Reality Check: Race

Ashley Lo

I found our reality check on Thursday very stimulating, especially given none of us really understands the
black experience, which is quite telling itself.
In response to Donna’s second question on Richard Wright, I can’t even remember being introduced to racism.
Coming from a very ethnically homogenous part of the world, I can’t pinpoint the exact point I came to expect
that “white” people are better, and “black” people are inferior. It’s ironic how a lot of my Taiwanese peers
think there is no racism in Taiwan simply because how welcoming we are to foreigners. Again, the foreigners
we welcome tend to be white Americans or Europeans. As for the millions of Southeast Asians, namely those
from Indonesia and the Philippines, who come to Taiwan to serve as migrant caretakers, their experiences tend
to be very different to my dismay.

For me at least, I think racism is at its worst when it’s all-pervasive; there comes with a certain ambiguity, by
which any social situation could be potentially racist, that makes it extremely devastating. For example,
Richard Wright’s father might have wondered, painfully, why he had failed in the city-- of course, one would
take racial hardship into account, but then there are also the questions of how hard he tried, he smart he was,
how charming he was or how persistent he was. This possibility of personal defaults that might have nothing
to do with race is, to me, ultimately how racism defeats someone. It seems that someone could never
conquer racism because no one really knows how much it infiltrates our everyday lives. Dealing with racism
is exhausting because one always has to be on their guard and be very aware that what they are encountering
is not personal, but social.

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