I have never been pulled over by the police for the "terrible crime" of being dark-skinned. I have never been referred to by derogatory racial epithets. My skin happens to be paler than that of most Caucasians I run into, actually.
And yet I am still an Other here.
I don't claim to know all the pain and discrimination that people have gone through because they have darker skin that the majority in their area. But I do know the pain and isolation that comes from being different from those around me.
I was born in England, and my parents and I moved to Canada when I was five years old. It may sound like a trifling thing, especially when you consider the amount of racial discrimination that occurs still, but regardless it was still the beginning of a buttload of pain, the kind that a child is hard-pressed to understand and cope with, the kind that leaves lasting scars. In spite of the fact that I have lived in this country for over 20 years now, I cannot relate fully to Canadian culture, and I still consider myself, at the core, British.
I started school with a foreign accent, which was the perfect invitation for classmates to make my life a living hell. They excluded me from games because I was different. Different not in any way that should have counted, but I was different enough to provide them a wonderful excuse. I spent years listening to them make fun of my accent, and eventually adopted a Canadian accent to give them one less reason to pick on me.
I want to point out that while lots of children adapt to the accent around them, often flawlessly, my case was somewhat different. Even now, I have a British accent that comes out when I am speaking to my parents, or when I am on holiday in England. My Canadian accent comes out whenever I speak to anybody else. I have actively tried to speak in my British accent to Canadians. It took too much effort, I stammered terribly, and in the end felt so much shame over it that I just reverted to the easier method of pretending I was just like them in order to not be stared at. In spite of my pride in being of British origin, the way I was treated when I was young made me feel such ingrained shame at that characteristic that it's easier now to hide it than to bring it out.
I have spoken to my parents in my British accent when close friends are around. It isn't like they don't know I'm British. But I cannot bring myself to speak to them that way. I can switch back and forth in a conversation involving, for example, my mother and Rei. But shame has become habit, and speaking with my British accent to a Canadian sounds forced now, fake, and uncomfortable.
All this treatment just opened the door to 8 years of being made fun of, and then 3 more years of me being ignored in high school because I'd learned to keep my head down and not to trust anyone. This treatment led to people stealing from me, sexually harassing me, threatening me, and actively hurting me. I was different, therefore it was okay.
I'm sure that by the end, people had forgotten why it was okay to hurt me. It had just become habit for them in the same way that hiding my accent and heritage had become habit for me.
I do not know the shame of being called words that are societally unacceptable because of their racial connotations. I do, however, know the pain of being called an "English muffin" by people who probably thought they were being clever. Just another reference to my heritage, and just another thing to make me ashamed of it. If I wasn't from England, they wouldn't be able to tease me like that.
And if anybody dares to say that such stupid words shouldn't have affected me... You're right. They shouldn't have. And they are stupid. But people overlook the fact that words do hurt, especially when they are intended to do so. Or even when they're merely intended to make you separate from everybody else, to call attention to your differences.
If words didn't hurt, we could all use the N-word with impunity.
Again, I want to stress that I am not saying that my pain is equal to the pain of those who have also suffered. Sometimes they have suffered much more than I have. I can't say what it's like to be East Asian, or Middle Eastern, or anything of the sort, because I am none of those things.
But I do know what it's like to be the Other. I know what it's like to feel shame over something I can't help, over my heritage, over something I shouldn't feel shame over.
This is something that tends to get overlooked in a lot of "Other" discussions. The Other in question is always different by skin colour, by language, by gender definition. There's no attention paid to the fact that a person can be made an outsider in spite of sharing skin colour, in spite of being in a 50/50 gender split, in spite of speaking the same language. I lived in a slightly different society for a while, and had an accent, and I was cast out before I even thought of trying to get in. I was Other.
In some ways, I still am, though most people wouldn't guess it. In order to fit in, even as marginally as I tend to, I have to hide a lot and rely on habits of self-protection. People find out that I was born in England, and suddenly I become special for it, either suddenly becoming more interesting or more avoidable because of the fact that I spent the first five years of my life in another country.
I'm reminded of an American I once spoke to through my call centre work. Upon finding out that I was in Canada, he suddenly affected a terribly fake Canadian accent and said, "You're in Canada, eh? You guys watch a lot of hockey, eh?" He reduced me to a stereotype, a false one at that, and one that pretty much existed as a joke to him.
That's what it was like. That's how people still treat me when they find out I'm from England. I cease to be a person, and instead become a cultural stereotype, a fascination, and what they think of as flattery is really just another way of pushing me aside, making me different from them.
I'm no more nor less different than I was before they knew. But hiding my differences is the only way they'll understand that, and it's an understanding of ignorance rather than an actual understanding.
Nobody should have to feel shame or guilt or discomfort because of their origin, their preferences, the million and one little things that make them awesome.
I'm tired of being told I couldn't possibly know what being an Other is like simply because I'm Caucasian in a predominantly Caucasian setting. I do know it. It is possible. And I personally think that those who refuse to accept it as a possibility are doing an injustice to those who must therefore suffer silently because nobody will take them seriously.
To me, that feels like the equivalent of telling somebody with chronic fatigue syndrome that they they couldn't possibly feel like an outsider in society, because their difference isn't obvious enough. The only way they could be "disabled enough" to be treated differently is if they were in a wheelchair or artificial limbs or something. Otherwise they're just complaining about nothing and should shut up, because they can't possibly know what it's like.
Sure, they may not know the trouble of getting into a building without ramps, but they know what it's like to not be taken seriously, to have to hide things or else risk scorn, to go through a problem silently.
I am both proud and ashamed of being who I am. Proud, because my heritage is awesome and has an interesting history and because I love the country I came from. Ashamed, because it's caused me such pain over the years thanks to ignorant fuckwads, and because I have to hide so much of it if I want a chance at getting by without suddenly becoming "special" in some way.
I am Caucasian. I live in the western world. I come from a middle-class upbringing.
And I am still Other.
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