Eating the Bitterness of Internalized Racism

As a transracial adoptee in a white family, I bought into anti-Asian stereotypes. But now I’m reclaiming the ethnic identity God gave me.

By Tiffany Henness

M

y father was Chinese and my mother was white, but I was adopted at birth by a white family in Oregon. When I learn something about Chinese culture, I feel like I reclaim a bit of my lost heritage. When I first heard the Chinese phrase 吃苦 (chī kǔ), which translates as eat bitter, it resonated with me right away.

To “eat bitterness” is to work hard and endure through adversity without complaint. I liken it to “suffer better,” a mantra I learned while training for an ultramarathon. Unfortunately, this approach hasn’t always worked for me. As a child, I attempted to swallow the bitterness of racial oppression, and that’s one reason why I struggle with internalized racism now.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

My mom kept a memory book to chronicle my cute kid moments. She recorded how I had asked, “What am I?” when I was four years old. According to her notes, she told me that I was part Chinese. My response was to make a funny face and then tug at the sides of my own eyes.

Where had I learned to associate slanted eyes with being Chinese? I don’t remember. However, it’s clear I had been exposed to racial othering by the age of four. Looking back, I can see that anti-Asian ideas were embedded in the culture around me—in TV shows and schoolyard comments, or between adults discussing international politics. I was fed a steady diet of anti-Asian racism.

As a teenager, I began to understand these gestures or comments were wrong. They made me uncomfortable and hurt in a way I could not articulate. I felt there was a problem. But I believed the source of the problem was internal (i.e., something was inferior about me as a mixed Chinese person) rather than believing it was external (i.e., something was wrong with how others viewed my appearance or how they talked about Chinese people).

I was encouraged to swallow these racial jabs as harmless jokes. I was taught to believe that harmful Chinese stereotypes existed because there was, in fact, some truth to them. I grew up in an all-white community and learned to interpret the racism I experienced as something else. I never assumed it was my Asian features that caused others to treat me differently. It had to be something about me that was off-putting: my expression, my attitude, or my awkward social skills.

A few years ago, I started to make sense of these experiences when I found a Facebook group called Be the Bridge. Latasha Morrison had created this space for people to have faith-based, bridge-building conversations about race and racism. This year, Be the Bridge released a discussion guide called We Need To Talk: A BIPOC Guide to Healing Ourselves. It contains this helpful description of what I’d experienced: “People of color may cope with the chronic psychological stress of being ‘less than’ by subconsciously surrendering to or embracing the ideas and beliefs of white supremacy. This coping mechanism is referred to as internalized racism.”

SWALLOWING SUFFERING

Internalizing racist ideas caused me to distance myself from my Chinese ethnicity and see myself as white. That way, I could avoid feeling hurt or shame over negative stereotypes I associated with being Chinese. Instead of denying the lies of racism, I was denying who God made me to be, which led to a deeply buried self-hate that remained largely undetected until I was in my thirties.

I remember watching a TV show with a mixed-Chinese character that I thought was being played by a white actor. In my growing understanding of racism in mass media, I was upset at this apparent whitewashing. I took my indignation to IMDB to research this actor, and I discovered that they were mixed-Chinese, just like me.

But, for some reason, I was still upset. I still felt like they were not “Chinese enough.” My heart felt ugly. Why was I still angry at that actor? Shouldn’t I celebrate the representation? Maybe my problem wasn’t with the actor or the role. Maybe it was with myself. I was insecure about not looking Chinese enough to truly claim my ethnic heritage. I was insecure about not growing up with Chinese culture and believed that meant I had to identify as white.

I looked a lot like that mixed-Chinese actor, and I had projected all my insecurity and self-loathing onto that actor. They were merely a mirror through which I saw myself.

After this, I started rethinking my upbringing and cultural influences. I tried to remember what I’d learned about race growing up. How had I learned what it meant to be Chinese or Asian American? What attitudes about race had been normalized in the white community I was raised in?

Memories came back—like the eye-tugging gesture at four years old. Only now I was able to see the racism that I’d intentionally dismissed before. I had quietly swallowed the pain of racial othering my entire life. I had interpreted racial stress and microaggressions as things I should work hard to tolerate, a hardship to endure without complaint. I had swallowed rancid bites of racism with a smile. But I was feeding self-hatred.

Regrettably, I even occasionally made my own racist jokes. I made fun of myself or played on Asian stereotypes. I didn’t think it mattered. I merely wanted others to like me and feel comfortable around me. Living up to their expectations and trying to embody white norms seemed to alleviate their discomfort with my racial difference.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was reacting to the social pressure of the dominant white culture around me. The Be the Bridge BIPOC guide describes this well: “Whiteness expects internalized racism and oppression from people of color.”

Why didn’t I realize the damage this was doing? I was distracted by the faux rewards. The more I embodied white normativity, the more I felt accepted. The more I minimized my racial difference or erased my Chinese ethnic difference, the less resistance I encountered.

I got stuck in a feedback loop: anti-Asian racism made me feel “less than;” because I felt “less than,” I minimized my racial difference; because I minimized my racial difference (to conform to whiteness), I had more approval and success in a dominant white culture; because I had more success in a dominant white culture, my Asianness must have been the problem; because my Asianness was the problem, the anti-Asian racist ideas must be true; and therefore, Asians were in fact “less than.” This cycle of internalized racism provided fertile soil for self-loathing.

EATING BITTERNESS

The chronic stress and harm caused by racism and white supremacy are not hardships to be endured without complaint, but suffering that must be disrupted without compromise. It took me a long time to understand that “eating bitterness” does not mean quietly accepting racism. Doing so was not building my character, but poisoning my soul.

I love this quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Freedom is not won by a passive acceptance of suffering. Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering.” Healing is lifelong work. Recognizing internalized racism is an ongoing process. It doesn’t just hinder my personal identity development; it also hinders my relationship with God and others. A key ingredient toward healing the damage within me has been reclaiming my lost heritage and affirming my ethnic difference as God-given and valuable. 

Internalized racism can also manifest in systemic ways when we, as people of color, support the very racist policies and laws that oppress us. Therefore, another ongoing pursuit is learning to see and name racist ideas and policies as external problems, as symptoms of the idolatry of white supremacy, and not as internal problems indicative of the non-white people groups being targeted by those policies.

This is the hard—but rewarding—work I commit myself to. In fact, this is where the approach of eating bitterness can be applied: I endure through the hardships, both internally and externally, of working against racism and white supremacy without losing hope. I persevere in the face of hateful resistance without becoming hateful as well, and in so doing, I reclaim my ethnic and cultural heritage.

Embracing my full ethnicity is a vital ingredient for a healthy and whole identity no longer rooted in whiteness. This is tricky as an adoptee. I only have a few crumbs of information with which to reconstruct an entire meal. So I remind myself that there is no right or wrong way to be a mixed-Chinese American. Shedding the lies I have believed might be bitter work, but learning to love myself as God made me is a sweet reward.

Photo by Larm Rmah on Unsplash

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Tiffany Henness is a TRA educator with Be the Bridge and founder of the Adoptee Influencer Network. She lives in Oregon with her husband and two children, and writes about adoption, faith, and ethnicity on her website, Calling In the Wilderness. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.