How I Came To The Work - Part 2: The Set-Up

I’m going to start the first essential question in getting a better understanding race in America and becoming anti-racist: When did you become of aware of your race, the race of other people, and racism as a system of oppression? 

I’ve been aware of race for as I long as I can remember. My racial identity was never in question. I knew my parents were from Taiwan. Along with other cultural makers like language and cuisine, I understood at an early age that I was not part of mainstream American culture, and by American culture, I actually mean “White American” culture.

Even though I was raised deep within the “colorblind” culture of the 1980s that taught that the best way to deal with race was to “not see it,” I was VERY aware of race. I knew how many people were Asian-American in my classes, and I knew that my neighbors growing up were Black.  And I knew that most of the people I saw on television were White.  I wasn’t upset about this fact, as I was woefully unaware of what this White presentation communicated to me about who was valued in our society.

The first time I remember being offended as an Asian-American was watching the Siamese cats in  Lady And The Tramp in middle school. The first I felt prejudice was when I was in late elementary school and one of my teachers was surprised that I wasn’t that good at math. The first time I became aware of racialized views on family was when I found out that some Asian parents in my high school community were critical of the fact that I had a White girlfriend. And the first time I became aware  that I had issues related to my racial identity development was when a large group of Asian-American students sat together in my college dining hall and I felt physically sick.

All of this prepared me to hear a different story in my college American history class. My college history professor focused our understanding of American history from the end of the Civil War to the Vietnam War.  She structured this class by following the oppression of different group of people.  For the first time, I heard of Asian-Americans being part of the story of American history as she taught about the American internment camps of Japanese-American citizens before and during WWII. This piqued my interest in my people’s history, so I followed up this class with taking the course, Asian-American History. This class along with a lot of quality time with a psychology graduate student in therapy helped me come to terms with my racial identity.

What I knew of race, and racism was of the past, not the present.  This served me well for some time.  In graduated school, all of this knowledge helped me understand the need to represent cultural with authenticity in education.

This is where I was when I entered education. I knew about the racial sin of our past, and like so many, I was unaware of the how this story was not done. I understood racism, but I was unaware of how systems of racism permeated every part of our society. I had done some good work on myself, and work on my craft as an educator.

I saw myself as a teacher and a person who was not racist. Like learning fingering on a flute, I felt like I had this part of my pedagogy down, and instead of continuing on an anti-racist journey, I sat down at the side of the road content, unaware of all of the racism  around me, and throughout our society.

I had no idea how much I had to learn, and that my work had just started.