This video of overt racism against the Chan family (and countless others as recently highlighted by the BLM movement) has made me think about my own experience with racism. I want to caveat that I share these stories and thoughts not out of anger or frustration, but out of love of other people.
The idea of race was foreign to me until my family immigrated to New Zealand when I was 9 years old. From that day, there were many big and small incidents that quickly made me aware of racism:
- At a public swimming pool changing room, where a boy several years older than me made fun of my Chinese ethnicity and decided to test his “kungfu skills” by kicking me in the face. I stood there in shock.
- On the bus getting a side-eye look and muttering below the breath of “go back where you come from”.
- At school, there were almost weekly insults about being Chinese, with one boy harassing me over 3 years (the bullying eventually ended when that boy tried to punch me…not realizing puberty hit me earlier than him and he was swiftly dealt with a swollen face…and stopped bothering me).
These experiences were not unique to me. My parents experienced them (even more often), my friends who looked or spoke differently experienced them, and I realized over time just how common this is with nearly all minority people across the world. As I got older, the overt racism started to disappear and became more unspoken, and I vowed to distance myself as much as possible from the experiences I had by working as hard as I can to create a buffer of “achievements” and “success”, and so I can choose the kind of people I can surround myself with.
However, deep down, I knew that the racism was still there. Just more subtle and unspoken. As time went on, I’ve started to wonder why some people would do this. They know that what they are doing is not “right”, just like how people who smoke or eat junk food generally understand that it’s not good for their health.
So why does it still happen?
Tony Robbins, whose work has had a big impact on me personally, has a framework for the fundamental 6 needs of people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwFOwyoH-3g): 1) certainty; 2) variety; 3) significance; 4) connection/love; 5) growth; 6) contribution. People often are stuck in behaviors that are toxic to themselves and to others around them when they satisfy three or more of these needs.
Spewing racism, sadly, neatly fits into this. By saying “go back to where you came from” to a stranger who looks or sounds different, the person would instantly get:
- Certainty: there’s a very high likelihood that they get a response/reaction from the other person.
- Variety: the type of responses/reactions are varied and unpredictable.
- Significance: for that instant, the feeling of being more superior than someone else simply because of the color of their skin/accent, etc makes them feel more important.
- Connection: they’ve built an instant (negative) connection with the other person and they’ve also dramatically decreased the chance of being ignored by others.
This has a few implications:
- You, as the victim of racism, are not the reason why someone is racist and hateful. To bring so much pain and suffering to others only means that the person who is spewing hatred must be suffering in immense pain as well. And the hateful/racist person is getting a temporary hit of gratification by spewing racism to others.
- The way to change this behavior is to begin rewiring and changing the equation of reward and pain of a racist action. Reduce the feeling of reward and stack the level of pain. This is how addiction intervention works (alcoholism, drug abuse, etc).
- One effective way to do this is to shine a light at this behavior for everyone to see, and for this light to be a mirror to look at our own actions, to expose the ugliness and toxicity for what racism and hatred is.
That is the power of sharing your own story (or amplifying others’ stories) and ugly incidents like the one experienced by the Chan family and the ones I and countless others experienced throughout our lives.
The great MLK once said “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Let us shine a light on every nook and cranny of the imperfections in being human and help to lift each other up in the process with love.
