I immigrated to France from Serbia when I was 9, and I got my French citizenship at age 24, 10 years ago.
While growing up in Paris, I was encouraged to work twice as hard as other kids, in order to be seen as a “good kind of immigrant.”
As a teenager, I used to emphasize that my mom was a LAWYER, and that my dad was an ENGINEER, and that both were political opponents to Milosevic — just to make it very clear that we we were the “right kind” of immigrants, the “good immigrants”...
..who would not “take advantage” of France, but instead “contribute” to it and “make it shine.”
But no matter how hard I tried to fit in, I was always seen as “other.”

I constantly got asked “but where are you really from?” and “why don’t you go back to your country?”
I still hear people telling me “you *do* have a slight accent in French (i.e. it seems that you don’t belong) but there is no doubt that you are culturally French” (i.e. whether I belong depends on my interlocutor’s appreciation of my “Frenchness”)
(That is meant to be a compliment, but it actually is trying to tell me that my Frenchness is granted to me and could be therefore also taken away)
In my twenties, I stopped trying to fit it. I stopped trying to justify why I was here, not there.

I would talk openly about what it is to be an immigrant, to wait in endless lines to get one’s visas approved, to be vulnerable, to be asked to justify oneself constantly.
I talked about the poverty that marked my adolescence, I talked about being always reminded that I do not belong.
More importantly, I realized how artificial and unstable this dividing line between “the good immigrant” and the “dangerous, unwelcome immigrant”
For many years, by striving so hard to be perceived as the “good immigrant,” I ended up enabling this division myself.

This is how racism works through us.
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