{"id":18,"date":"2014-10-10T23:23:51","date_gmt":"2014-10-11T06:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/?p=18"},"modified":"2014-10-10T23:25:57","modified_gmt":"2014-10-11T06:25:57","slug":"the-hidden-privilege-in-being-passable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/2014\/10\/10\/the-hidden-privilege-in-being-passable\/","title":{"rendered":"Can we internalize others’ pain in our identity formation?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending Hapa-palooza<\/a>\u2019s night of 8 stories<\/strong>, a celebration of mixed-race identity and culture. As a grassroots organization, Hapapalooza brought in many speakers from all walks of life with students, professors, music artists, writers, even a radio host! The talks were very inspiring in their general trend of questioning identity without a clearly identified race.<\/p>\n

One of the most interesting parts of the night for me was a young woman\u2019s story about the racism that her grandfather faced when he was alive as a Japanese-Canadian. Her mother was allowed to be exempt from the War Measures Act that interned Japanese people living in Canada due to being a Canadian citizen and half-white. At the end of the talk, this young woman said how she found it hard growing up between various racial identities, feeling the spit on her grandfather\u2019s face as if it were her face, and feeling the racist words he heard in her own ears. As I sat there, I found this difficult to digest. Being able to \u201cpass\u201d as white allowed this girl freedom from not only racism, but it allows her inclusion into two cultural circles: Japanese and Canadian culture. How does being a passable mixed-race person allow one to take racism that has been directed at others and internalize it?<\/p>\n

I feel uncomfortable with the rhetorical strategy of taking someone else\u2019s pain and using it to situate one\u2019s own narrative within the context of overcoming. Can we really feel the pain of use it as our own? In family, we can learn from the pain and suffering of our ancestors to inform our own understanding of their identity, but that pain was dealt to them. We can empathize, learn from, and be enraged by tragic incidents, but someone listening to a tragedy hasn\u2019t had a crime committed towards them. Where does that justification begin?<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t pick and choose the ethnicities we are born with, but we can choose to understand how we identify with the cultures that they originate from. Picking and choosing, like Fred Wah choosing Chinese, the \u201cstruggle of being a Chink,\u201d yet saying that one is \u201cpassable\u201d and \u201con the hyphen\u201d is difficult for me to digest as a mixed-race person myself.<\/p>\n

I would love to hear your feedback, please leave any comments you have below!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending Hapa-palooza\u2019s night of 8 stories, a celebration of mixed-race identity and culture. As a grassroots organization, Hapapalooza brought in many speakers from all walks of life with students, professors, music artists, writers, even a radio host! The talks were very inspiring in their general trend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4602,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4602"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions\/23"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}