As a woman of Caribbean descent living in this very multicultural scape of Toronto I feel most days that I am indeed invisible. Ironic I think since West Indians make up such a large number of the Torontonian landscape. The Canadian Caribbean identity is mainly Afro- Caribbean centric which leaves the transplants like me of mainly Indo Caribbean descent with a ‘likkle” bit of “sumthin” else feeling very displaced.
As a milestone birthday approaches- its months away but, this year will mark the 15th year that I have been a Torontonian, it will also symbolize what I have sometimes been dreading. This year marks the year that my Trinidadian born self meets up with my Canadian self. In a nutshell, I would have spent the same amount of time calling Trinidad my home as Canada. Time has caught up with me. The illusion that I had created however, that I can finally feel more Canadian at this milestone as well as simultaneously being fearful of leaving my Trini self behind is exactly that- an illusion. I still feel displaced in both places even after all this time.
As a milestone birthday approaches- its months away but, this year will mark the 15th year that I have been a Torontonian, it will also symbolize what I have sometimes been dreading. This year marks the year that my Trinidadian born self meets up with my Canadian self. In a nutshell, I would have spent the same amount of time calling Trinidad my home as Canada. Time has caught up with me. The illusion that I had created however, that I can finally feel more Canadian at this milestone as well as simultaneously being fearful of leaving my Trini self behind is exactly that- an illusion. I still feel displaced in both places even after all this time.
Even though I yearn to visit Trinidad often, my entire path of interest has shifted since living in this reality. My perceived once cushioned life is not transferable in this context.
I am so much more aware of my non privileged status her in the Canadian context. I hear about “white privilege” almost daily, the affect of being an educator in the inner city reality but little do many know that I myself had that equivalence of white privilege it just was named something different. It was the “Indian high colour child syndrome” where you had to succeed and live the life that your parents had wanted for themselves. This was indeed an ideology specific to the social class that I was a product of. I can definitely say that I lived a very sheltered life, very much as my colleagues on this site have admitted before. I guess you can say I was one step away from white privilege and wanting to ascend that ladder at any cost. In my reality, ideas about superiority based on status and race was something that we tolerated silently rather than faced, it was the expectation that you married up the social ladder in both colour and money. It was the expectation that you were better than the rest and you made that clear by attending the best schools (as best your parents money could buy if you didn’t earn it yourself) and you fought hard for a place in the business world to make the money you needed to assert your importance in an already privileged working/managing class.
I am so much more aware of my non privileged status her in the Canadian context. I hear about “white privilege” almost daily, the affect of being an educator in the inner city reality but little do many know that I myself had that equivalence of white privilege it just was named something different. It was the “Indian high colour child syndrome” where you had to succeed and live the life that your parents had wanted for themselves. This was indeed an ideology specific to the social class that I was a product of. I can definitely say that I lived a very sheltered life, very much as my colleagues on this site have admitted before. I guess you can say I was one step away from white privilege and wanting to ascend that ladder at any cost. In my reality, ideas about superiority based on status and race was something that we tolerated silently rather than faced, it was the expectation that you married up the social ladder in both colour and money. It was the expectation that you were better than the rest and you made that clear by attending the best schools (as best your parents money could buy if you didn’t earn it yourself) and you fought hard for a place in the business world to make the money you needed to assert your importance in an already privileged working/managing class.
As a transplant I wished that those racist and idealist thoughts would have been erased especially in a place that boasts retention and acceptance of difference. Tolerance. To my horror, it’s been gentrified and renamed.
I deal with the consequences of biased thinking each day, that I somehow belong somewhere else than the place that I have made for myself in the life that I chose to lead currently. I fight everyday to unpack and delete the bias that I hear from colleagues and students and I feel as if I am fighting a losing battle at times. I am trying to work through my own displacement as well as try to de-code all the racism, sexism and many more ism’s in my students as they tackle the lessons of their own colonial past.
This is really a full time job on its own—-
This is really a full time job on its own—-
The Coloured Collective 