Being Silenced for Calling Out Racism in the Workplace

I spent a good chunk of the early- and mid-2010s working as a marketing director with an experiential education organization that I credit almost entirely for my approach to anti-oppression and equity work today. I cannot understate how life-altering my time there was in shaping my thinking and cementing my commitment to social justice.

But of course, even the most progressive organizations exist within this white supremacist and patriarchal system we all find ourselves in and are inevitably shaped by. And while I worked with people who were not just progressive, but radical in thinking and living, they were not, like all of us, without their biases, flaws, and gaps in understanding.

Every year, we would gather our staff from across North America to cottage country in Ontario for a week’s worth of team building, facilitation training, and anti-oppression education. These retreats were often the highlight of my year. The week we spent together as educators, facilitators, and activists was transformative. I expanded and deepened my knowledge, skills, and friendships in ways that will forever go unparalleled.

Like much of the non-profit industry, this organization was made up of predominantly white folks and I often found myself to be the only woman of colour in the room, if not the only person of colour. I didn’t think of it much. Calls for representation and conversations around diversity did not take up much space back then. During that time, being the only person of colour was just the default. It was my normal and I didn’t think to question it.

During one year’s training retreat, there was another Asian woman of Thai descent. We’ll call her Diana.

For the first time, I was not the only Asian woman or woman of colour in the room. While that didn’t change much about the week, there was one particular staff member — we’ll call him Steve — who would consistently confuse my name with Diana’s. It was fine at first. After all, we were a team from all across North America with many of us meeting each other for the first time. Forgetting names was just par for the course.

But when it happened over and over again, and when I was consistently misidentified as the only other Asian woman in the room. Well, then. I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to understand what was going on.*

Over the last decade, I have had the greatest and deepest education of my life. These were not the years I spent learning in Canada’s formal public education system or even my post-secondary academic experience. No, the greatest and deepest education of my life has been self-directed with the guidance of many incredible grassroots educators, activists, and everyday people across different intersections of identity whose lived experiences are not currently acknowledged or deemed “legitimate” or worthy by our existing colonial educational institutions.

The movements of the last decade—Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Standing Rock, Occupy Wall Street, Mauna Kea, the Climate Strike, among many, many others — have given me a vocabulary I did not have growing up, that many of us did not have growing up. The #MeToo reckoning and the Black Lives Matter movement, most especially, forced me to reassess so many instances in my life that have always stayed with me for reasons I could not, at the time, understand or vocalize.

These are times that I have been wrong or that I myself have been wronged.

I want to hold space for these precious and painful moments that have been so fundamental in shaping who I am today. I’m starting this publication to look at what I once thought and what I now know and to try to bridge the gap between these two moments in my life. I’m creating this space as a way to move beyond the discomfort of failure in our conversations around social justice and anti-oppression and instead, normalize failure in our discourse. I’m writing these stories as a way to hold tenderness and compassion for an older version of myself who did not know better, but who knows now and is still continuing to learn and unlearn.