My migration story begins at the young age of four. Like many new immigrants to Canada, my family and I moved to an apartment in Scarborough when we first arrived from the Philippines. As of the latest census, more than half of Scarborough’s residents were born outside of the country with visible minorities making up 76.6% of the population.
After a few years, we moved to a bigger home in Markham, a suburb outside of Toronto that is often hailed as Canada’s most diverse community with visible minorities representing 77.9% of the population. I grew up in this city and spent the majority of my life there.
I’ve always felt immensely fortunate to have grown up in such culturally rich communities with friends who were born elsewhere or whose parents’ or grandparents’ were born elsewhere. After-school hangouts at their homes always made for a delicious time with diverse dinners and exposed me to a beautiful medley of accents from around the globe. I credit my early upbringing with much of the work that I do now with Living Hyphen.
But somewhere along the way, I got lost in a sea of whiteness. When I entered university to study Political Science and Sociology, I found myself in predominantly white spaces. I did, after all, choose to go to Trinity College at the University of Toronto, an elite college at U of T and home to the infamously homophobic, racist, and sexist secret society of Episkopon.
Trinity College, Class of 1T1. Find me first row kind of crouching, third to the left.
During that time, I also took part in a study abroad program in the Czech Republic with a group of predominantly white students from the university in a country that is even whiter.
Upon graduation, I entered and worked in the non-profit industry for a decade continuing my long voyage across this sea of whiteness.
After growing up in a multicultural haven, I was thrust into a completely different world during my first years as an adult.
I learned the rules of this new environment — the manner of speaking, how to posture, what to take interest in. I molded myself in ways that felt unnatural, but that I thought would be essential to fit in. I quieted parts of my identity, hid the expectations that my parents had of me, and immersed myself fully as best I could in this new world.
I assimilated.
And the truth is that I reveled in it.
I was proud to often be the only woman of colour in the room. It filled me with a certain sense of superiority to know that I was accepted and celebrated by my white classmates and colleagues.
I felt, in a word, legitimate. Like I had made it.
I hope that it’s obvious, without my having to explain too much, how and why this kind of thinking is wrong and toxic.
My assimilation and the pride I felt are both manifestations of white supremacy and colonial thinking.
A common misconception is that white supremacist thinking — that is, the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society — is the sole domain of white people. But many racialized people have bought into this lie too, unknowingly internalizing their own inferiority.
While I grew up in richly diverse communities where “visibility minorities” were in fact the everyday majority of my daily life, the books that I read, the television shows and the movies that I watched, the leaders and celebrities that were celebrated in the public eye, and the histories I learned about in school all centered around white people.
Spot the only PoC in the room! Here I am at a Toronto dance party back in 2012.
The mainstream media and our educational system almost exclusively celebrated, uplifted, and focused on the stories, the lives, and the experiences of white people. And so, at an early age, I had begun to equate whiteness with excellence, with success, with superiority. And I had begun, without my even recognizing it, to internalize my own inferiority as a Filipina woman.
That’s the cunning of systems of oppression, that it reaches the deepest recesses of all our minds with such subtlety that we don’t even notice it as it’s happening.
What I Know Now: Representation Really Matters
By now it may feel cliché, obvious, and a little tired to wave the banner of #RepresentationMatters. But…here I am waving it anyway.
Despite this call for representation taking up much more space in mainstream media over the last few years, there have been no drastic changes made to effect this change. Despite gains in film, television, and books, we’re still just celebrating a handful of diverse productions and the slight diversity we’ve been seeing lately often lies only on screen, not behind it. Leadership positions across industries still remain painfully homogenous, which is to say it remains largely white and male.
The people who write the books that we read, the people who create the television shows and the movies that we watch, the people that have the opportunity to rise as leaders and celebrities, and the histories that we teach and learn in school must be representative of the people who make up our world if we are to ever shift our thinking.
Our educational system and the mainstream media are tools of white supremacy and until we can drastically change them, no meaningful change can truly take place.
While I grew up in and was deeply embedded in some of the most diverse communities in North America, it still didn’t change the fact that I had internalized white supremacy so profoundly. The education system and mainstream media taught me from my earliest days who in our world was deemed powerful and worthy of that power.
Until we can disrupt, dismantle, and rebuild these systems in a way that includes not only diverse faces but also diverse lived experiences in decision-making and leadership positions, our ideas of excellence and success will always be narrow, will always prioritize some over others. To platform a diversity of identities and experiences means that there is not one that is superior to the other.
To borrow from and remix Walt Whitman, “our world is large, we contain multitudes.” It’s about time we make sure our systems, our classrooms, and our screens reflect exactly that.
The Living Hyphen team – diversity across intersections of identity!
This article is part of I Was Wrong(ed!), a publication that acts as a decolonizing space to acknowledge, reflect on, and learn from failure.