I've Been Meaning to Tell You

1) "Maybe the differences between our childhoods are but a version of those that exist between many parents and children. My own parents, your beloved grandparents, were not imaginary immigrant parents but real and specific ones, Black and South Asian people who journeyed to this country more than half a century ago, who worked lifelong as a minder of children and a factory labourer. They experienced many indignities and deep body aches, sacrifices and shortages, but they worked hard and they managed to raise a writer who is also a professor of literature, a fact of which they are proud but also, at times, perplexed. They do not understand everything about me, but I’m sure they believe, for good reason, that they have provided a better life for their son, and that many if not all the challenges they once experienced no longer affect me."

2) "You did not create the inequalities and injustices of this world, daughter. You are neither solely nor uniquely responsible to fix them. If there is anything to learn from the story of our ancestry, it is that you should respect and protect yourself; that you should demand not only justice but joy; that you should see, truly see, the vulnerability and the creativity and the enduring beauty of others. Today, many years after indenture and especially slavery, there are many who continue to live painfully in wakes of historical violence. And there are current terrible circumstances whereby others, in the desperate hope for a better life, either migrate or are pushed across the hardened borders of nations and find themselves stranded in unwelcoming lands. We live in a time, dearest daughter, when the callous and ignorant in wealthy nations have made it their business to loudly proclaim who are the deserving 'us' (those really 'us') and who are the alien and undeserving 'them.' But the story of our origins offers us a different insight. The people we imagine most apart from 'us' are, oftentimes, our own forgotten kin."

3) "I have tried to instill in both of you a strong sense of pride regarding your African and South Asian ancestry, knowing that one may very easily be made to feel otherwise. But the fact is that I’ve never actually named you one way or the other, never told you, authoritatively, what you are, racially speaking. I suppose that I have imagined, at times, that you, as such complexly mixed children, might have the opportunity to choose and declare your own identity. I had forgotten that racial identity is so rarely a matter of personal choice. That it is always, in origin, a falsehood and violence, though it can become, all the same, a necessary tool for acknowledging the enduring life and creativity of a persistently maligned people."

4) "That was how you handled the incident. But how did we as parents? Your mother was very angry. It was the anger of someone who had never been named the way your brother was, but who has known, as a woman, other damaging labels. I’m happy both that she revealed her anger and that you saw it. Never let anyone tell you that as a girl, you shouldn’t express how angry you are. I was angry too, but, later that evening, when we gathered as a family, I wanted to speak from something other than that emotion. For some vague and unspoken reason, we had decided, all four of us, to sit on the polished wooden floor of the living room, everyone except the notoriously inflexible me sitting fairly comfortably. In this already awkward position, I wanted to explain something to your brother, but also to you and your mother, something of vital importance, something I’d been meaning to tell you for a long time about the experience of being named. But now, as the opportunity presented itself, I was failing. I tried again and again. I kept swallowing and clearing my throat, noticing both you and your brother glancing at me but trying not to stare."

5) "I understood very well that the hurtful people around me were never monsters of the Hollywood-movie type. The boy who regaled us with [n-word] jokes might also choose me first for his team. The girl who scorned me, laughed about me with her friends, might also tell me during a chance encounter in an empty school stairwell that, actually, it wasn’t true that I was ugly. I glimpsed their contradictions, their inner doubts and vulnerabilities, their brave curiosities and cowardly tribalisms, their sincere desire to be good and also their ability to be casually cruel. The truth is that before I could appreciate my own complex humanity, I was made to understand and appreciate theirs, which I saw confirmed, over and over again, on television, in films, and in books."