Not all racialization is obvious or explicit.
As a child entering primary school, I struggled figuring out what it meant to be Canadian. It was a somewhat amorphous word, and besides standing up for the anthem every morning and seeing the red and white flag wave in the school parking lot, I really didn’t know what qualified as Canadian. But as I was exposed to different people and different ideas throughout my childhood, I figured out quickly that the primary criteria one needed to fill to be Canadian was this: whiteness.
The Construct of Whiteness
Now, when I say ‘white’, I’m not talking about Caucasians. It’s important we understand that whiteness is a highly politicized construct that doesn’t apply to all people who have light skin. There are plenty of Caucasians — say, people from the near and middle east — whose skin tones vary greatly, but who for all intents and purposes, are not white.
This is because the concept of whiteness is not necessarily one of skin colour (although it can be), but rather, a concept of power. For example, although in North America we may consider Polish and Ukrainian immigrants to be ‘white’, they are heavily racialized in Britain and other Western European countries. South-eastern European immigrants from Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Albania are considered undesirable in Switzerland compared to immigrants from Western and Northern European countries.
A Macedonian acquaintance with a master’s degree in electrical engineering, whose husband was living and working in Switzerland, was not granted residency until she acquired a non-Macedonian passport. Her family had some roots in non-Balkan countries, so she was able to leverage this, and after two long years living away from her husband, she was finally granted entry into Switzerland.
My point here is that whiteness is relative and often used to establish power dynamics. If you are the child of immigrants, as I and at least a third of my classmates were, you weren’t really Canadian, but something in between. It was like being the adopted child in a well-to-do family that constantly reminded you that your birth parents weren’t respectable enough to keep you. The more obviously different your parents were — perhaps through their appearance, dress, or way of speaking — the more you were coded as foreign, and by extension of that, privileged to be in Canada.
The Trauma of Migration
My parents left their country of birth in the 1980s, when my father anticipated its collapse in the years to come. I was born once they’d already settled into Canadian society, but from the moment I had enough self-awareness to read social cues, I knew we were different.
My mom wasn’t like the other moms. When my classmates got picked up from school, I saw women with straight, shoulder-length hair — usually blonde or light brown, sometimes with highlights. They wore fashionable clothing, clutched fancy purses with manicured nails, and masked their imperfections with flawless makeup.
But my mom didn’t care about fashion. She wore the same sets of clothing day in and day out and carried a giant, ratty old leather bag wherever she went. She had untamed, curly black hair and olive skin, spoke English with a harsh accent, rarely painted her nails, and hardly ever wore makeup.
Now, you might wonder what hair dye, makeup, and fashion have to do with whiteness. Generally, there isn’t much of a relationship; anyone can choose to look and dress a certain way.
However, when you’re born to parents who left a politically tumultuous homeland, you very quickly realize they suffer from a kind of survivor’s guilt. They carry shame for having abandoned their own parents and siblings for what they believed would be a better life. They don’t believe they deserve to have nice things, or that they can afford them (even when they can).
Every moment is haunted by the potential of loss. Tomorrow could be the day they lose everything, so nothing of excess is ever worth wasting precious resources on.
Simply put, many immigrants are traumatized by the very act of migration.
Often, immigrants struggle with economic and social disadvantage. Many immigrant families simply don’t have the luxury to look nice, and so for the immigrant child, even superficial things like clothing, nail polish, makeup, and hair dye on certain bodies can become important signifiers of not just class, but also whiteness.
My mother was too stressed and overworked, alienated and depressed to care about fashion. She didn’t have any friends and felt uncomfortable with white women — partly for cultural reasons, and partly because of her accent. In fact, she was so self-conscious about her accent, she didn’t speak a word of English to me until I went to kindergarten. She didn’t want me to learn English from her because she was afraid I’d learn her accent, so she instead waited until I could learn ‘proper’ English from my teachers and classmates.
Her goal was to make sure that I was assimilated and that I fit in at all costs, and this desire was directly informed by her own feelings of alienation in Canadian society. Whatever differences I observed between her and the other moms must have been amplified ten-fold for her.
But I learned that my mom wasn’t the only one who was different. I was different too, and I struggled relating to other kids. I wasn’t exposed to the same media and culture that they were. I didn’t wear the same clothes, eat the same food, and I didn’t tell the same jokes, anecdotes or stories. It became very clear that I was a foreigner, even though I was living only a few kilometers from the hospital I’d been born in.
A Chimera Trying to be a Chameleon
When I was seven years old, I had my first play-date with a white classmate — let’s call her Karen. Karen’s family was some nth generation Canadian, with a clear family tree of every ancestor from the past few centuries. Karen had stunning, pale blue eyes and strawberry blonde locks that I desperately yearned for. During summer, I’d spend hours in the sun hoping that my dark hair would lighten.
“Am I turning blonde yet?” I’d excitedly ask my mother after spending a day in Karen’s yard.
Yet all that accomplished was sunburns for Karen and brown skin for me.
“Oh my God, you look like a Sri Lankan!” Karen’s mother and aunt laughed when they saw me.
At the time, I didn’t know that Sri Lankan was an ethnicity. I didn’t know what the comment meant or why it felt bad, but I had the impression that there was something funny or embarrassing about how dark my skin had turned seemingly overnight. There shouldn’t be anything embarrassing about looking like a certain ethnicity, but the tone with which I’d been told made me feel like I was somehow wrong.
Although I always knew my ethnicity, I didn’t learn about my muddled racial heritage until much later. I know that I am mixed race, but I’ll never know the extent of it, because imperial legacy does a wonderful job of erasing records and lineages.
While most people of Western European descent have the luxury of knowing where their ancestors are from — which great-grandparent was German, French, or British — people whose ancestors hail from Africa, the Middle East, or the Balkans can only speculate based on limited records and oral history.
Where there is empire, there is a deep loss for the children who are born after that empire crumbles. We want to know our roots. We want to know what our heritage is and where we belong. All I know is that I have diverse roots that have molded me into someone who is sometimes coded as white, and sometimes as something else.
The Universal Woman is White
These were my first encounters with soft racism, but even as they happened, I learned that there was far worse. I didn’t think what was happening to me was racism. As a kid, I assumed racism could only happen to black people, because everyone in my predominantly white neighbourhood seemed to have opinions about black people.
I remember overhearing Karen’s mother say that she would never want her son to date a black woman.
“They’re aggressive,” she argued, “and their butts look weird.”
“Really?” Karen’s aunt replied. “I think they have gorgeous bodies — such nice curves.”
In this brief exchange I had been exposed to two immensely toxic ideas:
First, that what mattered in a woman before all else was how well she conformed to white standards of beauty; and second, that black women are either dangerous and to be avoided, or exotic objects to be fetishized.
Of course, I didn’t have the language I do now to describe these ideas, but it would be a lie to say I didn’t understand them. Even as a third grader, I knew implicitly what these statements meant, and they affected how I understood myself as a girl and an immigrant, and how I understood other women of colour.
It entrenched in me an unconscious drive to be as white as possible. Until I was in my late teens, I kept dying my hair blonde, dieting, and begging my mother to let me wear coloured contacts. I wasn’t intentionally trying to whitewash myself, but I had internalized the standards of white beauty to such a degree that I genuinely believed I would look better with Keira Knightley’s frame, blonde hair, and green eyes.
And yet through it all, whenever someone asked me if I was white, I’d balefully reply that I was, in fact, beige.
***
I mentioned in an earlier piece, A Critique Privilege, Oppression, and Other Such Loaded Concepts, that calling myself ‘beige’ became my way of creating a space for myself. I knew from an early age that ‘white’ didn’t fit. But I also didn’t identify with any of the more established minorities in my neighbourhood. Rather, I occupied an ambiguous space where my race became subject to debate depending on my context.
Beige’ is my way of honouring my experiences of soft racism, of alienation, liminality, and of my family’s sacrifices. It’s a way to ensure I never forget the violent and complicated legacy of imperialism. It’s a reminder that whiteness is often oversimplified and too easily thrown around without consideration. This oversimplification is not just unfair to white-passing people of colour; it obscures exploitation and oppression that hinges on whiteness as a tool of power, wielded by a certain group of people. Without proper nuance, whiteness becomes too sweeping, too general — and something that speaks of everything fails to actually speak about anything at all.