'I admire the way you treat your Blackness with compassion, despite feeling targeted...You can’t be pushed around,' writes teamutonji to her sister. 'I’m older than you, yet you were the one who taught me that being silent can make me complicit.'
Do you remember that night when you were in Grade 11 and you complained about the racism at our high school? I was living in a rooming house in Scarborough, Ont., 40 minutes away from our home in Oshawa. I didn’t know what to do so I boughtAnother time, you mentioned that you were experiencing symptoms of anxiety, depression and paranoia. “It’s because of the way people look at me,” you said. So, I leftby Sabrina Benaim on your bed.
I had been conditioned to believe that racism was no longer real. So my approach to bullying and abuse has been to suck it up. For years, being silent was my form of survival. Now, I wonder if my silence played a hand in your suffering; if I should have spoken out so that, seven years later, you didn’t experience it too. When you and your friends hang out in your room, I hear the way you support each other and use humour to get through your struggles . . . that gives me hope.
Do you know what happens to us when we’ve been programmed to accept the way the world looks at us? Exhaustion. We are taught to suppress our feelings and play the role of the “strong Black girl.” And when we talk about our deteriorating mental health, we are seen as weak; or worse, as people who are piggybacking on ancestral trauma.
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