The Brief and Wondrous Life of Risa de Dios

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Working for “The Man” Part 3

My boss and I stepped out for a cigarette. She told me that she wasn’t racist because she has a friend who is black. Yes, she pulled the “I have a black friend” card. This friend is a secret service or some high level government agent. He’s married to a white woman and lives in the suburbs. He’s done very well for himself and he has told her that he never experienced racism in his life. 

The problem with this is that she has taken it upon herself to perpetuate this myth that we have come so far that racism is no longer a thing. This may be true in their bubble world, but it is not actually true because of her problematic colorblindness for one. She also has trouble with acknowledging her privilege for another. As a libertarian, her belief is that everyone either uplifts themselves or causes their own struggles. 

Another issue is that she is speaking for him taking away all authentic reflection upon this man’s life. Was she there with him growing up? Was she in school with him and living in his shoes every single day of his life? Is she there when people gaze at him and his white wife? There is no way for her to know for sure if what he is saying to her is his actual lived experience. 

This brings me to the final problem with her friend. There are many reasons why he would say that he has not experienced racism. First and least likely is that he has in fact gone about his days without any microaggressions, those stinging annoyances that occur on a daily basis for many people of color. Second, he may, out of friendship, want to make her feel better about the world’s shittiness and refute any inequity he may have experienced. Third, he may not want to relive any of that trauma for her and play the victim. He may want to say he achieved his level of excellence and he did not have to work twice as hard to get half as far. 

In any of these cases, he gave her ammunition to perpetuate this myth of we’ve come a long way. That is, if he said this to her at all. 

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Working for "The Man" Part 2

After the exchange about the whole education system, my boss proceeded to tell me how colorblind she is. I found this highly ironic since I know she studied art and advertising before she had this beautiful bi-racial family. I so desperately wanted to explain to her that the problem is not in seeing color. We are all beautiful shades of color under the sun. We should be proud and comfortable in the skin we are given from birth. What would the world be without all of the colors in the spectrum? It would be bland, dull, boring, and mundane. Having pigment and having melanin is not the problem at all. The problem lies in people deciding prematurely how to react to us or how we will react to them solely based on the color of our skin. Being colorblind is not a solution; it is a cop out and is problematic.

Back to my conversation with her husband, he told me a little anecdote about when he first came to this country and he was driving a fancy car with his white girlfriend at the time in Miami. (Must be nice not to have your typical immigrant experience.) The cops pulled him over and assumed it was because he looked like a drug dealer with such a nice car. He admitted they were nicer to him when they saw that the woman was in the car with him and she did most of the talking. He appreciated their job and what they did and what he wanted me to take away from this story was that he complied with what they wanted him to do so there was no incident.

I tried so hard to hide the fact that what he said incensed me. Internally, my blood was boiling at his staunch refusal to see that had he been travelling alone, his experience could have ben drastically different? I’m sitting there thinking, how can he not see that the whole reason we are having this discussion is the fundamental problem with police brutality in general? The reason we need to talk about whether or not they would have given him problems is based on the discretion of the officer and the attitude of that officer towards darker skinned people. This is all rudimentary stuff. None of this should be new to anyone or have to revealed as if it is somehow ensconced by his veil of personal experience. Just because experiences are not universal, does not mean that there are not things outside of your purview that are unjustly happening.

I kept thinking to myself, "This is it. This is how your dumbass gets fired." At that point, I was drunk and the philosopher in me kept wanting to continue the debate, to ask him questions that would unshackle this man and bring him out of his proverbial cave.

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Working for “The Man” Pt. 1

By “The Man”, I mean. The white libertarian woman self identified as colorblind. She was born in the WASP world, grew up in Strong Island, “made herself from nothing” but her sweet connections when she got to the city, and now has a beautiful bi-racial family since marrying her immigrant husband. I spent my weekend with this woman and her husband really trying to see why they think the way they do. 

It started like any other night with me, with a couple of drinks. I forget how the conversation came up, but the husband asks me why black people don’t go to school and they brought up bullshit statistics from Lord knows what sources and I may not have done the research but I have always known black excellence and resilience in the face of adversity, so I couldn’t even fathom what they were talking about. Even still, I’m not unaware of the dropout rates and numbers that speak nothing to the lived experiences of people of color. I tried to explain that from an early age, schools as institutions are treating their children of color differently. While a little white girl who has trouble with authority is seen as cheeky or going through a phase, a little black girl is seen as someone who has an attitude problem. All the while, these children of color are punished, separated from their peers, made to feel ashamed, suspended, expelled, the list goes on and on. This kind of environment is not conducive to learning. When you feel as though every day you are targeted, when you feel as though you have to defend yourself every day from all corners in a place where you come to better yourself, when you see the inherent unfair treatment based on something so esoteric as skin color, it’s enough to turn you off from school and find other alternatives. 

I tried so hard to get them to see that there is a clear school to prison pipeline system. The cards are patently stacked up against these children who will become adults. The husband brushed off my comments like I had no idea what I was talking about and then asked me why is it that black people are not continuing on to higher education. I had to go into the intricacies of how poverty works and yes, there are some that turn to drugs and hustling in any way they can just to afford basic standards of living. Of course there are people out here committing crimes instead of going to school, but that is not the full picture of how or why they got there. There are also other unfavorable factors that work against people of color in the most basic of institutions (i.e. housing, education, banking, etc). Sometimes, they are faced with the choice of going to work and contributing to the household but losing that house because their income added to their caregivers’ puts them in a slightly higher bracket, or not working and definitely not being able to afford college. Some have terrible credit, their caregivers have terrible credit and can’t cosign on loans, and they are unable to finance their own education. Others have younger family members they feel a responsibility to look after and put those young ones before themselves. These narratives also fell upon deaf ears, but these are real things that real people have to go through every single day of their lives.

This is just one of the things we spoke about this night and this does not reflect all of the things I wanted to say about vouchers, zone schools, the white savior complex some teachers in the “inner city” experience, and some teachers who have given up on any hope of improving the education system and have relegated themselves to be bonafide babysitters. 

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The Guardian Brothers

I have just watched this movie in its entirety. It has me a little conflicted though with its cute, quirky poorly dubbed moments and its homage to the Chinese culture. I love the way the tension between tradition and modernity is depicted through the lantern festival as a fun thing to do for some and a serious aspect of the Chinese grieving process; Shen Tu’s readiness to accept that they were irrelevant vs. Yu Lei and Beckett’s drive to protect the humans no matter the cost to them; and Rain’s argument of keeping the grandmother’s recipe the same as it has been for a hundred years vs. her mother’s willingness to change it.  I especially liked the use of firecrackers to keep the evil spirits at bay; the piece of jade that acts as a guide for Shen Tu and Rain on their quest to find Yu Lei, and of course the hanging of posters to honor the guardians of the spirit world. These are deeply meaningful things and most likely superficial aspects of such a rich culture.

The aspect that I am grappling with is the presence of evil in the world. The competing shopkeeper whose name escapes me is sleazy and conniving. For me, he illustrates a component of evil that still remains even after the Nian is slain. The Nian is what they refer to in the film as an “ancient evil”, but how is that physical manifestation much more different than the evil that Mr. Rogman represents? If he is in the same vein of evil, then doesn’t that mean that the people still need the guardians to protect them? 

The end has me feeling dissatisfied because the story starts out as a mission for the old gods to make a comeback in the humans’ world and it ends with them “rarely coming to visit”. It goes back to the point that I brought up about the world still having the need or them. By the end, everyone just concedes that the modern world has no need for guardians or gods anymore and everyone is just okay with that. The whole reason why the Nian came back, in my opinion, was because both the immortals and the mortals forgot their history. Shen Tu and Yu Lei had no idea about that wall that had been covered depicting the Nian and the humans, especially the children had not learned of their connection to the spirits that protected their ancestors for millennia. 

Maybe it’s because I am so into theology and the mythos of cultures ancient or otherwise, but I am not about letting the stories of old go. They give us moral teachings and tell beautiful stories that illuminate our paths in our personal quests in doing the right thing. They have the ability to reveal truths about the nature of humanity through timeless perspectives while being deeply rooted in their own contextual time period. There is something about that sort of thing that really speaks to me on a deep level. All this to say, I thought it was adorable and it left me a little empty in the end. 

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What We Talk about When We Talk about the Immigrant Experience

Today, I watched a woman who was there for me all of my life turn 60 years old. I celebrated with her, her family, her friends, and her employers. She immigrated here with nothing to her name but a degree in biochemical engineering. She is a genius living amongst us. She can do calculations in her head that would require calculators with our feeble knowledge of mathematics. This woman came here with nothing and said, yes, it is okay for me to nanny children, even though she is light years above all of that. Why? She chose her family. Supporting them was more important than her ego, the status she felt she deserved in this country and in her life, and what those around her told her she was worth. I witnessed my fellow Filipinos again cowering to the white people in the crowd for understanding and appreciation and I had to hide my disgust. This man came to this party looking like a confederate soldier in all but his attire. He  had the beard and the hair. He thanked her for her service, but I don’t think he ever grasped what my aunt had left behind. She had to leave her two kids behind and raise someone else’s just because they paid her more than she would get to take care of her own children in her own country as a fucking biochemical engineer. Let that just sink in for everyone. 

There are countless stories like this one. Such as, the security guard in my building. He spent the better part of 18 years guarding my building. It wasn’t until just recently I had found out that he was a Chemistry major in his native Haiti. These people take pride in their work. They live and laugh and grow amongst us. They pay their dues. They suffer unimaginable indignities way below their station for the sake of family. 

These people are loved. They have families that rely on their generosity. They prosper because they have stakes as high as those who they work for in the States if not higher. They are human being capable of love and sacrifice. These are not criminals. They bleed and feel and love just as hard as those in America are documented. The only difference is their ancestors were conquered by those ancestors of those who have the privilege of saying that their lives and their turmoil do not matter. 

#brown lives matter #fuck colonialism #fuck neocolonialism #hard working immigrants #filipino #filipina #love #love conquers all #amor invincit omnia #sacrifice #immigrant #the Immigrant Experience 

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I’m About That Life

I grew up in the Lower East Side in Village View, a Mitchell Lamas apartment, and I have had friends who lived and died in Campos. Other friends of mine live in the Riis, Baruch, Vladeck, and Smith projects and together we witnessed, first hand, the years of neglect and indifference to the plights of our community. Today, developers are carving out parcels of land on property owned by NYCHA in order to create “affordable” housing that will be private property of the developers, which means our youth will see the gilding of these lilies of their fields to which they will have no access. It means that the city is failing at repairing the buildings that have been standing there since FDR’s time and it sends a message to the disenfranchised people the majority of which are people of color living in these communities that they are not worth the investment, but what is worth the investment are the buildings they are creating to divest away from the those same people who have lived there for years, growing families, working hard to provide for themselves and for the community. We, the residents, are not consulted and will not directly benefit from these new developments and we are being force fed lies about how the buildings will create jobs for our young people and bring in revenue for them. The reality is that these developers have a vision for this community that does not include working people of color and those who cannot afford the rising costs of living will be driven out if we do nothing to stop this now.

I have experience with community organizing within the Democratic Party all throughout the city and in some parts of Long Island with a group called Profectus. I have spoken to folks in Far Rockaway and other places where the sense of community is strong but their way of life is under attack. I have also worked with the Committee for Independent Community Action under the leadership of Dr. Lenora Fulani through which I attended a NYCHA meeting involving representatives for a new development and the residents of Sumner housing. My purpose for being there was to organize the community, galvanize support for our petition to the Mayor to stop these back door dealings and call for more transparency when initializing anything dealing with NYCHA property, and to bear witness to the mismanagement of these endeavors to better the community. The patronizing marketing tactics and the amount of blatant disregard for the residents were appalling. It inspired the desire in me now to do everything I can to protect the Lower East Side, its integrity, and the dignity of my neighbors.

I am so ready to take on this fight by any means necessary. I have the drive, the skills, and the time to dedicate to serving my community in any capacity I can. These investors, developers, contractors, and gentrifiers may not care about the communities they are disrupting, but I do because these are my friends, my families, my loved ones, and the people who have shaped me into the person I am today and they deserve better. We deserve better.

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My Sister

From a young age, my sister, Archie was a prominent figure in my life. I was always advised not to be like her, but I never understood why. Her kind of beauty was perpetually unobtainable to me. She was always smiling and making friends. What they were referencing was her wild streak in their attempts to slut shame her and preemptively slut shame me. 

Our first rift was not even about her supposed loose lifestyle or even that I cared about what she was doing behind closed doors on her own time. I was about eleven at the time and all I ever wanted was to live with her and my two brothers - to be a “real” family. Unsolicited, she told me in no uncertain terms that she was going to get her life together and get a place where all four of us could live. I thought the years I spent crying over our separation were finally going to cease and the relief was palpable. I told all my friends about how happy I was that this was happening and how it was all I ever wanted. 

Four years later, when it was evident that none of that plan was put into motion let alone close to fruition, I gave up on her and trusting her words. I got a call from my older brother telling me that she was having a baby with some man she had met online. I was livid, selfishly so, but livid nonetheless. Here she was promising me a family and there she went creating her own and leaving us behind - leaving me behind. I was still a child and even worse, an orphan child, one that dreamed of that promise of a family that I felt kept being broken over and over again. I wanted nothing to do with her, that child, or her new family because I couldn’t see a life in which we all lived together. I thought she would want to shelter her child from the truths of why we lived so far from each other and from our mother, but that is what I would have done, not what she did. She opened her new home to me and my siblings, she spent time with us and made new memories, and she even helped us achieve some of the things we missed out on when we were children. She was the epitome of forgiveness because she even let my mom into her home.

My mom, in my eyes, was the sole perpetrator of all the wrongs that had befallen me and my siblings. Even in death, it seems that she and my aunts orchestrated my second abandonment. The matriarchs of my family put it into my sister’s mind that I am untrustworthy. All the while, my sister’s selfishness and her own dubious nature were coming out the the forefront. 

My niece had a birthday last year and I attended her party. I made the foolish decision to stay after the children’s party ended and the even more foolish decision to drink too much at a bar we went to after hours. I thought I was okay because I was with family, but someone we were with assaulted me. She used her forearm to try to choke me out and threw me against a wall. I’m not going to say I didn’t deserve it, I did say some incendiary things and bring up her children. None of which I thought merited such a visceral response, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, instead of having my back, my sister came out of the bar and started pushing me as I was already being choked, she let me run away, and she (who always has her phone in her hand charged and ready to go) ignored my calls for help from strangers’ phones. She allowed time for people to call the cops, for them to arrive, and for them to come arrest me. Although, I had never felt as alone as I did by the side of that Pennsylvania road in the middle of winter with nothing but ice and the rush of other people’s cars around me, the second abandonment came the next day. 

My sister and my other siblings had the audacity to gather around and tell me that I have a problem the next day. I am the untrustworthy one, when they left me to be arrested. They deemed me too emotionally unstable and untrustworthy to have around the family - a family I was from which I was supposed to garner empowerment and support. I made one huge mistake and they all decided to collectively forsake me and stood back in amazement when I could not get over the betrayal. For almost a year, they stayed united in their silence except my older brother, the perpetual peacemaker. 

Archie finally messaged me to “invite” me to my niece’s birthday party. I made another mistake requesting to bring a friend for emotional support, the kind I knew I would need but wouldn’t get from the people who would be there. She made a big fuss about not being able to bring a man over and didn’t even give me the courtesy of fully explaining why. She ended up brushing me off and telling me that my feelings were invalid and that she was done with me. It remained that way two weeks later on my own birthday. She left me no message or kind words, just silence, until today. It a little over a month from my birthday and I messaged her to wish her a happy birthday. 

I really do wish my sister the best. I pray that she takes care of my niece to the best of her ability and then some. I am just so heartbroken that she cannot look outside of herself to see that I am in pain and by not addressing this pain, neither of us is going to be able to move forward. I mean, it is possible to move forward, don’t get me wrong. This is just not the healthiest way to do it. The answer is not to shut me out. The answer would be to hear me out and be supportive, give me the benefit of the doubt like I afforded her all those years ago. I could have saved myself a lot of heartache if I had just shut her out when I was moved to do so, but I didn’t and maybe that was my mistake.

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St. Patrick’s Day Epiphany 24 Year in the Making

I have lived my life as an orphan, as a child of my circumstances, learning everything about loss. I lost my parents to what I can only understand as selfishness until proven otherwise. I have lost my second parents to death, pain, and resentment. I have lost every man I have ever chosen to love because I could not heal myself enough to confront my inadequacies, to accept my flaws, and to learn to accept my losses with grace and dignity.

I try as hard as I can to live every day filled with love and gratitude. Some days, it feels like the weight of the world and all its woes will crush me, but on those days, I am inspired to continue going on. Why? Because I have not been the best I can be yet. There is an unquenchable thirst, an insatiable hunger within me, a perpetual hope for a peace within myself that I will not lose. I used to think it would be in a family that I create because it’s been what I was told by society to strive for. The nuclear family, the nice home with a picket fence, two cars, two kids, and a pet.

That is not what I want. What I want is to live and preserve the dignity of other people’s lives. To bring joy and laughter to a community, to fight for water because it is a source of life to us all, to fight the plight of chronic hunger and poverty, to fight for workers who are mistreated and under-appreciated and want nothing more than to feed their families and have a sense of pride in what they do, to fight for gay people who want to love freely and without fear, to fight for trans people because they deserve to be able to openly and freely love the skin in which they live, to fight for Muslims who are afraid now to openly love God in the ways they’ve chosen to love and adore God, to see to the education of our young people because anyone who seeks knowledge should have equal accessibility and opportunity to find it, and to shelter the homeless because they deserve to have a place to stay sheltered from the elements no matter the circumstances which led them to become that way. I want to fight the racial injustices that occur every single day to my black brothers and sisters, to preserve the national parks in all their marvelous beauty, to care for and comfort the widows and the orphans, to take special care of the infirm and the elderly. I want to uplift the least advantaged and most of all I want to inspire others to want to do the same.