Practicing smallness: on internalized racism
The systems we live within alter our perceptions, and the way we perceive things dictates the way we choose to interact with them.
When these systems are ridden with oppression, discrimination, and violence, there is little room to form your own truths and live amongst values that constitute your freedom as a person of color. Whether it be on a large, institutional scale, or a joke about an exhausted stereotype, it becomes human nature to absorb the information we are fed and exist within it in a way that makes us forget our right to perceive and approach ourselves with kindness and grace.
In this way, internalized racism hinders our ability to exist wholly and guiltlessly in the world. When you spend your whole life being taught that you and your culture sit at the bottom of the hierarchies of value, wealth, beauty, desire, and intelligence, you become accustomed to needing to justify your existence at all times. I remember when I was 8 and first moved to Riyadh, I was faced with the reality that I had to exist amongst people whose skin did not look like mine. It was almost an instinctive, innate understanding that the White girls were somehow better and more valuable than I was, and in order to prove my worth, I spent the next ten years trying to subside my own worthlessness by identifying with people that I knew would be put on pedestals. It violently altered my perception of myself for a long time, and admittedly, still lingers in my body today.
Internalized racism thus becomes this cyclical reinforcer of the system’s injustices. When we are taught to see ourselves and our worth in a way that devalues our existence, we are bound to act in accordance to this. We make ourselves quieter, detach ourselves from people that look like us, spark laughter at our expense to make it known that we are one of the good ones – the ones that don’t rock the boat, the ones that take the blow to soften the hit that we bring to those around us by virtue of existing, of being. Every time we act in parallel to what the systems have taught us, we become a weapon for its violence.
I believe the key to be able to start to comb through the effects of this violence lies in cultural celebration. Our cultures are the keystones of who we are. The ways in which our communities share joy, sadness, grief, healing… The richness of our histories has so much love and wisdom embedded in it that is waiting to be understood and embraced by us. Take intentional time to learn about who you are and where you come from; the ways in which your ancestors moved throughout their days; the songs and foods that hold your people together; the clothes that keep them warm. Talk about these things with others. We have become too used to being ashamed of the things that moulded us. I think it is time we hold them in high regard, thank them for lending themselves to us so wholly, and start to make up for the time we lost trying to make ourselves small.