In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction M arch 6, 1998—the day is etched into my memory. It was at a party hosted by a friend from grad school: a place that I believed to be safe space, a place where I could put my guard down. Not long after we arrived, I was made painfully aware that for racialized peoples in Canada, safe space is always a tentative thing at best. I sat in the room, along with five other anti-oppression workers, and listened to a White woman1 attack my cousin. He had just immigrated the day before and I had thought that this party would be the perfect place for him to experience a little slice of Canadian culture. Ironically, in retrospect, he did. The interrogation began as soon as she discovered that he had recently immigrated from India. “So that’s the place where those people put those things on their heads, right?”“It’s really dirty there, isn’t it”“There are a lot of slums there, huh?” “You must be so happy to get out of there,” etc. We all heard her, and while the situation demanded that we say something, we had been taught/disciplined not to react, to be polite and to not “start trouble.” I could see the confused look in my cousin’s eyes. He knew that he was being set apart from the others. He knew that there was something not right about the situation. He knew that something bad was going on that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Different culture, he thought.“Maybe I just wasn’t getting the joke,” he said to me afterwards—he was so unsure of how to interpret things. He was the joke. What he did know was that the situation made him feel odd, different, it made him feel like an outsider. Her language was all nicely hidden and easily dismissed as curiosity, stupidity, ignorance, and/or just plain obnoxious behaviour. She never called 173 LIVING WITH THE TRAUMATIC Social pathology and the racialization of Canadian spaces Leeno Luke Karumanchery 10 him a Paki, Sand-Nigger, Pull-start, or any of the other slurs reserved for people of South Asian descent. So to the eyes and ears of privilege in the room, racism was not what they had seen and taken part in. They would not name it racism. I knew what it was and I knew how it was working, but I did nothing —we did nothing—they did nothing. We were all paralyzed. Some were immobilized out of pain, some out of shock, and others out of simple indifference , but the result was that nothing was taken up or challenged. We were left to deal with the aftermath: the pain born in the violence of the moment, the shame of inaction, and the intrapsychic/psychological scars that accumulate through a lifetime of experiences just like this one. On the way home in the car we discussed what had happened. I was drained, feeling that I had been physically assaulted, and I hadn’t even taken the brunt of her racist barrage. But I suppose that is the nature of language and human interaction; they are rarely uni-directional. I knew what it was, and being able to see it was empowering to some extent, but that knowledge really didn’t help me resist or fight in the moment, nor did it ease the pain afterwards. My girlfriend at the time (a White woman) could not, or would not see it. I spent the entire ride home looking for validation, asking her to understand my pain. She questioned my inaction, insisting, “You can’t do nothing and then complain about it afterwards.” Why was it important for me to get her validation, her understanding? My cousin couldn’t see what it was. He knew how it made him feel, but he felt that racism wasn’t part of the equation because she didn’t use slurs. Importantly, as a newly arriving Indian immigrant , this was his first lesson in racism, his first lesson in becoming “Other.” This is an important distinction, as it emphasizes the difference between being the Other and becoming the Other. I am sure that upon his arrival to Canada, he might have described himself in many terms: short, engineer, brother…Brown would likely not have been one of them. But Canadian society is so finely tuned in its racist thought and ability to recognize/categorize all things racial that...

Share