth of the ocean of racism is to fully open the heart to the truth that every human being is family. And to see how far we have strayed from that truth.
It is from this place of heartbreak, even despair, that we must start.
I am a 41 year old Chinese American woman, and it took me until I was 39 to truly start seeing the pervasive and insidious demon called racism in the United States. I had to leave the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was born and raised, to stop minimizing, denying, and flat out rejecting the fact that this is a country founded on and sustained by genocide, slavery, and violence. Living in cities that were over 30% Asian, with around 35% of its residents being born outside the country; being able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual; having been raised in a socially mobile family with a professional father; earning a doctorate in psychology; I could smoothly move from one social group to the next. I felt safe. There were racial incidents, sure, but these felt like minor slights that everything encouraged me to dismiss. And with relief, not liking the discomfort and fear it provoked, with an ease that I now find shameful, I obeyed.
Life has me on a crash course; repeated incidents over the last two years have forced me to wake up to the racism that runs like blood through the veins of this country; to see what the Chinese faced when they first came to this land in the 1800s; to see what Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color have been facing since before the founding of this country.
When I left California, I lived in Montana for 6 months, Buddhist retreat centers in California, Massachusetts, and New Mexico for around 4 months, and now have been living in New Mexico for 6 months. I no longer feel safe around white people.
T oday, an educated white woman who works with Indigenous people for a living, accused me of reverse racism. I had suggested that being Chinese, I am likely to be less triggering to Indigenous people than whites. She took this as a personal attack, and declared that I should not have raised the issue of (white) race. She demanded to know why I could talk about white people, whereas she could not talk about Asians. After confronting me in a work setting with hostility, she said lightly, I just had to get that off my chest. I want to move on now.
This incident occurred at 1:30PM on a Saturday, it is now Monday afternoon, and the story continues to loop in my head. There are layers of grief, rage, betrayal, and pain, that need to be met with tenderness. I realize that I never feel as small as when I am threatened by a white woman — because she is putting to voice what the entire culture is already telling me as an Asian — that I don’t matter, I don’t belong, and I should go home.
T here is an sea of unprocessed racial trauma inside of me. Which is why, when an incident occurs, it hits so deeply.
Memories keep surfacing.
The white male client I saw in graduate school who suddenly remarked, “Everyone wants to date an Asian girl,” leaning back in the sofa, his legs spread wide, a smile on his face. To be suddenly demeaned, exoticized, turned into an object.
The dozens of times I’ve heard white people say, “There were a lot of Asians,” as if there can be too many of us. As if when we gather, we are a horde. It speaks to their discomfort in being a minority, even for an hour. Or, “You’re so quiet,” pronounced with triumph as if voicing a stereotype brings relief. Everyone in American culture is compared to the white man, who sets the standard in all domains. Silence in Chinese culture is neither weakness nor submission; it is an indication of respect and wisdom.
Since I left the SF Bay Area, every week someone mistakes me for another Asian. You’re Grace, right? You look exactly like her. Were you on that TV show? I can’t tell you guys apart. These incidents reflect a form of racial objectification. I am an Asian object, interchangeable with the next Asian person. I become only race and gender, no longer seen as a unique human being.
Having been fed on an endless diet of mainstream TV, movies, books, and magazines as I was growing up, I remember the violence of only seeing white faces, white culture, white language, white food. The only time I see someone who looks like me, they are crammed into a stereotype — owning a grocery store, working at a restaurant, speaking broken English, their face blank, offended, scowling. The desire to distance myself as far as possible from these caricatures, the self-hate growing inside.
The popular white girl in 4th grade who told a racist Asian joke in a group of all white girls, then looked at my face for a reaction. The constant feeling as a child that I needed to hide the weird foods I ate, my eyes, being different. So identified was I with white culture, at times I was surprised when I looked in the mirror and saw a Chinese face. I longed for limp blond hair, green eyes, to fit in. Today, I look at a picture of my 10 year old self and see a beautiful Chinese girl, glowing with life. The memory of how much I hated myself then gnaws at my heart — my puffy black hair, my too wide face, itching to get out of my skin.
I remember my immigrant father’s terror of public conflict — once a man took the parking spot we were waiting for on the way to dinner in the predominantly Asian inner Richmond district of San Francisco. As I railed with frustration as an adolescent, he turned to me with fear, disguised as rage, “Stop it! People get killed for things like this.”
My white qigong teacher whose home is filled with Chinese paintings and artifacts, who teaches qigong for a living, and makes fun of her Chinese qigong master’s accented English.
A highly educated white woman, whose professional work I respect, deems my experiences of racism to be nonsense, as if her washing her hands of the whole dirty business. She calls me paranoid, adding that my “obsession” with racism likely means that I am racist and inviting racism into my life.
When racism occurs, I have a fear of being physically attacked. And I see that this fear speaks to the reality of white power, that this country does not belong to me, it belongs to white people, and at any second it can be taken away.
Visiting Taiwan for the first time around the age of 9, I remember seeing a tall blond white person amidst the Taiwanese, and feeling the power that he commanded. America, speaking English, is king. And for the first time, I saw why I wanted to be white, date white men, befriend white woman, and why it was frightening to be “too Chinese.” There are so many aspects of racial identity, racist experiences, that have been swallowed, undigested, because they have been too complex and painful to meet. The guilt of betraying my culture; the shame of being nonwhite; the confusion around belonging.
Stepping into Heathrow airport after living in India for two months, and suddenly shrinking, being hit in the stomach with the rememberance — I am a second class citizen in the white world. White people are always first in the Western world. Whiteness exists through obliterating everything that is not white.
When racism occurs, I have a fear of physical violence. As a heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied, Chinese American woman, I am not the target of physical violence. Each marginalized group is subject to its own specific brand of attack. The kind of prejudice a transgendered Chinese person receives is very different than what I receive. The brand of malice my 21 year old cousin faces as a young Chinese male is another story. What my father faced when his feet touched the shores of San Francisco as a 17 year old; my mother’s day-to-day life as a 23 year old in New York City; both having fled China as toddlers with their parents; raised in Taiwan, and immigrated to the United States. Each person with their own unique story. I can only speak to my own racial experiences, marked by invisibility and exotification.
Living in Montana is like being a panda in the midst of bison. People stare, their minds associate to other times they have seen pandas, anything they have read about pandas, they want to connect pandas with other pandas. It could be comical if it weren’t so painful — one white cowboy blurts out something nonsensical about tofu when he sees my face. I start to feel a sliver of what it is to be an animal in a zoo. There are times when I don’t want to leave the house — I am so tired of being looked at, being different, feeling self-conscious, speaking for all Asians, fielding another act of racism disguised as harmless ignorance.
I see all the ideas that white people have about Asians — we look alike, are good at math, are quiet and submissive, get along with all other Asians, that all of Asia has a single unified culture. I feel the weight of these projections being thrown at me each day. It is exhausting, and I started to get confused about who I am. A few months into living in New Mexico, a Navajo/Diné friend says, “I’d love to hear about your culture,” and I surprise myself by bursting into tears. I realize that he is the first person to ask me to define my own culture, rather than reciting stereotypes in an harmful, painful effort to connect.
All racism is violence.
And, given the specific brand of racism that I face, I do not know what it feels like to be hunted by the white government, white people, white laws, white culture, for the country I live in to literally want to annihilate me, which is what has happened and is continuing to happen to Black and Indigenous people today.
I have not lived it, so it is my duty to unflinchingly listen, to read, to learn, to honor the suffering that my brothers and sisters are endured. It is imperative to bear witness, because turning away is another form of violence.
In order to create a nameless, faceless enemy, we must dehumanize the other person. When I was a psychology intern at the veteran’s hospital, I learned that people are able to kill when they have been brainwashed to believe that the enemy is not human. That they are animals, worse than animals, demons, and it is imperative to kill them, or their cherished family will be destroyed. People kill to protect their own safety; and this country has created a culture rooted in scarcity and fear. When people are threatened, they are willing to do anything.
This story — kill or be killed by savage monsters — is living and breathing in our country today. Genocide does not happen overnight. People are indoctrinated into believing that only certain people matter. As a teaching tool in a class on diversity, Erin Stutelberg from Salisbury University in Maryland uses a pyramid of white supremacy that moves from indifference, minimization, veiled racism, and discrimination to violence and genocide (adapted from the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence and Ellen Tuzzolo).

We enact what is living inside us, and if we do not own the demons inside, we project them onto BIPOC. When we make someone else into a nameless, faceless Other, we cut off a part of ourselves. We lose our own humanity — and without it, we die. This country is full of dead people, whose hearts are beating but whose vitality, generosity, and kindness have been eroded to almost nothing. And this is worse, much worse, than the discomfort of meeting the truth of racism.
There comes a time when the other person’s suffering becomes indistinguishable from my own. After years of inclining towards nonharm, the heart is becoming strong enough to bear the horror happening right outside my door, all over the country, and all over the planet. Seeing suffering is no longer a choice; nor is resting in the privileged prison of safety. We can choose to be alive, or we can remain dead.
It starts with heartbreak, and then it becomes rage, the rage of a parent whose child is threatened, the rage of a human whose dignity is robbed, the rage of a person whose friend is hurt. This is the fierce rage of love, that cuts through bullshit, fear, and indifference. Rage is a thirst for justice. So feel the heartbreak, feel the rage, and then act. Because each person has a important role to play in the revolution. Do not deny the world, do not deny your family, of your unique contribution.
It is never too late to start seeing, and to start speaking.
