A perspective on intergenerational approach to racial justice

This is a 10 minute talk I gave as part of a My Life, My Stories / Encore.org digital event on how we can address racial justice in 2021.

My name is Frankie Huang. I am a writer, illustrator, and strategist based in the Boston area. I’ve written quite a bit on contemporary Chinese culture, women’s issues, and more recently, about my observations on race in America.

I was born in Beijing, China, and moved to the US when I was 9 years old. Then in 2013 I moved to China for work, and only returned to the US at the beginning of 2020 for Covid-related reasons.

A lot of my understanding about race has been shaped by living in these two very different countries, and having lived both as the ethnic majority as a Han Chinese person in China, and as an ethnic minority in the US, where white supremacy has shaped much of the status quo as we know it.

In terms of identity, I belong to a dominant group as well a marginalized group. In mainland China the government is actively homogenizing the national culture to align with Han Chinese culture which I am familiar with, while minority cultures like Uyghur muslims are being systematically erased through oppressive policies.

When I am in the US I’ve lived with racism all my life and have gotten anti-China slurs flung at me since the onset of the Covid pandemic and the president’s blame-shifting rhetoric.

Why am I bringing this up?

I want to highlight how much our identity profoundly shape the way we experience the world, and how we all exist within one power structure or several of them, and precious few of us are without some form of privilege attached to our identity.

In my opinion, each of us who feel committed to social justice must first look within ourselves and interrogate our own position, our privilege, the harm we cause or are complicit in before we can effectively and earnestly engage in activism and be good allies to those who need our support.

Otherwise, it is easy to say you believe in great causes like Black Lives Matter and reproductive justice, and feel like you mean it, but still make no impact at the end of the day except to signal to others that you are a good person. Worse yet, you could feel so good about having progressive beliefs that you become oblivious to actions you can take to actually realize those progressive beliefs.

So now I’m about to say something that routinely makes a lot of folks uncomfortable: if you are someone who exists in a very privileged position in America, a middle-class straight white man for example, you don’t need to be actively discriminating and hurting marginalized people to perpetrate harm. Your comfortable state of being is quite likely built on the discomfort of others, like when a white-sounding name has a better time finding work, or a white face leads to securing a loan, and for white folks, becoming aware of this is integral to making a real difference in making the future safer and better for all.

I grew from childhood to young adulthood in the US, and my parents made sure I understood that this is a “white people’s country” and that I must be a person that offers a lot of value, and don’t stand out in a foreign way, in order to thrive in it.

This is part of what is known as the “model minority myth”, and for a very long time it felt natural for me to to strive to be more “American”, speak English without an accent, dress in a “mainstream” way, adopt American customs and etiquette, etc.

For a second generation immigrant like me, this is part of a process known as assimilation, and when I first learned the term, I did not think about the amount of erasure of immigrant identity it requires, nor the amount of performance it requires on my part. A simple and imperfect analogy to this is when you’re young, and you’re trying to fit in with the popular crowd, and try to be just like them, it’s all about faking it til you make it, pretending to be someone you are not.

Trying to seem “whiter” is not a full-time thing though. Like so many others I have always code-switched, like when I’m with my parents or around other Chinese people or immigrants, I’d let my Chinese side be more apparent, but in environments where I was surrounded by white people I revert to sound more “white”, sometimes I don’t even notice myself doing this.

But after living in China for the last almost 7 years, I’ve become a little rusty at this, so when I moved in with my white in-laws in February of this year, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was not at the top of my game when it comes to blending in, and it made my in-laws uncomfortable.

A little bit about my husband’s family: they are very nice, middle class New Englanders, they are well-educated, politically liberal, and have never, and probably would never say anything that would be considered overtly racist.

“Racist” is a loaded term these days, because it’s so often narrowly defined as inflammatory, hate-filled expressions. A lot of other types of racially insensitive or abrasive interactions get shuffled into a category called “micro-aggressions”.

I find the term “micro-aggressions” to be a silly term, because it is grounded in the perspective of those who commit them, whose thoughtless words and acts that are not meant to harm. But on the receiving end, these can be bracing, even traumatizing. And when micro-aggressions are committed within an extended family unit like mine, one that brings together a white American family and an immigrant daughter in law, addressing the situation can go directly in opposition with maintaining a friendly, harmonious atmosphere.

Without going into too much detail, over months of living with my in-laws, I’ve come to understand that my fluent English and my ease with a lot of surface level aspects of mainstream American lifestyle gave the impression that I also have American values just like theirs. This makes me think of when I lived in China, and noticed how many Han Chinese people don’t really think about how there are other Chinese people who think and live differently than they do. When you are the mainstream demographic, you can go through your entire life without ever understanding other kinds of people, and not even feel like you’ve missed a thing.

Going back to what I said earlier about how our commitment to social justice must start within, I think if my in-laws were able to acknowledge and anticipate how we may have differences in values and in the the way we communicate and express our feelings, we could have had an easier time understanding one another. I would not place this responsibility solely on them, but like many people of color in this country, I have been watching and imitating white people all of my life, while many white people don’t even know this is going on the whole time.

As our country become increasingly diverse, and as more culturally and ethnically complex families are formed, I ask that each of you think about how conflicts can form from simple misunderstandings, and that those misunderstandings are in fact opportunities to create better understanding. Bridging difference can be hard work, but it’s not impossible.

When someone with a different background as you come into your life, as a colleague, as a friend, as family, there are conversations to be had about what the world is like through their eyes, I think our lives can all be a lot richer when we have more of these conversations, rather than wonder why someone doesn’t behave the way we think they ought to.

Learn more about My Life, My Stories here.

Learn more about Encore.org here.