On Being a Person of Color, Grief, and Justice

Being a person of color is a world of culture worth celebrating and cherishing. A rich history full of stories of hardship and laughs and love and legends and strength passed down from ancestors that run through our bones. Being a person of color is vibrant and full of life, a family you’re born into and a family you discover as you embrace your non-white being. Being a person of color means being hyper-vigilant. Subconsciously scanning the room for a non-white face and being unsurprised when you do not find one. It’s the tension between our shoulder blades and rigid facial muscles that we did not know was there until we relax in the presence of a fellow person of color. It’s also being hyper-competitive. Feeling the need to compete with each other. Feeling like there cannot possibly be enough space for the both of us because that’s what we’ve always known.

Being a person of color is paranoia. It’s knowing that you’re probably safe here and they’re probably not looking at you or acting a certain way because you’re not white… but aren’t they? And then they ask you if you’ve ever eaten dog before or if you smell like curry when you sweat or if they can touch your hair, or your boss diminishes your being solely into your race by making a “joke” at work about not being able to tell the two brown guys apart. It’s thinking that your mom would probably be safe going grocery shopping by herself… but putting your to-do list aside and going with her anyways when you can because, after all, probably doesn’t play favorites. Location matters when you’re a person of color. Being a person of color is feeling the need to contact one of the two Black faculty members who interviewed you during the group interview process who spoke to you as a fellow BIPOC of intersecting marginalized identities to ask if they have been able to find community outside of the university… after inquiring and not being understood by the all-white current student panel in which a queer-identifying woman replied, “you mean like, friends?”.

There is a certain expertise that comes with being a person of color. A certain knowing that your people, your community, your family are seen as outsiders, as othered, and you or they might be the target of another racial attack because you look like them or they look like you.  This expertise includes a learned skill of coping and living with ongoing, repeated racial trauma.  That trauma comes in all forms of words and actions and it always partially belongs to a collective such that we are not afforded the luxury of grieving only for ourselves and our immediate family but instead grieve for our community and all other people of color as we are all oppressed by the same systems of white power. 

We are not afforded the luxury of grieving privately, on our own terms, as we are often forced to share this trauma with the world, to process it and convert it into “proof” and put it on display. External proof of our inner truth. Sometimes we are put on display when we don’t want to be there. We try to scroll past, but by then it’s too late.

We are not afforded the luxury of time. Every day a new headline involving the fatal consequences of white supremacy takes the place of yesterday’s. So much happens in one week that crucial topics become irrelevant and seemingly insensitive to more recent tragedies every day. When do we transform our trauma and share our expertise when the tragedy and the trauma never stop building?

While grieving, we are forced to use our energy not only to take care of ourselves and each other while continuing to provide for our families, go to work, grow in our careers, maintain and be present in our relationships, to heal from heartbreak and loss and celebrate joy as well, but to also educate others on experiences we lived, not learned, and to provide tutorials and lesson plans, steps for a better future, while amplifying each other’s voices.  And still then, we are looked over, pushed aside, not believed, not enough. I remind myself that we do not owe our energy to anyone. That there is no expiration date to our expertise. Sometimes it’s hard to believe.

White people are tired of seeing us try to use our voices and educating themselves (with resources we provide), tired of having difficult conversations and keeping up with which businesses align with socially and racially just views, etc.  And of course that is valid (as all feelings are). It takes an enormous amount of work and energy to live a socially and racially just lifestyle in America.  We are also tired.

We are tired of doing that same work as well as and while seeing our battered faces and bodies on the news, our names as hashtags, our being non-white or “not from here” continue to be a valid excuse for us to be eliminated, shot, poisoned, harassed, “randomly selected”, threatened, beaten, pulled over, sexually assaulted, taken away from our families, targeted, and then having to internalize and/or publicly display our hearts and our soul in order to keep the momentum going forward.

Selfishly, guiltily, impossibly, there are times when I wish I could free myself of the personal responsibility and fervor I feel in relation to achieving justice. Free myself from knowing that justice does not exist without there being justice for all. I want to read, I want to paint.  I want to create art, make love, write letters, grow a business, spend time with my family and friends… without the accompanying nagging inside my mind. I don’t want to be only partially present during celebrations and I don’t want my post-sex euphoria to end with me thinking about how I am going to use my experience and my privilege to further the movement for racial justice.  I wish that immersing my body in nature was not a necessity at times for me to sort through my thoughts and process my past and present racial trauma and to come up with ideas on how to exhibit my experiences in a way that people will listen. At times I fantasize of a bubble, a place populated only by those who believe in racial justice and social equity in an ideal way that I have yet to even envision. Sometimes I allow myself to believe that my children will grow up in a bubble like that and that when I am 60 years old and our current youth are making the major decisions, the bubble will have engulfed Earth all together. Every day I get closer to envisioning what life would be like inside of that bubble. I encourage you all to envision your own bubble. Don’t just stop at everyone is happy there. Realistically, what would be different than where we live now? How would we be able to achieve that?

So please, in all seriousness, do what you need to do to take care of yourself and prioritize your mental health.  We need you at your best. Justice does not lie at the end of a road and it surely cannot be reached passively or solely through fantasizing a Utopia. Recharge and come back ready to listen, ready to learn, ready to try something new, try something again, apply yourself and activate others. Ready to practice, self-reflect, ask questions, seek answers. Do the mental labor that people are so quick to expect from people of color. Ask yourself: Why do I think this? Why do I think I know this? Do I know this? Why is it so difficult for me not to think this? Why do alternatives to this seem so scary to me? Why do I feel like this doesn’t concern me? How did we get here? How can we get there?

As always, remember to be kind to yourself. Be kind to others. Speak up when you see something, take a stand.

And to my fellow BIPOC, I see you, I am here for you, I hold space for you, always. Allow yourself to love and be loved. You are worthy.

Love always,

JC