Burning Skin.
This is a piece that I have been putting off for over a year. Maybe longer.
Note to the reader: Please be warned that this piece contains explicit language. This piece also features several audio clips, so get your headphones ready! This is one of my longer pieces so be prepared to sit with it.
This is something I have always wanted to talk about but felt that the timing was never right and as time went on I have come to realize that the timing never will be right. I am talking about the subject of race. It seemed that last year all notable thought leaders, powerful figures, and my peers of color all had something to say. For a while, I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to take away from the voices of the experts and the truly oppressed. After all, I am a young male who is relatively well off from the real dangers of the world. After enough time passed for me to deem it appropriate to speak my turn, I began to doubt whether anything I could say would be valid or worth listening to.
Herein lies one of the many great everyday tragedies of racism in our modern society. Did racism hurt my chances of getting ahead or was it due to my own failures in not putting enough effort to capitalize on the opportunity? Although I almost exclusively pull out the ‘race card’ in humorous conversation, I rarely do it with serious intent in everyday life. After all, ignorance is bliss, and who would want to wake up in a world where the deck is stacked against them based on the color of their skin or the faith they preach? Not me, and not many of my peers. It is this conundrum that many folks of color find themselves in, by which we want to acknowledge the role that race has played in our lives but that in doing so, we make ourselves vulnerable to the perception that we are weak and complaining and that everyone else has a tough life and that we should get over it. The worry is that bringing up the subject of race [as a person of color] and being rejected, is that in doing so, we end up moving the conversation backward on the matter. Therefore, often (as depicted by the media) only those with extreme and documented trauma are viewed as credible and worth listening to. Do not get me wrong in that I am not trying to diminish the voices of those most in need or most affected by systemic racism. As a matter of fact, I am not going or trying to talk too much about systemic racism in this piece. I am here to talk about casual racism. The racism that doesn’t make the headlines. The type of racism that doesn’t warrant a novel to be written about it. The type of racism that exists on neither end of the spectrum but rather somewhere in between it all.
The root function of language is to control the universe by describing it - James Baldwin
Below you’ll hear some of what has come and passed me by in my life thus far. The words that have come to shape my universe, and in turn, have shaped me.
I am not asking for your pity. But, maybe I am. I don’t want to scream for help and yet I need it. I don’t want to be a martyr. I don’t want to be another voice in the crowd either. I just want to be understood. And more than that, I hope that you see shades of you and your own life in the picture I am about to paint. To know that you aren’t alone. Scratch that. We aren’t alone and that the first step to making things better is to try to understand and accept each other.
Let’s address the title first. Burning skin? Pretty intense, huh. The truth is, for the longest time, I wish I could paint a new color all over my skin. Growing up in Indonesia as a hapa, I found myself “worshipped” for the relatively fair complexion of my skin when compared to that of other Indonesians. I was told [by society] that being white was better and that I was gifted the chance to at least be half of a white person. When I say “worship”, I don’t mean that folks bowed beneath me or that tributes were lining up before me as if I were an ancient king of old but rather I mean that I could see people look at me differently all the time. I don’t even want to use that word to describe my upbringing because it makes me sick to think that not only are the impacts of colonialism in Indonesia still felt in a very real economic and political sense but that the imposed notion from our western colonizers that the indigenous people of this land are inferior to the white man, still persists today. It is so ingrained subconsciously in the society of many post-colonial nations that we take it to be an immutable fact that we accept the way we do not question the sun rising each morning.
Without going too deep or meta, racism is not only internalized in my home country but is also accepted as the way of life. For all the “worship” that my whiteness provided me in better service at restaurants, improved perception of my athletic abilities, and other instances, I felt resentment. I was referred to as “Bule” a lot not only within my school but on occasion, by some extended family members as well. I could feel it and no one would say it but anything good that happened to me was often chalked up to the advantages I “must” have inherently possessed as a person who is half white.
At a young age, I tried to find ways to mitigate these negative experiences, and starting off as early as elementary school (I was enrolled in an Indonesian school, Cita Buana), I decided that my best bet was to blend in with the locals. I told my parents that I wanted to study Islam (so that I could fit in). I wanted to enroll in the national exams so that I could experience what my classmates had to (as an American citizen, I did not have to take this test). I wanted to force myself to experience all the highs and lows of being Indonesian so that others wouldn’t look at me differently. These efforts were spent mostly in vain.
In the same way that we often associate casual racism in America with that of ignorant comments about the quality of one’s English and wide generalizations about people of color, I experienced the same remarks myself from the position of being perceived as a white person who was being analyzed by Asians. A foreigner in my own home. In a way, my early years in Indonesia not only gave me my first taste of racism but also trained me to believe that this was the way things just were. We did not believe we were sipping the Kool-Aid because we had become so accustomed to racism’s taste that we couldn’t differentiate it from water. I learned that the world was this or that. Right or wrong. Asian or American. Eventually, I just chose American since it seemed easier.
Around the 5th or 6th grade, I began to push my parents, in subtle ways, to move me to the top international school in town. Jakarta International School, or now (for reasons I will not get into) as it is known, Jakarta Intercultural School (JIS). I knew that there were very many legitimate reasons to move schools. JIS was objectively a higher quality institution and the athletic and extracurricular programs they had were some of the best in the city. But deep down, I knew I was pushing for this move because I wanted to play ball with the white kids. I wanted to be a white kid. I wanted to burn the color in my skin. Have it peel off like paint in a decrepit building because being a person of color at that time to me, was one of the worst things one could be. Of course, I didn’t consciously know that this was what was motivating me to make the switch. I was too young to understand the inner workings of the racist beliefs I had adopted as a child. The self-loathing, which I understood to be normal. When I eventually moved to JIS, I told other students that I was both Indonesian and American. This revelation garnered mixed reactions in the middle school playground. Those who heard me say American first before Indonesian seemed to look at me in a more positive light and those that heard the reverse combination of my two dual identities seemed to look at me the way they looked indifferently at the (Indonesian) janitors who cleaned the hallways. After a couple of weeks in, I dropped the Indonesian part of my elevator pitch. I told folks that I was American and only upon being pushed did I reveal that I was also half Indonesian. I began to pretend that I couldn’t speak Indonesian and when pressed to do so in an urgent situation around friends, such as buying lunch at the cafeteria, I would feign a watered-down version of Indonesian that sounded like a tourist reading from a guidebook. I look back at this time and feel sick. I was a kid. I wanted to burn my skin to purify it of its color. I wanted to cut my tongue so that it could no longer utter its native notes. I remember even trying to style my hair to seem less unruly and more straight like that of my white friends. Or maybe, if the hair didn’t look like that of a white person, I would’ve accepted being mistaken for a Korean person. At least their skin was lighter than that of Indonesians and their economy (and soccer team) was much more successful than ours.
“Indos”
That is what we [foreigners] called Indonesians. It wasn’t just a shortcut due to laziness as it was a way to not only push Indonesian people away from us but also to make them seem beneath us. But what if you were Chinese Indonesian? This ethnic group in the country had historically accumulated a lot of wealth so they were called “Chindos”. Still viewed as other but not viewed as far beneath the white man. Colorism is still rampant throughout Asia, including Indonesia. We have been trained to not only view characteristics of western people as the most beautiful and the best but also have carved up our own communities to create a hierarchy within a hierarchy to exercise some level of self-preservation of relative status and perceived beauty. In short, when one person is bullied by another, the victim often bullies someone else to make themselves feel bigger and that is exactly what has happened in Indonesia and many other communities plagued by colorism. In my experience, I have seen Indonesia exhibit societal stratification based on a sliding scale of color by which those with lighter skin are viewed more preferably to those with darker skin; not dissimilar to what is seen in many other societies around the world. Furthermore, within the wide bands of colorism, there are other ethnic tensions between diverse populations such as those of Chinese descent, South Asian origin, or pacific islanders (i.e. Papuans). Only recently in Indonesia, has this discussion come to the surface of the mainstream media and consciousness of my generation (Read here). And for the record, this is not meant to be a paragraph bashing Indonesia as the poster child for colorism. Colorism is, unfortunately, an active force in many countries and Americans need to look no further than the recent release of the movie The Heights to see that the issue and discussion are still alive and active (Read here).
“The issue [colorism] is prevalent in all communities of color and has been taboo in part because it’s uncomfortable to talk about internal strife while also fighting against broader discrimination based on race and ethnicity”
“I thought you were a creepy Indo”
I still remember a girl in middle school saying this to me and perhaps that was the moment when I decided to cut my tongue and burn my skin. I can’t confirm if that was the specific moment but I know those words haven’t left me. And worse, I said that to someone else later. Perhaps I said it to put it on record where I stood. I was American. I am not an Indo.
Of course, as a kid trying to navigate the social maze that racism had created, I was bound to hit a dead-end at some point. I apparently had overplayed my hand at the table and put down the wrong card. I told folks I was Jewish. A fact that I had only recently learned on one of my summer trips to the U.S. to visit that side of the family. I didn’t really understand what being Jewish meant but I did know that back in America, a lot of Jewish people were white so that bringing this fun fact back to Indonesia was bound to score me some points. I was wrong. My middle school and high school bullies were not only well versed in general racism but also in very specific antisemitism. I quickly realized that I could barely find other Jewish kids at school. Perhaps they had gone into hiding as our predecessors had done so during darker times. I intentionally make this reference to the holocaust because there were kids who joked about it not happening. So, just like my Indonesian side, I tucked my Jewish card into my pocket and zipped it up.
High school came around and I think we can all agree that high school is a pretty awesome and messed up time in our lives. We think that we are becoming the person we will be for the rest of our lives but in reality, we are really a pixel in a larger picture that is still loading. A granular moment in the larger piece of theatre. I spent most of my high school trying to bolster my whiteness. Asian ideals of masculinity differ from that of Western, and specifically, American views of what it means to be a man. I had grown up with what one would call “softer masculinity”. I didn’t have any notions that there were any issues with having many friends who are girls or being more in touch with my feelings. From an early age, I loved the color pink, which in America is still viewed as a very “girly” color. But my own masculinity would be crushed by that of the predominantly American variety that permeated JIS. Here, might was right. In middle school, I was called a faggot and many thought I was gay because of my tendency to be easy friends with girls and so when high school came around, I knew it was the right time to change the narrative. Like any corny movie, I hit the weight room, decided to distance myself from most of my female friends, got a new haircut, and tried to exude what I thought was a cool and macho exterior. I ruined a lot of great friendships and romantic relationships in high school trying to follow my made-up guide about how to be a man; a guide I never truly believed in but thought it was the way things were if I wanted to be perceived as masculine in the American sense.
On UN Day, a day where we all wore clothes from our home countries, I always wore American clothes. New York Knicks tank top, with an Amerian flag bandana. Hell yeah, USA baby. We all soaked in what we thought high school was supposed to be based on the music videos on Youtube and the movies on TV. High school was about the jocks and the popular kids. The cool kids were always white though. So were the hot girls. The athletic kids also used to be the white kids and the one or two black or latinx kids depending on the sport. If it was basketball, any black person was thought to be automatically great and if it was soccer, the same was assumed for anyone who spoke Spanish. The reality is not that different here in the US or other places but we were at an international school where were supposed to be a bastion for diversity and therefore inclusion. However, the inherent outward diversity present at school did not help us tear down the racism that we had all grown up to believe was the way of the world. Rather, it further reinforced the status quo by making us think that if what we had interpreted as racism was still present in this diverse environment then maybe what we are experiencing is not really racism but rather the natural order of the world. We did everything right didn’t we? Didn’t we tick off every box? Every color and country was represented here? We comfortably embraced a false sense of inclusion based solely on the diversity reflected in our group’s makeup. Pouring all the colors onto the canvas doesn’t automatically make it a rainbow. In a way, this experience was foreshadowing what I would come to realize about America and being American once I had made the journey across the pond for university and now work. In America, we espouse the notion of being a nation that is a melting pot, and therefore we are supposedly an inclusive place for all. Representation does matter but it’s not the end of the story, it’s the beginning (More on this another time!). These thoughts never occurred to me in high school and have only bubbled to the surface of my mind in recent years. High school was mostly me putting up my walls to guard my precarious identity of being an American. In many ways, I was practicing the idea of putting up walls to keep out everything non-American long before Donald Trump started preaching it.
Fast forward to college. I was 18 years old and starting at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. I was an American coming back to America. Coming back to the real homeland that I had never really known except through my fantasies which had been fueled by Hollywood, the internet, and my annual trips each summer growing up.
I quickly learned that I was not as American as I thought I was (Duh. No surprise here!). Despite my best act, they could see right through me. I was a yellow man in the white man’s land. I had been taught (through the media) that being Mulsim was not something to be proud of all around the world but I had naively hoped that I would not encounter such prejudice in the U.S., especially at an “elite” private university. Some of my friends who would consider themselves to be very open-minded found themselves unable to move past their predisposed position that Islam was a violent religion. Below is an excerpt from a previous piece titled Our America, where I recall a couple of instances where I dealt with Islamophobia:
“With my first friend, I shut down and stormed out of the room after calling them choice words that likely only exacerbated an already tense discussion. After calling that friend out and seeing no progress in bridging the divide, I decided that the next time someone made such discriminatory remarks, I would try to hear them out before fighting fire with fire. That opportunity came several weeks later as another friend made a similar remark and I chose to hear them out on that occasion and to continue to question them on their statement. After a relatively calm and open discussion, I came to learn that my second friend’s Islamophobic statement came from a place of fear as opposed to hatred. He was afraid of what he didn’t know. He had read about the act of terrorism in the news and was worried that something similar might happen to him during his own travels home for the break. He admitted that such irrationality was likely due to the stress he was feeling during a busy exam period that added to the general anxiety he was feeling due to having not seen his family after a long semester. Like many of us, he was just going through a rough time and therefore wasn’t thinking with full clarity.”
Unfortunately, not all of my experiences dealing with Islamophobia can be recounted with such ease. There were many other difficult insults and conversations that were had. Sensing a change in the tides, I decided that something needed to be done. I was not ready to let go of my ideal of being an American person just yet; a white American person. I pulled out the Jewish card. A card I had known so little about growing up but knew that it would provide me some level of common ground with others. In a moment of Deja Vu, I began to see how people reacted differently to me when I said I was both Jewish and Muslim. And just like before, I dropped the Muslim part from my introduction. Plowing ahead, I decided that in order to actualize my own identity as an American, it was time to join a social fraternity.
It didn’t work out. I felt lost at sea. This wasn’t the America I had grown up knowing. What the hell was Lacrosse? I am not saying I am a saint but the level of objectification I came across was off the charts. It began to hit me that maybe I really wasn’t as American as I thought I was. As if in a feverish sleep, my identity was tossing and turning. I had changed the mask so many times that I was beginning to feel that there was nowhere I could fit in. Despite the early setbacks, I decided that college was still going to be a fun time for me but that I was going to focus on my career and push the identity stuff to the side for now. So I poured myself into my extracurriculars. I joined several different student organizations and dropped out of most but ended up joining a coed business fraternity (yes, it is confusing that it is a coed organization but it’s still called a fraternity). This was a fortuitous turn. Alternative greek life in America sprung up side by side with social greek life and historically has included organizations that focus on career development, community service, or cultural celebration, which became spaces and places for people of color to create and experience their own version of greek life. This was one of several experiences as a young adult in America that likely triggered my own racial reckoning. The election of Donald Trump to the executive office showed many Americans, including myself how polarized and divided our country really was. I can recall a very vivid moment when I was in the suburbs, where I remember a neighboring man yelling at me asking who I was and to get out. They had thought I was a trespasser in my own friend’s yard and assumed so because I didn’t look like the majority of the people in this neighborhood.
“Who are you?! What are you doing here?! Get out!”
He didn’t need to drop a racial slur because we both knew what the undertones of his words were. I can recall countless times when I was the only person of color at a restaurant or store and I received different treatment. In every professional role I have held, I have always been one of the few, if not only Asian people in the office. I work in the sports and entertainment industry and Asian representation at all levels is severely lacking. I remember at one job, HR asked all new hires to talk about their experiences and ask what they thought about qualities needed to advance in the firm and become an executive. I answered “being white” as one of those qualities needed. The room was stunned. It was true though, and everyone knew it. Through the corner of my eye, I noticed that our HR lead, who was also a person of color, smirked a little bit.
Over the past few years, I have learned (and am still learning) how we have institutionalized racism in this country through a multitude of mechanisms such as the war on drugs, voter suppression, and financial discrimination. Through literature and conversations with other Asian-Americans, I continue to learn and further grasp a better understanding of our history in this country, which has been littered with many racist atrocities such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment camps, the murder of Vincent Chin, and many other incidents (most recently the mass shooting in Atlanta and the general increase in anti-Asian discrimination during the pandemic).
Of course, literature can only take one so far. I knew that I needed to not only learn about but also embrace the various aspects of my identity and cultural history. I picked up many of my passions from growing up that I had thrown away in order to escape my identity as an Asian person. Slowly but surely, I began to speak more Indonesian and have tried to seek out communities of other Indonesian’s wherever I go. I am not a deeply religious person but I have tried to celebrate all the Muslim and Jewish holidays and traditions when I can with family and friends, and to learn the significance of both my cultures through their stories and own lived experiences dealing with faith. I continue to acknowledge the advantages that I have received in life for being half white and do not take such privilege as lightly as I did when I was younger. I have come to terms with the fact that I will never fit into one box neatly and that’s ok.
As has been stated above, I never had a singular come to Jesus moment in my own exploration of the role of race in my life. As a matter of fact, I probably knew deep down that this moment of reckoning was going to have to come one way or another. I knew that racism had messed me up in many ways. I didn’t act racist in the way we would commonly imagine, such as overtly addressing someone with a derogatory remark based on the color of their skin. Rather, without my own knowledge or consent, I became an undercover missionary preaching the gospel of racism through how I lived my life and how I codeswitched at every possible turn to make myself conform to what I perceived to be acceptable to society. At some point in the past few years, I stopped running and that is why I have chosen to take a pause in my story there.
This piece and the experiences I have shared are meant to be a snapshot in time. Now as a 23-year-old Indonesian-American (and Jewish Muslim!), I am taking a beat to reflect on what I have experienced and how it has shaped me. These stories are meant to highlight the subtle ways in which racism plays and has played an active role in our lives. This is the way it has impacted my life and it may have hit you differently but the point is that racism is inextricably mixed in with each one of our identities and our everyday lives and that one step we can take towards breaking down these barriers we have set within and between ourselves is to look critically inwards and examine even the most mundane actions in our life. This is not to take away from the battle against dismantling systemic racism. Not at all. Far too often we fall into the trap of individuals being held responsible for systemic failures and I am not asking you to solve the institution racism on your own. Rather, I am imploring you to begin to take an active role in your own life to unravel the ways in which racism has twisted and turned your own self-image and how you may have taken actions in your own life to perpetuate racism’s negative effects.
I am signing off below with a little voice note. No script. Just some candor to wrap this piece up.
Note: There are a lot more experiences I would like to have shared but I felt they were still too painful for me to share at this point in time. If you reach out, I am happy to connect and talk more.
Bonus Reading: 6 Charts That Dismantle The Trope Of Asian Americans As A Model Minority (NPR)
