Two things can be true

The beige space where my white privilege and cultural oppression intersect

“Two things can be true at the same time,” says my instructor at the School of Radical Healing, Adria Moses. The words catch my attention because it’s something my friend Simone also says often. This phrase immediately shifts my perspective from judging (experiences, people, or feelings) to noticing how two feelings and/or truths can co-exist.

I am in a space of massive learning this year, and it’s bumpy. My goal when I reached out to Adria to ask to learn through the container of her course and her community was to understand how to create safe spaces for anyone in one of my programs or those who consume any of my content. And I am keen to learn from BIPOC educators, to listen and learn from their experiences, intelligence, and wisdom. Like many of you, probably 90% of people I’ve learned anything from in an educational container like a course have been white. I felt ready for new narratives and perspectives, embracing a “You don’t know what you don’t know” mindset. And it’s been affirming and rewarding and also intense and painful. Two things can be true.

As many of us commit to learning about white supremacy and other systems of oppression, unlearning the stories we’ve been taught, and seeking to do better and create a more equitable, peaceful world, we are bound to get things wrong. To do this work, we must fully commit to sitting in our discomfort when we ask questions, form ideas and opinions, and ultimately say wrong things. We have to sit with the discomfort of truths about what privilege we embody that we may not be comfortable with. Sometimes it gets really icky and brings up feelings of shame or guilt. If you’re lucky like me, someone you love will hold up a mirror and gently say, “Dude, I love you. But do you realize this is how you present yourself?” And then give you a giant bear hug in the street when you feel like an embarrassed piece of shit.

In my desire to understand my own identity as an Armenian-Canadian, my experiences of otherness, my own painful stories and trauma, and intersectionality, my exploration led me to a possibility in a somewhat harmful grey zone of believing that maybe Armenians are BIPOC. And I’ve learned that despite all that we as “beige” people may have experienced on the other side of the globe (and sometimes even in the West), we cannot conflate culture and race.

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I remember my first corporate job sent around a survey asking employees to self-identify their race. Race is such a complicated thing for Armenians. We often appear in the “Arab/Middle Eastern” category, but most of us are not Arab. Some diaspora members settled in Arab countries, and some may have family lineage combinations that mean they can rightfully self-identify that way. Still, for the most part, Armenians are one of the most unique ethnicities out there. We have no clue where we fit. Are we BIPOC or simply marginalized and oppressed? Why do we need even need labels to describe our experience of otherness?

This confusion regarding our place in the world is exacerbated by our history of genocide and survival, including that our little nation of 3 million is almost always at odds with neighbouring Turkey and Azerbaijan. We continue to read and experience hatred for our existence online or in public. I descend from people who experienced ethnic cleansing, something that is also (by some accounts) happening in Armenia right now in real-time. I relate strongly to Indigenous people in Canada, to their struggle for acknowledgement of their genocide, for their desire for sovereignty over the lands that they’ve been stewards of for millennia.

But what I didn’t realize until this year is that while I’ve been exploring the full spectrum of my identity and wondering if I’m actually a light-skinned POC, conflating culture and race is dangerous and harmful to visible POC.

While race is a social construct, I 100% benefit from light/beige/whiteish skin. While in Turkey or Armenia, I would likely experience negative impacts due to the culture and ethnicity I descend from. But here in Canada, I rarely experience the same kind of marginalization that Black, Asian, or Brown friends and colleagues have. I’ve experienced xenophobia, being called a terrorist growing up in the 80s (when ASALA was attacking embassies and diplomats to get attention for our cause), for example. But even that word held a different weight back then and can’t compare to what my Muslim partner has experienced post 9/11.

However, I also know there are times when I’ve been in a room of Anglo white people, where I feel unease and a power dynamic that I didn’t have words for until BIPOC folks started to describe “micro-aggressions.” I know that the more I embrace my culture and heritage and become more vocal about geo-political issues and what’s happening in the world, I lose followers and sometimes even friends. But I realized recently that two things could be true: that I could be culturally oppressed, persecuted, and hated for my identity and still be white enough that I can straddle many worlds and enter many rooms without too much probing on what the fuck I’m doing there. Two things can be true.

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In my exploration of the space I take up in the world, I have come to know that I have not only benefitted from whiteness but aligned myself with it. After feeling like I escaped my parents’ home by marrying a white man, I surrounded myself with white culture for ease and freedom. Before I took his last name, I would constantly be asked, “What are you?” as folks scrutinized my unique face. But once I took his name — boom! — no one asked. There are doors I am certain that name opened for me in a very racist media world (if you haven’t read about “unconscious bias,” go look it up). Even many of my friend groups went from other immigrant and first-gen women to white. And while my sparkling personality and sense of humour had something to do with it, the colour of my skin was largely at play too. It impacted where I believed I COULD belong. This is what white privilege looks like.

At some point, I stopped living in a way that honoured my Armenian heritage. I began celebrating Christmas on December 25th, rather than keeping the tradition of opening gifts from Father New Year on NYE and taking the day off and going to church on January 6 (Armenian Christmas). I spoke to my kids in English, denying them their mother tongue because English has become my intellectual language too. I felt tired, and it seemed easier to just go with the flow, despite my parents and their friends wondering what would happen to our language and culture. Most of us first-gen and younger immigrant and refugee kids assimilate. White Canadianness means freedom from parts of our traditions that feel oppressive and can be attractive as we build our identities. Living fully Armenian in Canada felt suffocating to me. And that’s totally OK! But now, in my forties, I feel a call to find a sweet spot between the two, to repatriate the parts of my culture lost to the sexy siren song of white western culture. To better understand the kinds of thinking that meant my ancestors were forced out of their homes and native lands, dying of starvation and disease along the way if they weren’t beheaded first.

A few months ago, a brilliant writer and activist I was keen to get to know better reached out. She was gathering some local “Brown women” and was wondering if I’d like to join. I was shocked at first. I had never thought of myself as Brown. And yet “white” has never felt right to me. I said I was chuffed to be included but that I identify more as beige. “Hummus colour,” I joked. Meeting these women has been life-changing for me. The intersections of what we explore are often spoken in shorthand. They just know. They get it. Our families have imposed similar “straight As and get a job that reflects well on our family” pressures. They know the guilt and shame of “What will they think?” that pervades our communities and can keep us from stepping into who we truly are. These women have all risen to great ranks in institutions and organizations that our parents would have never been able to due to their appearance, education, or accents. These women are gifts to me; I’m so grateful to them. But I haven’t faced all of what they’ve faced as visibly Brown women, and I can’t pretend to. Two things can be true.

My intellectualism often gets in the way of simply being. Human thought blocks most of us from actually experiencing life IN our bodies. And once we explore systems of oppression, we realize that our bodies are not equal. If you occupy the body of a woman, you are put in a box of should/shouldn’t, good/bad, and right/wrong binaries you must adhere to. And when we begin to layer intersectionality onto our bodies — race, religion, ability, sexuality, gender — these binaries (and the way they oppress us) amplify.

Most of us want to do better. We don’t want others to suffer while we benefit. But that often feels like such a massive undertaking when we reflect on that at a global scale. Still, I want to learn and hopefully help. And that means listening, digesting, and integrating before speaking. It also means risking getting it wrong. Hopefully, we don’t hurt people in the process, but sometimes we might, and that means we take accountability and responsibility for our actions and also our feelings. The number one feeling that comes up for me when I get issues of race and culture mixed up is shame. “Oh f-ck,” I think, “Here I go trying to explain/validate/justify my own lived experience, and I’ve gotten it wrong* and hurt others in the process.” And what we typically do when we feel shame is try to defend our reasons for doing or saying what we did, which then gaslights or harms the person we’ve hurt on the other end. So we need to stay with ourselves, and our discomfort and treat ourselves and each other with deep compassion. We’re still learning.

This is the work, friends. This is how it looks in action. Because to make things better, we need to decolonize our minds and our language, and we have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. What I learned through getting it wrong is that racially I am closer to white than non-white. Ethnically and culturally, I am this hybrid of belonging and not-belonging, which is why I am diving into this stuff to begin with. I have to accept that I don’t get to choose what the colour of my skin means either.

This is a subject that’s likely too big for this post, especially with the complicated feelings I’ve been experiencing in light of the massive Earthquake in Turkey and Syria this past week — the earthquake hitting the epicentre of the Armenian genocide, creating a land of ghosts upon ghosts. Two things can be true. I can feel the anguish of people lost in rubble, of families decimated in an instant, and I can also feel grief and anger for those we lost on those roads over a century ago due to hate.

So I’ll leave you with two asks:

1. If you’re interested in exploring racial trauma and your role in perpetrating it, consider picking up Resmaa Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands. It’s for everyone. As Adria said this week, “We can’t intellectualize our way to healing.” This book is the answer to that.

2. The Canadian government is currently 2x-ing donations to Turkey and Syria. Please consider giving to the Canadian Red Cross. Boots on the ground that know how to mobilize are key right now, and time is running out. It will take generations to heal the destruction that just occurred. I know because Armenians have spent over 100 years trying to heal theirs.