"I later recounted the incident to another person of color, who nodded along at my ambivalence about why that statement was bothering me. But even as I was describing the incident to him, I thought to myself that I must look like I am grasping at victimhood. It was a strange feeling of not knowing how to perceive my own reality. The student’s friend hadn’t shouted the command at me, she didn’t say it with a teenager’s attitude. In my head, I tried to make sense of why I had felt insulted in that moment, but more importantly, why I couldn’t communicate and confirm with the world at large why I had felt that way.
There have been many other incidences, where I did not need to seek confirmation of whether I was insulted by a student because I knew that I had been. As a perpetual outsider, in virtue of my brown immigrant body, my accent, mannerisms, and the assumptions about my affinities and motivations, I have encountered what are termed as, microaggressions both within the classroom and in context of presenting my research. There are countless such incidences, and they still occur every semester without fail. And even within these blatant instances of racism, there have been allies, who not only failed to understand the experience, but charged me with being overly-sensitive (paranoid). Thankfully, today’s social media exposes me to the experiences of other women of color and I can receive validation of my reality from them."
This is so very real, I spend so much energy every day being unable to come to a conclusion on myself; am I a paranoid, over-sensitive person? Does that mean that I should unilaterally ignore any feeling that doesn't have someone to corroborate it? Or, am I colonizing and oppressing myself and I should honor every uncomfortable sensation? If so, does that mean that I should be pushing back on all of them, and leaving spaces where I don't feel comfortable... because that's so close to everyone and everywhere that it's fundamentally unrealistic.
FB: "As women of color, we are greatly underrepresented in academia. This adversely impacts our ability to speak about our experiences with an expectation of understanding such encounters by our allies. And when one is constantly given alternate banal explanations for their ‘overly-sensitive’ perceptions, one loses the epistemic ground they stand on. They cease to give credibility to their own perceptions."
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