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A word of advice to white people: when a POC has mustered up the courage to confide in you that someone you both know has been acting racist towards them, do not try and placate them/mediate the situation/try to persuade the confider that the person wasn’t being racist.
Do not try and persuade us to think of it in a different way - that perhaps the person has had a bad day, that you know them to be a good person who would never say such a thing (because they often won’t, in the presence of others), that maybe there was a misunderstanding.
Just believe us. We know when people are being racist and hateful.
Racism isn’t just what you see on the surface - the mention of racial slurs or derogatory comments towards certain people. It is way, way more insidious.
Racism isn’t just what you see on the surface - the mention of racial slurs or derogatory comments towards certain people. It is way, way more insidious.
I know that people often react in this way because they want to remain “neutral”, if they’re friends with one or both parties, or if they have something to possibly lose my speaking up about this. And often because the word “racism” has been taught to be feared more than actual
acts of racism. The mention of racism will often escalate a situation, causing people to be very upset at such “accusations”, so people are conditioned to avoid the word, and to avoid discussing or acknowledging the problem at hand so as not to “create a fuss”.
I was talking to a friend earlier today, who just finished studying here for a year. I asked her if the UK was what she had expected it to be, and she said she hadn’t expected it to be so racist. She said she couldn’t explain it properly, but that she could just see it in people
‘s faces, the way they weren’t even interested in engaging with her in conversations, the way that she felt her contributions or presence were not valued by certain people. And that this impacted whom she socialised with here. And this friend in particular never, ever complains.
She said, in a rather matter of fact and observational manner, that she felt people couldn’t be bothered to engage with her or see her as a human being. That sometimes, people wouldn’t look at her or that their eyes would glaze over/block her out as she spoke to them.
I was so saddened to hear that this was her experience during the short, ultimately less than a year’s time that she was here, on top of culture shock from moving across the world, learning new information and perspectives, the struggles of pursuing her career amidst a pandemic
- a pandemic which ultimately had a negative impact in the way the Western world viewed East Asian people and people of EA heritage. I know that she was not alone in these experiences - what she told me was saddening but not disappointing because it resonated with many others’
experiences of being seen as the other.
