Given the furor over Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the resulting backlash in #BlackLivesMatter, I, as a fellow person of color, have beheld the explosion of long-held sentiment and thought deeply about the roots of those sentiments.
Although I can't speak on the black experience, it is at least possible for me to imagine some of those feelings of being other, less than, illegitimate, unworthy - and the exhaustion that comes from thinking or feeling those things. It goes way beyond the kind of chip-on-the-shoulder insecurity, beyond the wanting to be something more than what you are now, to a kind of wanting not to be yourself, to almost a willing away of something so fundamental to yourself that you know is impossible. It's an identity issue that you constantly grapple with, not because you haven't done the necessary soul-searching and hard-looking and found a sense of self to be proud of, but because incidents here and there cause you to doubt. To doubt your value as a person, your value in this society, and how much any lack thereof is a reflection on you rather than an inherent inequality in society.
And amidst that ceaseless grappling, something concrete, something extreme like Ferguson happens, and everything is for naught. The respectability, the "twice as hard" - worthiness is shown definitively to be elusive to the likes of you, despite your best intentions, your best efforts, your best everything.
This is how it is to be an Other in American society, the invisible label on some of us that the others don't talk about.
I was fortunate enough to have grown up in an area where others looked like me, so I didn't feel so Other. Still there was that sense of dual identity, reinforced by my father's conflation of any unacceptable behavior as American, which compromised our worth in his eyes. Wanting to spend time with friends, buy supplies for our burgeoning lives, partake in the movies/music/trends of popular culture - all of this supposedly made us dumb, childish, conformist-type failures, and, as is typical of identity issues, made us feel that push-pull of wanting to be/have and feeling bad for it.
I could say that having "Chinese" and "American" so starkly defined for me became a division that I felt acutely for the rest of my life, but I have experienced enough genuine diversity and acceptance both in others and myself for it not to be. And I am thankful for that. But when it comes to that divisive sense of Us vs Them, Same vs Other, I realized that for me, although it isn't race, it is something else. I have always found difficulty in having grown up in a dysfunctional and unsupportive family, and my pain has always been in observing those who have grown up in loving families, wishing it had been the same for me. It's a fundamental truth about myself that I can never change, and yet.
The issue really came to the fore in college. Experiencing a kind of life away from my family, and that supposedly unalterable truth of my dysfunctional family history became somehow alterable in my mind. So then, the grappling. In the meantime I was fighting just to stay in college, because financial aid denied me given my father's income, not believing that he had refused to support me. I was alone in this fight, much like I'd been alone through most of my application process, and while I struggled I observed all of those whose situations were set, who did not have to fight, much less know something other than being set in their situations. And there it was, privilege staring me in the face, privilege I didn't have.
Though that situation was eventually resolved, it colored my entire perception. As long as I kept working at having my situation be set, I wouldn't have to feel less than, was a subconscious but recurrent thought. Except then it became less about situation and more about emotional disposition, and having that be stable or "set". I only recently realized that I must have been depressed for much of college, in a kind of fatalist haze that I'd always attributed to quarter-life crisis. Even so, at the time I still knew that my reactions and interactions were always less sunny and less breezy than those of my lovingly-raised peers. My "emotional baggage" haunted me - some had pointed it out in high school, yes - but in college it was less because it was there than because for others it wasn't there.
I wanted more than anything to be light-hearted, to take things less seriously, to be wound less tightly, to always be able to afford to give others the benefit of the doubt or the emotional room to come and go as they please. And at many times in my adult life, I would have said that I succeeded in becoming that. Except then something happens, an emotional curveball that triggers an avalanche of hurt, and I am no longer successful, I have not become at all - and did I ever become? Or did I just pretend? I really don't think I just pretended, except all emotional progress seems to have been lost. And what more painful reminder could you get of having had to work (to grapple and fight) other than to have all of that work lost?
But I give myself no other choice than to continue to fight. Not because I lack the privilege to stop, but because this is what self-worth is truly made of.