Brief Account of a Second of Racism
You know what I’m impressed with today?
It’s the assessment.
The way people assess the way you look and how you communicate beyond a “normal” degree of interaction in today’s US of America. I mean…I just have to say it. I am not one to support normality by any means, but when you stand with your body in a place trying to LIVE - just that-, like any body would (the splice by a space in “any body” from its grammatical spelling is fully intentional), you kinda feel…
Well…insulted. Violated. Transgressed.
You feel as if you have just been made feel different. And that is, in many ways, not right. You are isolated. Pushed out. Careful with this, it is not just pushed with words or looks or even actions, it is moreover a behavior that forces you immediately out of your state of being. How you were and are up to then is no longer saintly. No one may ever be sacrosanct, I know; but what I am saying is that you are pushed into a different state of being just by the violence that lies well ahead and behind someone’s ignorance.
An occupational therapist walked in to a room today where a beloved being to me was sleeping. I have been through this every day. Every time that door knocks, I calmly jump at it. I say calmly, because I am trying to force myself into a perennial state of calmness here; like when I meditate once I know rounds are done just trying to keep my cool about the overall of it. But I jump, inevitably, because…well…this is healthcare. I am not certain, by the way, that private care in North America is as stress-free as Costa Ricans tend to conceive it when we face public or private care in our Central world. But I am not about to go into a long discussion about private and public, state and international, health care or death sentences. I am really just shaking about what just happened.
So this woman walks in and asks me all sorts of questions. I try to abide, thinking about what I am saying and trying to help her out as much as possible. She is, in the end, doing her job and I am here to help her. That she was dependent on my information is a whole other issue I will not even contemplate here. After some struggles and good sides, the meeting finally comes to an end; one I had thought of quite satisfactorily, also. She thus gets up to wrap this up and says:
“So…are you…”
I wait for the question sign on her forehead. I mean, this far I have learned enough to know I am better off making people work for it than easing their experience into what can only be an upcoming cultural questioning.
“Are you from around here?”
She found it. So she worked for it. I will amuse her, I think to myself. So I chuckle, kind of proud that she has found a decent way to pop this question and hoping the smile in my face can send her the underlying code that I get it.
“I have been living here for a while now,” I tell her, admittedly a bit held-back as I continue to test waters.
Her face does not look altered enough. She has been cool to Nonna, so I am just going to throw her a bone here.
“But I am originally from Costa Rica”
“OOOH!” she snaps immediately, “I could kind of tell you had kind of an accent. I mean…I certainly noticed you looking for words here and there, but not enough to..and you look…you know. So certainly not from around here, I was thinking”
All this time, she is looking in her purse for something. She does not even have the nerve to look me in the eyes as she assesses not only my speaking skills, but the way I look to her.
Not from around here.
“I have great admiration for people who are bilingual” she says, as she walks out the door hopefully knowing how much her foot has been in her mouth this whole time since she decided to re-open it after her work was done here. I guess I will, however, always have the eternal question of whether she is even slightly aware of how her comments have just made me feel.
“Have a good day,” I told her. That is all I can say as I am glad she is walking out of my life, at least for a little while.
I dislike feeling this way about interaction. I really do. But then you learn that people think they can tell you just about anything; completely ignoring, for example, how I was looking for words to describe the challenging situation the family is facing, not the verb or the pronoun to complete a sentence.
I do not care, even, when I hear my mouth pronounce a word differently now, because I have found much more joy in recognizing the twitch in the tongue that made a vowel sound come out incorrectly than forcing my body to do it any differently. I have also recently decided to keep all this knowledge about language to myself to instead take in just how people react around me as I am going through a language act. It has been a brilliant process, to be honest; to be able to acknowledge my brain working faster than my speech mechanisms in my body and still keep up with a conversation deciding to correct (or never verbalize) the faults I keep making in my second language. Or to see my brain working too slowly at giving the correct command it knows it needs to send in order to articulate something. All the while I have grown fond of observation. I am enjoying how action and movement is altered around me (or GLADLY at times, how my surrounding goes untouched in the presence of my now newly loved ones) when I say or do something that is not the result of my identity, but of the way in which I am capable of communicating at a given point of my day and lifetime.
I am uncertain much of this is understood widely, however. How the way I talk makes up for how I am presented to people, but not for the entirety of who I am, you know? Or how the way my parents’ congeniality creating my current body does not necessarily comprise the entirety of my living choices and conduct. How the way I look or the language I grew up speaking are but fractions to the set of complications that make up my character. How my heart is shaped in ways my skin cannot quite relay, nor how the pigment around my eyes was never created to convey how I see the world. People have no idea how I act in the overall scope of matters, what is in the best of my intentions and the way I look at them as they seem busy assessing my entire being.
We sat at a table for lunch today, my clear blue-eyed loved one who seems to float in a time and space continuum, and I. There must have been 4 other people around the table today. What stands out, sadly, is the look on a woman visitor’s eyes as she clearly judges me for what can only be her interpretation on my race across the peas in my neighbor’s yellow plate on the table.
This is 24/7 pain cutting silence thin across the living room in this elderly residence. I cannot even articulate what my wife calls the white residence versus colored servant relationship that molds us.
At times, however, outside of these walls, the conversation has gone completely differently.
“You have no AC-cent!,” they tell me. People on the street. Anyone and everyone. I must convey a generic interpretation of the group as it truly speaks of people of whom I have very little recollection other than their assessment. The eyes wide open with a jaw down at what to me is the commonality of my existence. How bewildered people are only makes it harder, sometimes. It really is not that difficult, I think, to speak other languages at least semi-appropriately.
I have lost count of such encounters, already, which makes it even worse to me. As if my battle has been completely lost, already, and so long ago now. I have lost track of the amount of times I have had to “tell my story” about growing up with “such good English.” I doubt my middle school friends have any idea how many people known and completely unknown to me know of their existence as I have memorized the response of what my dad claimed was the “true reason” why I spoke English so well. Not well enough for the woman whose job was not well done at all today, but whose assessment of me hopefully also goes into the iPad with which she tracks my grand-aunt-in-law’s bowel movements.
It is hard to explain, all of this. Today, I merely react to the impression of the liberty people take to make you feel so different without being aware of it. Tomorrow, hopefully, I will have the strength it takes to truly take apart the entanglement of experiences it signifies for cultural ignorance to be at the root of our global understanding of socialization. The term global, here too, is used heavily on purpose. I would, however, like to acknowledge how this task requires that I first heal and clean myself from my personal experience before I can even consider engaging in the gigantic task of recollection. Maybe that is why it is so hard to find written accounts and artist work around the topic, because it is so corrosive and effective, the aftermath of this kind of socialization.
Walking back home, however, somewhere around 9 to 10 p.m. on a narrow pathway by the road that leads to where I am living, I keep reminding myself how willingness can go from 0 to a mile in just about a second. I have seen it and I have felt it. We cannot let it work against us. Put willingness to work, I say, as I try to wake myself up from the inertia that sets in when you feel like an outcast to a foreign society.
At least I am not brown enough to be stopped by suburbia police, I have found, when it is dark out and I have nothing but a flashlight in my pocket under the black hoodie that keeps me from the cold New England weather. Let that not speak of my privilege as if it were a good thing. Let that be a cry out about the racial profiling and harassment toward other minority groups and populations, instead. I am, after all, always just hoping for a bit more engagement from people. I know I am not the only one. Gladly. I’m hoping...
It’s the assessment.
The way people assess the way you look and how you communicate beyond a “normal” degree of interaction in today’s US of America. I mean…I just have to say it. I am not one to support normality by any means, but when you stand with your body in a place trying to LIVE - just that-, like any body would (the splice by a space in “any body” from its grammatical spelling is fully intentional), you kinda feel…
Well…insulted. Violated. Transgressed.
You feel as if you have just been made feel different. And that is, in many ways, not right. You are isolated. Pushed out. Careful with this, it is not just pushed with words or looks or even actions, it is moreover a behavior that forces you immediately out of your state of being. How you were and are up to then is no longer saintly. No one may ever be sacrosanct, I know; but what I am saying is that you are pushed into a different state of being just by the violence that lies well ahead and behind someone’s ignorance.
An occupational therapist walked in to a room today where a beloved being to me was sleeping. I have been through this every day. Every time that door knocks, I calmly jump at it. I say calmly, because I am trying to force myself into a perennial state of calmness here; like when I meditate once I know rounds are done just trying to keep my cool about the overall of it. But I jump, inevitably, because…well…this is healthcare. I am not certain, by the way, that private care in North America is as stress-free as Costa Ricans tend to conceive it when we face public or private care in our Central world. But I am not about to go into a long discussion about private and public, state and international, health care or death sentences. I am really just shaking about what just happened.
So this woman walks in and asks me all sorts of questions. I try to abide, thinking about what I am saying and trying to help her out as much as possible. She is, in the end, doing her job and I am here to help her. That she was dependent on my information is a whole other issue I will not even contemplate here. After some struggles and good sides, the meeting finally comes to an end; one I had thought of quite satisfactorily, also. She thus gets up to wrap this up and says:
“So…are you…”
I wait for the question sign on her forehead. I mean, this far I have learned enough to know I am better off making people work for it than easing their experience into what can only be an upcoming cultural questioning.
“Are you from around here?”
She found it. So she worked for it. I will amuse her, I think to myself. So I chuckle, kind of proud that she has found a decent way to pop this question and hoping the smile in my face can send her the underlying code that I get it.
“I have been living here for a while now,” I tell her, admittedly a bit held-back as I continue to test waters.
Her face does not look altered enough. She has been cool to Nonna, so I am just going to throw her a bone here.
“But I am originally from Costa Rica”
“OOOH!” she snaps immediately, “I could kind of tell you had kind of an accent. I mean…I certainly noticed you looking for words here and there, but not enough to..and you look…you know. So certainly not from around here, I was thinking”
All this time, she is looking in her purse for something. She does not even have the nerve to look me in the eyes as she assesses not only my speaking skills, but the way I look to her.
Not from around here.
“I have great admiration for people who are bilingual” she says, as she walks out the door hopefully knowing how much her foot has been in her mouth this whole time since she decided to re-open it after her work was done here. I guess I will, however, always have the eternal question of whether she is even slightly aware of how her comments have just made me feel.
“Have a good day,” I told her. That is all I can say as I am glad she is walking out of my life, at least for a little while.
I dislike feeling this way about interaction. I really do. But then you learn that people think they can tell you just about anything; completely ignoring, for example, how I was looking for words to describe the challenging situation the family is facing, not the verb or the pronoun to complete a sentence.
I do not care, even, when I hear my mouth pronounce a word differently now, because I have found much more joy in recognizing the twitch in the tongue that made a vowel sound come out incorrectly than forcing my body to do it any differently. I have also recently decided to keep all this knowledge about language to myself to instead take in just how people react around me as I am going through a language act. It has been a brilliant process, to be honest; to be able to acknowledge my brain working faster than my speech mechanisms in my body and still keep up with a conversation deciding to correct (or never verbalize) the faults I keep making in my second language. Or to see my brain working too slowly at giving the correct command it knows it needs to send in order to articulate something. All the while I have grown fond of observation. I am enjoying how action and movement is altered around me (or GLADLY at times, how my surrounding goes untouched in the presence of my now newly loved ones) when I say or do something that is not the result of my identity, but of the way in which I am capable of communicating at a given point of my day and lifetime.
I am uncertain much of this is understood widely, however. How the way I talk makes up for how I am presented to people, but not for the entirety of who I am, you know? Or how the way my parents’ congeniality creating my current body does not necessarily comprise the entirety of my living choices and conduct. How the way I look or the language I grew up speaking are but fractions to the set of complications that make up my character. How my heart is shaped in ways my skin cannot quite relay, nor how the pigment around my eyes was never created to convey how I see the world. People have no idea how I act in the overall scope of matters, what is in the best of my intentions and the way I look at them as they seem busy assessing my entire being.
We sat at a table for lunch today, my clear blue-eyed loved one who seems to float in a time and space continuum, and I. There must have been 4 other people around the table today. What stands out, sadly, is the look on a woman visitor’s eyes as she clearly judges me for what can only be her interpretation on my race across the peas in my neighbor’s yellow plate on the table.
This is 24/7 pain cutting silence thin across the living room in this elderly residence. I cannot even articulate what my wife calls the white residence versus colored servant relationship that molds us.
At times, however, outside of these walls, the conversation has gone completely differently.
“You have no AC-cent!,” they tell me. People on the street. Anyone and everyone. I must convey a generic interpretation of the group as it truly speaks of people of whom I have very little recollection other than their assessment. The eyes wide open with a jaw down at what to me is the commonality of my existence. How bewildered people are only makes it harder, sometimes. It really is not that difficult, I think, to speak other languages at least semi-appropriately.
I have lost count of such encounters, already, which makes it even worse to me. As if my battle has been completely lost, already, and so long ago now. I have lost track of the amount of times I have had to “tell my story” about growing up with “such good English.” I doubt my middle school friends have any idea how many people known and completely unknown to me know of their existence as I have memorized the response of what my dad claimed was the “true reason” why I spoke English so well. Not well enough for the woman whose job was not well done at all today, but whose assessment of me hopefully also goes into the iPad with which she tracks my grand-aunt-in-law’s bowel movements.
It is hard to explain, all of this. Today, I merely react to the impression of the liberty people take to make you feel so different without being aware of it. Tomorrow, hopefully, I will have the strength it takes to truly take apart the entanglement of experiences it signifies for cultural ignorance to be at the root of our global understanding of socialization. The term global, here too, is used heavily on purpose. I would, however, like to acknowledge how this task requires that I first heal and clean myself from my personal experience before I can even consider engaging in the gigantic task of recollection. Maybe that is why it is so hard to find written accounts and artist work around the topic, because it is so corrosive and effective, the aftermath of this kind of socialization.
Walking back home, however, somewhere around 9 to 10 p.m. on a narrow pathway by the road that leads to where I am living, I keep reminding myself how willingness can go from 0 to a mile in just about a second. I have seen it and I have felt it. We cannot let it work against us. Put willingness to work, I say, as I try to wake myself up from the inertia that sets in when you feel like an outcast to a foreign society.
At least I am not brown enough to be stopped by suburbia police, I have found, when it is dark out and I have nothing but a flashlight in my pocket under the black hoodie that keeps me from the cold New England weather. Let that not speak of my privilege as if it were a good thing. Let that be a cry out about the racial profiling and harassment toward other minority groups and populations, instead. I am, after all, always just hoping for a bit more engagement from people. I know I am not the only one. Gladly. I’m hoping...
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