When I arrived in Oregon after I had just left the only home I knew for eleven years, one of the first things my middle school made me do was take an English proficiency exam. Never mind that English was my first language. Never mind that my country the Philippines was once a US colony, so its entire education system had utilized English for decades. All the administration saw was that I was not born in the USA, and my full name was Maria Amanda Perez Flores.
Boom. English proficiency test.
Looking back at it now, I realize that that was at least a microaggression, if not outright racism. I don’t remember anything about the test other than it being extremely easy and having to answer questions about volcanoes. I would like to say that that was an isolated incident and the rest of my time at middle school was about as awkward and uneventful as the average middle schooler’s, but when my family repeatedly received mailings in Spanish, I realized that I was not going to be perceived as equal to the white kids as much as I hoped I would.
I tried to, anyway. I avoided the groups of Latino immigrants at school. They were brown and descended from colonized people like I was, and they had Spanish names like I did, but I constantly told myself, I’m not like them. I’m here to assimilate. Looking back, I held some perceptions I regret. But what could I do, as a middle schooler whose identity was completely dismissed by the authorities who were supposed to take care of me? If I couldn’t be seen as a Filipino, I could at least do my best to be as white as possible.
When I listened to Eddy Zheng’s podcast, I was reminded of my early days in the USA. He said that owing to the model minority myth, many Asian-Americans strive to be “more American than Americans” (I felt that). He spoke about the fractures between immigrant communities and communities of color. Filipinos are especially prone to this self-segregation, the same that I practiced when I distanced myself from Latinos at school. For one thing, Filipinos like to tout themselves as “good” immigrants. Perhaps it’s because we are products of America’s extended international manifest destiny project, perhaps it’s the fact that many Filipinos arrived here as nurses, a profession more highly esteemed than migrant farmworker. What I wish Filipinos realized is that idolizing and aspiring to whiteness at the expense of fellow of people color serves nothing but white supremacy.
To move forward from this toxic segregation mentality, Eddy emphasizes the need for policy to create culturally competent, therapeutic systems to help immigrants engage in cross cultural healing through a social justice lens. For anything to be culturally competent, it must acknowledge that people are raised in different social contexts, and these contexts shape the way that people exist in and relate to the larger world. Despite this diversity in ways of being, the course of history has shaped our world in a way that has exalted one way of being as the superior, and as the default: the white way.
This sentiment is echoed in the article, Communicating with Clients, and in the Counternarratives video. Both these sources acknowledge the pervasiveness of the system we live in, which upholds white supremacy and treats the white, colonial perspective forced upon the world’s people as “neutral” and “objective.” And they both question two facets of our society that have aimed to be just that: the law and the media. What is particularly powerful about these sources is that they acknowledge that the white way of interpreting the world around us is not the only way, nor is it the superior way. At best, it prevents us from truly understanding one another (speaking with clients to fit their case into a legal framework); at worst, it perpetuates harmful perceptions of others that can lead to violent consequences (representation of black victims of white terrorist acts in the news).
Although we are not engaging in cross-cultural healing as part of LO (it’d be nice though), what we can do is be mindful of the way we speak about those who are incarcerated. The narrative framework of violent criminals who deserve to be punished, reminiscent of the colonial project which explicitly aimed to civilize “savages,” must shift toward one of restorative justice that holds space for people who commit harmful acts and the people who are harmed, realizing that all deserve to be made whole again. In doing this work, we must be aware of our own privileges and how they shape the way we speak about the subject, recognizing that the racial disparities in our carceral system are a direct result of the white supremacy that has plagued our world for so long. The people who have been caught up in the system have stories that are nuanced, and we cannot make any assumptions about them. While I do not intend to compare myself to those experiencing incarceration, I sure do wish that my middle school administration did not make assumptions about me.
In the years since middle school, I eventually realized that I would never be like the white kids and instead took immense pride in being a Filipino. I went from resenting the Spanish language to speaking it fluently, because I knew that I was far more connected to my Latino peers than to white people, who would never know what it was like to have the violence of colonialism imprinted in their blood. I took this perspective with me to college, where I found a welcoming community that celebrated my heritage. I thought my days of being disadvantaged because of my race were over. I was wrong.
At the end of my college career, I knew that I did not want to work in a for-profit job. I had always been drawn to causes and wanted to make the world a better place, so the next logical step was to see if I could get a job at a nonprofit. I wanted to feel like my day-to-day work made even a small difference, and it was my way of fighting against the system that I knew oppressed people like me. When I got my first job out of college as a bilingual paralegal at a migrant rights nonprofit called Justice in Motion, I felt like I had landed the perfect job for me. In many ways, it was. But I learned very fast that the organization valued bureaucracy and control over staff far more than it valued me and the quality work I produced. (I do not need to go into the details of my story because I have already shared it in the exit letter I wrote my employers. But the takeaway I want to reiterate here is that the dismissal of my request to work remotely, and the decision to fire me instead of talk to me about alternatives that would enable me to keep working while being comfortable with my finances, made me feel disposable.)
Given how fantastic I was at my job, I did not end up leaving when I was “fired.” Instead of leaving the organization once I did go remote, I was strung along as a temporary employee for years, with an exit date perpetually hanging over my head. But I remained out of a genuine love for the work. My friends told me this was abuse, that management was taking advantage of me. I shrugged it off, thinking that the insecurity I faced was just part of working entry level at a nonprofit. Then my colleagues and I unionized, and the process helped me realize that the problems I faced at Justice in Motion were not unique; rather, they are part and parcel of a larger systemic problem plaguing the nonprofit, public interest sector.
That problem, big surprise, is white supremacy. It is no coincidence that statistically, nonprofit executives and leaders are far more likely to be white. Meanwhile, people of color, although part of the population many nonprofits claim to serve, are relegated to entry-level, programmatic roles. Many of them, like myself, find themselves unable to sustain themselves on a nonprofit salary, and they leave the sector before being able to build a long-term career within it and advance to leadership. White people, on the other hand, have generational wealth that can help them not only get their foot in the door, but take over the whole house. My own Executive Director, who came from a wealthy family and whose father financed her founding of the organization, exemplified exactly that.
This problem is not addressed in the excerpt of the Drift Thesis we read, which attributes pedagogical practices at law school and lack of knowledge of opportunities as contributing factors to the drift. This may be true, but there needs to be an added nuance. The public interest sector, which claims to address social problems, often only perpetuates them, replicating oppressive dynamics within their own workplaces. Furthermore, the capitalistic competition for fellowships, funding, and limited job positions in the public sector is an additional factor that can deter potential public interest attorneys. As much as I, and many other law students, would like to have a career that focuses on social justice, I refuse to do it at the expense of living a comfortable life, forcing myself to partake in ruthless competition only to be paid less than my worth. I refuse to subject myself to the hypocrisy of white people who claim to care about people of color yet treat the ones who do their cause-oriented work as disposable. Working in the public sector is not the answer to dismantling broken systems when it itself is part of and upholds these systems. There must be a better way to address systemic oppression, one that doesn’t force oppressed people to participate in the system that harms them, whether at school, in the workplace, or in everyday life. I, and so many others like me, deserve better.
Appendix
I was telling my partner about this reflection essay, and in response he sent me this screenshot he saw on Twitter a few days ago. He thought of me when he saw it but didn’t want to show it to me because he knew it would make me angry. After hearing about this paper, though, he sent it to me, since it is extremely relevant to the experience I had in middle school. (Similarly, I did not get my financial aid letter from NUSL until I checked in with the financial aid office, which then told me I needed to verify my citizenship. I could only laugh at the absurdity, as it should not have been on me to check in about that.) This led into a conversation about how I have tended to diminish my own experiences of racism since moving away from the Philippines because “I haven’t had it that bad.” It is a constant work in progress, but I now acknowledge that because I am a person of color, there will always be ways that my race will impact my quality of life no matter how “good” I may have it. The best I can do for myself is allow myself to feel things fully while reflecting on what I have been through and being proud of how much I have overcome.
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