Not Your Token

I'm angry.

It's 2016, I'm living overseas, Spotify recommends some great tunes every week, I live 10 minutes from a cake shop that stays open till 4am every day. There's a lot to be happy about but something has been bugging me.

I'm sick of being people's excuse to be casually racist.

I get it, we're afraid of what's different.
Let's break it down, our differences lie in the colour of our skin and our cultural practices.
You might think our medicine is whack because it's not sickly sweet or artificially coloured but hey, I think it's messed up that you feed your children unnatural chemicals to make them better.
I think your levels of milk consumption is concerning, you think having rice for every meal is silly and ethnic.
I was brought up valuing the benefits of education, you probably wrote us off as nerds.
I've seen just how much harder people of colour have to work just to get to where you would start your career.
We don't turn our noses up to your medicine, we don't call you names based on your food, we don't make fun of you for putting your priorities elsewhere.
So why does it make it okay for you to?
But each to their own.

There is a lack of respect in this advanced 21st century world we're living in. Colonisation has long planted the idea that "White is Right", guess what dear friends of 2016, you don't have to reap what your ancestors have sowed. It's not difficult to treat your PoC friends with respect.
Respect for their food.
Respect for their cultural practices.
Respect for their family relationships.
The respect you'd show for you fellow non-PoC friends.

I've come to realise I am often the only PoC in a group and usually that doesn't bother me.
It bothers me when non PoC expect a free pass to be racist because "they have lots of *insert ethnicity* friends."
While we're at it;

• it's not my job to translate things for you when we're out and about
• it's not my responsibility to tell you if someone is talking about you in their own language
• it's not my job to educate you on my culture

I'd happily do these things for friends but only when it comes from a place of curiosity and not as the source material for your latest shitty punchline.

Be my friend. Someone I can go get cake with (I'm really in love with this cake place, can you tell?), someone I can talk with, watch movies with. Not someone to excuse your micro-aggressions and casual racist remarks.
I'm done with being your token friend.