This is the story of one of my experiences of racial trauma that really impacted my mental health. I have found this really difficult to talk about for a number of reasons – the main one being that people wouldn’t believe me or take me seriously, but my new philosophical mantra for 2020 is ‘fuck it’ and so I decided to write about it.
This happened before there was worldwide engagement around Black Lives Matter, the reality of white supremacy and anti-racism practices. I like to think that this wouldn’t happen even a year later now because people are more aware about how racism manifests itself.
I had recently taken over as the chair of my firm’s Multicultural Network – this is a role I feel so passionate about and privileged to have and I don’t want my retelling of this experience to negate that. It has raised my profile within the firm as someone people can have conversations with around race and multiculturalism, and 99% of the time I absolutely love that because I have such interesting and insightful conversations with well-meaning people who are eager to improve their anti-racism practices and be an active ally to ethnic minorities.
But today I am talking about the other 1% of the time, where being in such a visible position of being a person of colour and an anti-racism activist ended up getting a lot more personal and affecting my mental health.
I had a colleague who I had had considered to be a friend. She would often say things that were slightly problematic and could come across as a bit offensive, but I never really thought anything of it. I just assumed that this person had phrased something in an odd way and didn’t mean anything offensive by it. In my workplace there aren’t a lot of women, so there is certainly an element of us knowing we need to support each other and stand up for each other.
Now for those of you that have not experienced being a person of colour in a white dominated workplace, you might not realise how difficult it is to call out people that make micro aggressions towards you or towards other people like you. It feels awkward, they often get defensive, and we often end up feeling like by putting ourselves out there, we are the ones that end up being isolated or dealing with the negative consequences. That’s if you get listened to at all, a lot of the time anything you say just gets dismissed because their intention wasn’t to hurt you – and that is more important than the impact of what they said had on you.
I think this is analogous to the way many women are treated when they report experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace. Ultimately they often end up being the one that gets moved to a different team and isolated at work. It can be frustrating when white women understand how unfair this is, but can’t see how the situation is similar when people of colour try and say something to them about racist behaviour.
I just wanted to give this context to explain why I didn’t call things out earlier, because someone reading this may think I should have addressed these comments before they escalated and then things wouldn’t have got so out of hand. I 100% agree with this now I have the gift of hindsight, but that is easier said than done.
The kind of micro aggressions I experienced were varied and happened continuously over the course of a few years – they also weren’t all directly aimed at me. There was the way they spoke about their voluntourism in Africa (the country…), the comments they made when I wore a Christmas jumper to work (“are you wearing a Diwali jumper?”) and other small assumptions about groups of people and language that made me feel a bit uncomfortable.
But I really didn’t think anything of it, I gave this person the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t mean anything by it.
A friend from outside of work actually met this colleague briefly and did say to me afterwards – something isn’t right here, this person keeps trying to tell me about anti-blackness in the Indian community. Don’t get me wrong – this is something that absolutely exists in our community and needs to be stamped out. But for a white person to have a conversation around race and only be able to acknowledge racism between other groups of people, without addressing the racism that stems from their own community, it’s a bit of a red flag. After all, part of the reason that anti-blackness in the Indian community exists is because of the racial hierarchy that European colonialism implemented.
There was a time at work when I organised an event around Black representation in professional services. There were a lot of senior members of staff that attended this event and I was so elated because these important people had finally had their eyes opened to the realities of racism in the workplace, and the importance of doing something about it. It was a real career highlight for me and I think really important for the path our firm has since taken in being actively anti-racist.
Anyway, this colleague attended this event, and afterwards as we were headed home she started crying. For context, there had been alcohol at the networking after the event so I didn’t think much of the tears – it seemed like they were just drunk tears. But she then went on to say that she was upset because the fact that everyone was now focussing on racism could mean that they were going to stop taking issues around women and gender equality seriously. I got where she was coming from because there is an issue in the workplace with people thinking that gender inequality is ‘fixed’ and in general in the corporate space it is often difficult for women to report experiences of sexual harassment or uncomfortable comments they have received. I know I’ve received a couple of comments as a woman that made me feel uncomfortable but I never reported them or did anything about it.
But at the same time, talking about anti-racism isn’t the issue here – my event was not implying that we should be forgetting about gender issues. Also – I am also a woman! I just happen to be a brown woman so I deal with the intersectional experience of sexism and racism.
You may be starting to see a pattern here.
There have been a bunch of things that she said that I never gave much thought to in detail, I thought it was a little bit annoying but I genuinely didn’t think there was anything malicious intended. Perhaps this was naïve of me. The other thing is that I knew this person had other things going on in her life and with her mental health, and as someone who has had to deal with issues around my own mental health, I wanted to be supportive around that and understand how that may affect what she says.
Then at our work Christmas party things escalated to a point that my mental health was really affected by it all. I was having a conversation with a couple of other people and she happened to be sitting near by. I was telling some story about my parents, and she interrupted the conversation to say “I’m surprised you say that, because I thought all Indians were XYZ…”
I was quite taken aback by this and tried to make a joke out of it. I tried to say something like, “right and how many Indians do you know?” – implying that there’s a diaspora of over a billion of us so it’s not really cool to make sweeping statements about all of us.
She did not get it and genuinely replied with a straight face saying she knows a lot of Indians because there were lots of them on her course at uni. I was quite shocked by this response to be honest and didn’t really know what to say. She then went on to make a number of different comments about how racism is all to do with tribalism and people’s intrinsic biases against each other, and has nothing to do with white supremacy. She also went on to say that Indians are the most racist people in the world, worse than white people – and I am totally not denying that we have a lot of racism we need to address in the Indian community and that may well be true, but it was a weird thing to say.
I just wanted to enjoy the party and couldn’t be bothered to go into it or start a deep conversation about it so I just rolled my eyes at the person sitting next to her (who was looking at me with an incredulous look on his face as if to say ‘ “did she really just say that?”). That was my next and biggest mistake.
I should also mention that I have an extremely expressive face and large eyes – when I told one of my closest friends from uni about this incident she was like “but you roll your eyes at everything, that’s just your face”. So I didn’t think an eye-roll was that big a deal, although maybe it is to other people.
I should also mention that I wasn’t really drinking at this party – mainly because I had eaten so many roast potatoes that I now felt a little bit sick and was struggling to move (it’s the only way to do Christmas dinner). She was drinking and that could have impacted her reaction too.
After I rolled my eyes, the colleague came up to me and confronted me asking why I rolled my eyes. Again, I couldn’t be bothered to go into it or explain why I was offended by what she was saying – I looked around the room and saw it was mainly white people there and it just didn’t feel like a safe environment to get into this. So I said no it’s fine – the worst thing is I might have even apologised for rolling my eyes just to calm down the situation which makes me so angry now - that was just the ultimate example of me pandering to white fragility.
She then started crying and left the party early. I WISH I had listened to Renni-Eddo Lodge’s podcast episode called ‘White women crying is racist’ before this happened, because then I might have been able to understand what was going on here. I was incredibly confused. I had just experienced racist conversations and micro aggressions that made me feel unsafe in the white-dominated peer group that is my workplace. Yet she was the one who was crying and having a go at me? It didn’t make any sense to me.
An hour or so later I received a really nasty message to my personal phone number, basically having a go at me and saying I made her have a panic attack and I was awful. She said that she should be allowed to say these things and talk about race because I need white people like her to be part of the conversation if I want to have allies. Yep it’s the classic trope of, you need me as a white woman to be on your side so you’d better tolerate me saying whatever I want to you. There is such a power dynamic when it comes to white women’s tears. Never mind that some of the comments she made were personal and about my parents; I should just be so grateful that a white lady is even giving me the time of day as a lowly brown person. I think I replied to the first one of these messages, but they kept coming through and they were so angry and attacking that I gave up on replying and was lost for what I should do.
I was in one of the most distressed states of mind I have ever been in. I couldn’t function, I couldn’t eat properly, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t concentrate at work – I felt so unsafe and othered . I phoned my mum in tears about it and she told me I needed to block her so I didn’t continue to get distressed by these messages, and then report it to HR or to my team leader. The whole thing made me feel like I was 14 again when I was being cyber bullied at school and sent messages like ‘no one likes you’. (I was not a happy 14 year old).
I had never reported any micro agressions or racially related stuff at work (partly because we know we don’t get believed and that white voices are valued more than ours in our society) but this time I did report it because I had physical evidence of what was said through having screenshots of the messages. I reported it and I spoke to HR about it.
They were quite understanding and considerate of my mental wellbeing, but ultimately I felt like they didn’t really get it. They kind of said things like, “oh she probably saw it as a topic of debate rather than realising it was a lot more personal to you” and “oh she had drank alcohol so wasn’t really thinking.”
Then they spoke to her and reported back to me that she was really upset and crying about what happened. So again we see the immense power of white women’s tears. I didn’t make a formal complaint about it, which was maybe a mistake, but the ONE thing I asked for from HR was that they organise a mediation session between us with HR there – I did not want to have any direct conversations with this person by myself because I didn’t feel safe.
The mediation session never happened. HR said the person didn’t want to do it and that was that. Once again, of course, the white woman’s needs are more important.
So ultimately, we were in a position where this person faced no consequences, I felt unsafe at work, my mental health was in an absolute state and I didn’t know what to do. I did not feel safe doing my role as Multicultural Network lead. I didn’t even know if I felt safe working here. I considered leaving the firm – which made me angry because I really like my job, so why should I have to leave?
Then as a stroke of luck to me, this person ended up announcing they were leaving the firm to go work somewhere else.
A conversation they had with one of my friends from work revealed that I had “accused them of saying something racist and so this was a factor in why they left”. Not that they had perpetrated racism and felt they should leave because of it, or that they had been asked to leave. They clearly didn’t think they had done anything wrong, they clearly hadn’t learned anything, and HR clearly hadn’t explained to them why what they did wasn’t ok.
I understand there are two sides to every story and she probably views the whole thing differently, as do HR. Ultimately that’s why I haven’t felt like I’ve been able to speak about it, because I don’t feel like my experiences and my side of the story will be believed.
After she left the firm, I raised it again with one of my team leaders because I wasn’t happy with how HR had handled it – she clearly hadn’t learned anything from it and was probably going to do the same thing to other people of colour at her new firm. Again, nothing happened after I raised it again.
I also raised to HR that we need a better way of reporting and dealing with racism, or other types of discrimination towards people with protected characteristics at work, and guess what – nothing happened here either.
The mental health impacts from all of this were very real for me. I’ve dealt with some level of anxiety and depression since I was a teenager, but these events really caused me to spiral and ultimately I made the decision to start taking anti-depressants and seeing a therapist (and for me, taking medication was one of the best decisions I ever made). I am certainly not saying that this person caused my mental health issues – there are a whole myriad of environmental and genetic factors for my depression, but it was a massively triggering event and I realised I couldn’t cope without extra support.
I felt a lot of shame around the whole situation too. I was ashamed I didn’t speak out earlier, I was ashamed I didn’t do anything to stop it from happening again to someone else and I was ashamed about how much it affected me and my mental health.
I didn’t tell many people about it, not because I wanted to protect the person who perpetrated this, but because I didn’t want to be seen as a victim. I was also worried that people wouldn’t believe me – or worse, that they would believe me but wouldn’t care.
One of the hardest things was seeing people who did know about it act completely normally towards her at work. I can’t even describe how it made me feel except for isolated, unsafe and like an outsider.
So why am I sharing this now? Well one thing is that it feels like a massive burden keeping it to myself, and I want to remove some of the shame we have talking about mental health and admitting when things affect us on a deeply personal level.
I also don’t want this to happen to other people, and if it ever does I do not want them to feel alone through all of it. I want us to be able to share the experiences we have had so they don’t happen again.
Ultimately I don’t have anything new to say here except for that mental health and trauma is real, and we need to take it seriously in our communities.
If you are dealing with anything like this, please know that there are so many of us in our community who are here to talk and support you.