“My cousin is buried near your cousin”

Suddenly thought of a conversation I overheard of my Latina co-workers, " my cousin is buried near your cousin".

As the world is busy directing their racism against Chinese bodies due to the corona virus outbreak, I thought of the implications of growing up as a person of color in this country. So many bodies were buried due to gun violence and continuous act of racism. When the word diversity is associated with complaints of affirmative actions by the privilege white, when chinese are seen as the model minority, thus pitting us against other minorities; when the Oscar award’s annual buzzword is about how diverse or not diverse is the production team, thus clearly misdirecting us to think that by including people of color in a production team, we will solve the disparity of opportunity and race against the standard of excellence deemed acceptable by the 5000+ white Hollywood executives.

I am the selected few who got out of our so-called ‘third-world' countries and excelled in White America by attending an ivy-league institution. Yet how I think or package myself couldn’t be further away from the standard of conduct of an ivy-league grad.

While being exposed to what is excellent, over the years, I have to continuously defend myself for being such a an 'unplaceable' product. This confusion of people couldn’t place me in the 'right' place has led to many voices in my head mirroring society’s pressure to tame and beat me into submission, submission into the idea that being a product of a very curated Elite education experience has to look and be successful in a certain way.

I am constantly on a pendulum swinging between freedom and the chokingly manicured narrative I represent. To be truly honest and authentic is a difficult quest and it requires constant self monitoring and de-colonizing our ‘polluted’ common sense.