On race, power and shaping the future

I have to admit. I was afraid. I had wanted to write this for a while now, but I was afraid that my thoughts would come across as being naive and biased.

So here’s the thing — even if this comes out naive and biased, it has to be expressed in order to be corrected. I want to live in a world where we can have rational discourse, so this is my way of being the change that I want.

I am not American, so I have refrained from commenting publicly on American politics. It gets annoying when some foreign person comments on Singaporean politics without understanding the cultural nuances and context, so that is the last thing I want to impose on the Americans I care about.

I was born into a dominant race in Singapore, so who am I to express my views on racism? I was brought up by foster parents who encouraged me to hang out with people of other races. They didn’t teach me to believe other races were less. It shocked me when a Malay classmate would later thank me for being a “different Chinese person”. It would take me years to fully comprehend what she meant.

For better or worse, this made me partially blind to racial bias, because I was privileged as a Chinese in Singapore, and I believed what my foster parents taught me — to see all of us as the same without giving attention to the color.

It influences me till today, because I still don’t see people’s color, it is difficult to see and honor their struggles as well.

I am ashamed to admit this, but it took me a long while since moving here two years ago, to understand why my African-american friends behave so cautiously around people. It was as if they were constantly worried about being intepreted the wrong way. One of my buddies here asked me if I was scared of him when I first met him. I gave him an incredulous look — why on earth would I be afraid of him?

Asking why when things fall apart

Like many of us, I had read the news and watched the videos on both Ferguson and Eric Garner. Events like these used to outrage me so much that I would cry, be in despair, and it would feed into my previous life-long belief that this world is not worth saving. What change can we make, when the existing power structures are so broken?

But have we stopped to ask more questions?

I am still outraged, but I have found myself wanting to think with rationality and radical empathy:

Why did these people, belonging to the police and grand juries, think that ending someone’s life this way is acceptable? What sort of belief systems and values were they conditioned with, in order to make those judgements?

Do we really believe these people are inhuman and have no conscience? Are some people seeded with pure evil? What sort of stories have they been told all their lives, disguised as absolute truth? Could they possibly believe they were really making the right call in the name of justice, based on the world they are surrounded with?

It doesn’t mean that we should be less outraged. But I want to challenge more of us to ask:

Why? Why would anybody think other lives matter less? Why on earth would they not see what we see? What is it that we can do to bridge that gap? If we can’t bridge this gap in the present, can we bridge it in the future with our children? Can we raise more of us to be people who are respectful of everybody’s right to live? How? What are the concrete actions we can take, that will make a sustainable dent in the future?

Having an “us vs them” mentality is not going to mend this breakage. We have to address the root, not the symptom. If the existing system is broken, if the people in power cannot be trusted, what else can we really do, apart from having an eye for an eye mentality that benefits no one?

Reshaping the future

We are broken. It is not just race. We’re destructing the planet, we are apathetic to poverty, most of us will not stop to let the tap run incessantly while millions of people have no clean water to drink. We’re not painting a very nice picture of ourselves.

But there is hope. We have abolished slavery, reduced poverty dramatically, legalized gay marriage, among many other measurements of progress. We can’t keep on blaming the system and asking the system to change. We are the system. We shape the future of the system. We have a chance to influence — who are the people we want in power, how we want the power structures to change.

We can take part in protests, publish countless tweets and blog posts, they all do matter, but at the same time, let’s own this world and take care of the aftermath. Are we:

• Telling stories of love and equality, or racism and hatred?
• Teaching values of collaboration and respect, instead of selfish survival?
• Encouraging people to work on things that truly matter, or things that make us feel secure, when security is moot if we face a shitty future?
• Owning our place in power as democratic citizens, instead of being apathetic or leaving the system to change by itself?
• Paying attention to how we educate our kids so they can grow up with critical minds, instead of conditioning them with the same dogma?
• Learning to have reasonable discourse among ourselves, instead of participating in a mob mentality?

Nothing will matter more than the stories we tell, the values we impart, and the work we do, from now. I implore of us to put aside our daily numbing busyness and think about this, just a little more.

The way we shape our future is through shaping our young.

They will be the ones who will be next in power, who will take part in grand juries and decide whether someone’s life is worth a trial. They will make new laws, reform policies and raise us up.

They will need to, on behalf of those of us in current and previous generations, because we have broken the world.