funded by passion
furthered by mission
The Journey
she/they
Anti-racism work was in many ways responsible for the genesis of The DAI˚ALOGUE, back in 2020: like many others, it was the year I felt like I woke up from a hypersleep, into a world that was forever changed. At the time, I was living in New York City which was grappling with more COVID-19 infections as a metropolitan area than any other country in the world.
NYC is known as a place of extremes, and that disparity had never been more clear than under pandemic conditions: Manhattan emptied out, and those remaining were mostly the ones with nowhere else to go. The demographic data reinforced what healthy inequality researchers had been tabling all along, and the world was disgusted by anyone who looked like me. Although racism has always been an undercurrent in my life, as it will be for anyone racially minoritised1 in the place where they live, I naïvely evaluated the outcomes of COVID-19 more as a class issue or a once-in-a-century event than the product of systemic racism.
Then, a week before I packed up my things and moved to LA, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. And the illusion, the ignorance, everything I thought I understood—shattered.
It’s not that I wasn’t aware of slavery, police brutality or the Civil Rights Movement. I’d studied all of these things, read many “Great American Novels” for English class that were extremely questionable in hindsight, and Stephen Lawrence’s murder case often returned to the headlines over the years despite it happening long before I was born. But somehow, all of these manifestations of racism could just be written off as isolated incidents, examples of bad character or “a product of the times”. It’s easier to point a finger at a single person, close the door to the past, and pretend that the racism dies with the individual.
George Floyd’s murder instigated the resurgence of Black Lives Matter on an international scale, unfolding into one of the largest protests in US history. And unlike previous calls for action, this time, Black lives had to matter to everyone. You couldn’t ignore them in the news, all over social media, in massive demonstrations on your high street: no one was allowed to be comfortable in silence anymore. With the proliferation of digital information, there was no excuse not to educate yourself. In liberal spheres, many were threatening to end friendships and partnerships over it. That movement was asking people to look inwards and unpack and unlearn internalised racism and microaggressions perpetrated not just by white people, but by anyone benefitting from white supremacy. For example, both anti-Blackness and colourism are rife in East Asian communities too (that’s not even getting started on colourism within Asian beauty standards, which I’ll save for a more detailed essay) and perhaps until that point, POCs absolved ourselves of racism because we also saw ourselves as victims. In 2020, people who looked East Asian were being attacked and told to go back to where they came from (myself included). We couldn’t possibly be racist, right?
The response to that question was the solidification of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) as the standard acronym, to recognise the unequal struggles of different racialised groups in the US.2 And the evidence kept cascading: thousands of buried local news stories and individual accounts were being thrown into the mainstream, alongside never-ending lists of microaggressions many of us would either never have noticed or brushed off as workplace politics (or a well-meaning, poorly executed gesture).
I was deeply inspired by the work that many people in my networks were doing. Designers were creating engaging, informative carousels; facilitators were bringing communities together for book clubs, vigils and panels; volunteers were writing master documents with learning resources and mutual aid funds. There was something for every kind of activist—even the ones shy to use that term.
I reverted to being a child: just learning, listening, trying, with a curious heart and open mind. (As a non-religious person, is this as close as it gets to being “born again”?). The first version of The DAI˚ALOGUE was initially created for a class assignment, as my own contribution to knowledge-sharing and storytelling for social impact.3 However, the pressure of it soon became too great: I didn’t know enough, I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, I didn’t want to be cancelled so early on in my career! I ended up putting the project on pause, going back to school (this time in East Asia) and working full-time in LGBTQ+ health and wellbeing, youth homelessness and now climate justice, all of which has given me more confidence and direction for the social progress I can contribute to.
I’m sharing all of this because my point is, anti-racism work is an ongoing, personal journey for all of us who want to embark on it. Everyone has to find their own reasons and motivation or it will simply become another nice idea that gains traction when it’s trendy and is labelled ‘radical’ when it’s not. The irony is not lost on me how ‘woke’, a term with AAVE origins in the fight against racial prejudice, has been both weaponised by conservative voices and co-opted by younger generations for causes that don’t acknowledge its connection to this history.
- I often switch between racialised terms like “ethnic minority” and newer terminology like “global majority” depending on the context. In this case, “minority” more accurately reflects my experience as a Chinese-born British person.
- In the UK, BBPOC (Black, Brown, People of Colour) has been adopted to better reflect our own ethnic makeup, often used instead of the outdated BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic).
- Although the experience of living in New York during COVID was all the teaching I may have needed that year, I’m really grateful for my classes at the School of Visual Arts that pushed me to make, even if we ended up meeting online for most of it in the end. Special thanks to Ben Denzer (Visual Storytelling) and Adrienne Leban (Design for Social Change).