I began this past semester with a blog
post that highlighted my fears in going back to school this spring
semester. It addressed many fears that have come out of experiences in
classrooms and in open spaces on my campus.
My fears, all of them and more, became
realities this semester.
This semester was the semester where I
finally put a word to what I was feeling in my classrooms when we talked about
marginalized identities. When I had to prove my humanity by conjuring up
oppressions to appeal to privileged peoples. When I would leave a classroom and
feel shaken, dirty, and defeated because of the ways in which people have
reiterated the disgusting comments that I have heard my entire life.
Trauma.
This post was inspired by a conversation
that I had with a professor. This professor had potential initially in the
class I was taking with them; the very first thing they had said about racism
was that “racism = prejudice + power” and addressed immediately the absurdity
of reverse discrimination. Eons later, when we were finalizing our final
presentation (on a topic of our choice), one of the groups that presented to
our group argued that Affirmative Action is a form of reverse discrimination
against white people because it only helps people of colour (news flash, it
actually helps majority white women). My group, who knew me rather well by
then, waited for me to tear them apart…while I waited for one of them (white
males, white females) to amplify what I had told them about reverse
discrimination (it doesn’t exist). But I was let down. Because they just smiled
and nodded. The thought of me—a woman of colour—having to explain the
fucked-upness of reverse racism against a white female and 3 white males…I
couldn’t get myself to do it. Many times, I’ve ignored the people who’ve told
me to pick and choose my battles. In that situation, I finally knew what it
meant. I knew the outcome of the
situation already; the “angry, oppressed, and victimized” Asian woman. In the
split second that I had made that decision not to stand up for my humanity,
while I knew was a safe choice—did not provide me with any solace.
I emailed my professor after that class and
told him about the situation. I told him that it had made me very uncomfortable
and unsafe to have others think that reverse discrimination was a real thing
and that while I would be okay with the group presenting it as their final
project, that afterwards, I wanted him to address it once again and maybe in
greater detail. He told me he would not address the topic any further because
we had already talked about it in class. He then mentioned that doing so would
not change anyone’s mind. He asked to meet in his office. I was very
dissatisfied with his response in that I felt as if (once again), people of
colour and their oppressions were not worthy enough to be mentioned in the
classroom. So I went to talk to him in his office and during the course of the
conversation, he got super defensive, mentioning that we had already talked
about racism and reverse discrimination and Affirmative Action and doing so
again (and in more depth) may not be beneficial. In proving my case, I simply
told him that when I have to explain in explicit details why reverse racism does
not exist, I have to rip apart my humanity for the sake of their learning and
it’s traumatizing to do it.
And that’s where he stopped me.
He interrupted my train of thought to ask
me “Is trauma really the word you
want to use?” and went on to explain that trauma is a very serious word and
implies many horrific things. As if I didn’t know what the word meant.
And that’s why I want to talk about racism
induced trauma.
It’s already a given from much research
that racism has negative psychological effects on people of colour (Pieterse, Carter, Evans, & Walter, 2010) But the extent of
research that shows that racism can be associated with symptoms of trauma and
PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) have not been explored deeply.
The difficulty of recognizing racism as a
source of trauma is the strict definition (out of the DSM, the Diagnostic
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and what is and what isn’t rendered
PTSD. PTSD has been defined as a response to a traumatic event that is
triggered by 1) the re-experiencing of a traumatic event and 2) avoiding stimuli
that is perceived to be associate with such traumatic event. (Helms, Nicolas, & Green, 2012) How can you not
extend this definition to racial trauma as well?
Rather than pinpointing a certain event as
a source of trauma, the idea of racial trauma is that it can be a result of
multiple events that occur over time that further oppresses and impedes an
entire community. Examples include the wholistically traumatic repercussions of
colonization by the continuous perpetuation and violence in the loss of land
and rights for Native and Indigenous peoples.
This is the reason why it is so difficult
to pinpoint an exact event to prove to administrators or people in general that
one’s oppression or trauma stems from just one event when it occurs and
accumulates invisibly, systematically,
and institutionally over time.
The
society we live in does not hold the cumulative effects of implicit events
(such as microaggressions) to the same standard or value as we do singular,
explicit events when using the term trauma.
In an educational setting, I have found that
many of these traumatizing experiences stem from courses that are claiming to
teach ‘diversity.’ Overall, studies have shown that the experiences that white
students receive from diversity courses is consistently more positive than
students of colour. (Castellanos & Cole, 2015) This should be no surprise.
It is rare to be in a classroom for diversity credit and not cater to the white students and their learning. The usefulness
of these courses for students of colour is questioned constantly. The
effectiveness of these courses for students of colour may not be capable of
being measured because students of colour live
through many of these topics and groups addressed in diversity courses—students
of colour do not have as much to learn as they may have to teach. Their
cultural education and expertise extends beyond the classroom and transcends to
interactions and lived experiences with racism, which need not to be taught to
them. Again, the effectiveness of these courses are at the cost of students of
colour. These courses bring painful memories of racism back to the forefront
where students of colour are forced to speak in order to validate their own humanity for the sake of white
people’s learning. Students of colour open old wounds, rip apart their humanity
and showcase their lived experiences of racism and the history of pain and
destruction that it has created—for the education of white people.
In particular, one of my classes this
semester was on diversity. Its main focus was racism and sexism. It was taught
by a white male, so you can probably already gauge the effectiveness of that
and the merit he began with). To be honest, I enjoyed the class because it was
discussion based. That is the only thing I liked about that class. I have never
been shut down and silenced, talked down to, nor invalidated so many times in a
class as I did with that professor and the chaos that he considered our classroom.
Remnants of white supremacy, respectability politics, ableism and sexist
ideologies permeated every inch of the atmosphere.
He defined racism as prejudice and
discrimination against a racial or ethnic group. After I confronted him about
the fact that white people cannot experience racism because racism is prejudice
+ power + privilege, he asked the class that they could “consider” my definition, or his definition.
He shut down the conversation on Black
Lives Matter when a white female said that she did not support it because she
almost missed her vacation flight because of it and I blew up, calling her out
on her privilege.
He taught on the topic of refugees and had
little consideration to the way he spoke about refugees (condescendingly and
pitying) as if there were no refugees or children of refugees in the room.
He told me that spoken word was not
activism.
There are more, and as they accumulated
throughout the semester, I got angrier, more disheartened, and more reluctant
to come to class. It was a constant question of “what fucked up shit would he
say today?” “Who would he invalidate today?”
I tore my humanity apart for the sake of
that class; I told my story and how it related to the systems of oppression for
the sake of white people’s learning. If not that, for the sake of pissing off
white people. Because I was bitter and this class allowed me to voice my
frustrations and bitterness in a way that could critique the institution. I
read all of the discussion posts from my peers on our discussion board and
addressed questions, called out fucked-up posts. I swore relentlessly. I
questioned his authority relentlessly. And by the end, I was tired and
depressed, and I did not want to go to that class anymore and prove to others
that people of colour and women are not subjects to study because they are
living, breathing humans that are not ‘us and them.’
That class taught me nothing because I,
along with many other women of colour, taught
that damn class at the expense of our tuition money and our humanity because of
the incompetency of our professor to teach in a way that would do marginalized
identities justice. It was tailored for white people.
Diversity courses in this racist
institution is traumatizing.
In a course that I was an Academic
Apprentice for this semester, I also saw the remnants of trauma that exist and
the cost that students of colour pay for validating their own humanity.
This course was near and dear to my heart
because I learned a lot about myself and my identity when I took it last
spring. It was the first course in my college career that brought two of my
many passions together: my identity as a Hmong woman and Critical Race Theory. But
what I took from this semester was different than when I took it.
I saw the difficulty of having a personal
connection to history and putting a critical lens on it. When a reading is so
near and dear to your heart because it is a reflection of who you are, it is
something that I found far too traumatizing to actually critique.
This was provoked by a reading that we did
this semester that was not on the syllabus when I took the class; Cry of the Machines by Kao Kalia Yang,
an excerpt from her new book The Song Poet.
The story is through the lens of Yang’s
father and follows a narrative of him and the factory that he works at, a
factory that is slowly killing him. The way that Yang writes of her father’s
insights on life in Laos vs life in the United States and the pain, the sorrow,
the incompetency that he feels being in the United States. A story only has as
much value as we put to it, and I put extreme value on this piece. I felt it
because I remember visiting my dad when he used to work in a factory assembling
cables and drilling holes into metal and that I would never be allowed past a
certain point. He always met my mom and I at that point, and I knew that I was
not allowed past that point because it was dangerous. He would always wear a
mask and his hands would always be dirty and they would ache. Everything that
he is—and everything my family and I are—is a remnant of the Vietnam war and
systems of oppression, it is engrained into our very skin and our very history,
and to sit in a room and listen to white people talk about how much they pitied
the father, how their families were in the same situation…was difficult.
And while I tried so hard to acknowledge
the intersectionality of oppression and that there is an existence of poor
white people, the context of the situation felt as if it was minimizing the
actual history of oppression that Hmong people faced, and that it was being
swept under the rug.
I remember this class period because only
one Hmong student spoke in that class (our class was pretty close to being half
white and half Hmong).
This class period was in particular,
traumatizing because of the topics it covered were more than just words on
paper, they were my lived experiences, they were my mother, my father, my
brothers, my internalized self. And while it was not a situation where I had to
prove my own humanity, I was forced to look at my humanity in ways that I never
wanted to. And to my knowledge, that was the goal of this class. To reflect on
ourselves and to ask why we feel so strongly or so opposingly to certain
readings and how that relates to our own humanities, our existence, our
history, ourselves.
I’m not a fan of happy endings because they
are unrealistic. Then again, this semester’s end doesn’t necessarily mean that
I will not face these things next semester. The white patriarchal supremacy of
educational institutions has a way of permeating time and space and catching up
with me after the summer.
In retrospect, I spent a lot of time crying
this past semester, as well as skipping classes to avoid provoking my own
trauma. It’s not something I’m necessarily proud of, but it’s something that I
believe institutions are incapable of
understanding. They are incapable of understanding the cumulative effects
of racism or any type of ism that produces trauma. Institutions are incapable
of love, of validation. Only people can do that. And that’s one thing I am
happy for this semester.
I cut off many toxic people in my life. I
worked on relationships that meant something to me, I was more present in moments,
rather than living in the past, or the future (though, this is still a work in
progress). I built meaningful friendships and did pretty radical stuff
together.
I learned the meaning of solidarity in that
it is not a goal, not a destination, not a finish line to cross, nor a pin to
tab to your chest—it is a feeling that can come and go, it is a feeling that
you must constantly work at to create together. It cannot be an individual
effort.
My brother
learned last summer when he attended camp, a quote that I have engrained into
my heart: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Castellanos, M., & Cole, D.
(2015). Disentangling the impact of diversity courses: examining the
influence of diversity course content on sutdents' civic engagement. Journal
of College Student Development, 794-811.
Helms, J. E., Nicolas, G., & Green,
C. E. (2012). Racism and Ethnoviolence as Trauma: Enhancing professional and
research training. Traumatology.
Pieterse, A. L., Carter, R. T., Evans,
S., & Walter, R. A. (2010). An exploratory examination of the
associations among racial and ethnic discrimination, racial climate, and
trauma-related symptoms in a college student population. 57, 3,
25-263. American Psychological Association.
