RISE

I cannot remember a time in my life when I was ambivalent about the US. This is a country that has dominated the world I grew in and, as a consequence, there is a lot of things that connected me with this strange country across the Atlantic. Growing up, the pop culture most easily accessible to a middle-class Chinese-Indonesian boy with a reluctance to confront his Chinese heritage while at the same time being acutely aware of the lack of acceptance due to his race was American pop culture. In university, the innovations from America formed the basis of a lot of the knowledge I gathered. The modern convenience we have nowadays, a big part of them we adopted only after the US made the first step. Whatever you might think of the US, it is a country that has had a big impact in each of our lives and as such, it has unwittingly become a test tube for the issues we are dealing with in the world. The protests taking place in the US right now is a litmus test of our will to break down old barriers. Racism isn’t new; it is an especially pernicious form of the human need to discern oneself from others, it is the easy way to make us feel exceptional, whether out of fear or ambition or any other possible banal reason. No single person is immune from racist thoughts and as much as I pride myself of being an open and decidedly not racist person, there were occasions when I caught myself falling back to racist tropes. And this is exactly why we need to rally to support our brothers and sisters who are taking a stand at the moment. By supporting, we are recognizing our shortcomings AND our willingness to change them.