For my readers who don’t know, I’m from Sri Lanka. My mother is part Dutch, so I have light brown skin. My husband is German. My kids like to say he is not white, he’s pink, lol. Kira was born very, very fair. She looked like a German baby with white skin and blue eyes. Right now, her skin is olive and her eyes are green. She sometimes wears purple contacts! Max was born a little darker with brown eyes. He is a lovely caramel colour and he still has brown eyes.

Both my kids tan very well in the summer and never really lose their tan. Even on Christmas Day, they still have tan lines from the summer. 10 mins in the sun, they have a tan and they do not burn. I joke that their fair-skinned, blond friends will be jealous of their skin’s tanning abilities for the rest of their lives.

I remember growing up hating the colour of my skin. I’m ashamed to say that now. But I wished I had been born white because even as a child of 4 or 5 years old, I must have somehow realized that my brown skin was a disadvantage. It’s not that I thought white skin was prettier; I knew I was pretty, as many people, white, brown and black often told me I was a pretty child. My parents always told me I was pretty and I believed it. I can’t remember exactly why, but I always wished I’d been born white.

I remember my first incident with racism. I was in the car with my grandmother, and we were curbside at the mall, waiting for either my mother or father as they ran into the store for something quick. I was about 4 or 5. It was a hot summer day, all the car windows were open, and I was hanging out one window on the store side. A blond lady walked by, and she spit on the ground and shouted at me, “F’ing paki!” I looked at her confused and yelled back to her, “I am not from Pakistan!” She swore at me some more, and my grandmother pulled me back into the car and rolled up the window. I was so confused. Why did she think I was from Pakistan? And what was so wrong with that? I had a friend from Pakistan and she was nice. My grandmother told me to ignore people like that, always. She called her a racist but I didn’t understand the word.

When I was pregnant with Kira, I was part of an Internet Board. I happily shared the news that Dave and I were going to be parents. The congratulations rolled in. Then one woman said something that I never, in my wildest dreams, expected to hear. She said that Dave and I were irresponsible for having a child, that we were setting our “mulatto” child up for a life of misery, persecution, grief, and hatred because he/she will be mixed. I made the mistake of reading this message at work on my lunch hour, and I spent the rest of the hour crying in the washroom. I knew this wasn’t true, but I was so distraught that someone would actually say this to me and feel this way in 2003.

When I had Kira, as I said above, she was white-skinned, with blond hair and blue-eyes. I got so, so many comments from people about how I must be the nanny, because how could I, a little brown girl, have given birth to a blond, blue-eyed baby, from people I knew to strangers on the street. I was once at Bethel Park, where we have our cabin, when a lady I didn’t know approached me while I was holding Kira. She admired Kira and commented to me that I was “looking after” such a lovely, well-mannered baby. I answered that she was mine, I had laboured 12-hours for this lovely, well-mannered baby. The lady was shocked. She said, “What?! Who’s the father?! I have to see what the father looks like?!” I don’t know about you, but I always assume that the woman holding the baby is the mother.

No one ever doubted that Max, my darker-skinned, brown-eyed baby, was mine. When we all go out in public, people have no trouble believing Max and I are together. Dave and I could be standing together at the cash register and cashiers still as, “Are you together?” People still do a double take when I call Kira my daughter, even though we look a lot alike. Funny how that goes.

I have so many more examples of racism in my life – recent ones, not just these ones from the past. Ones from yesterday, or last month, or last year. For a stupid time, I believed that things were better, because when I asked my kids, they said they hadn’t experienced any in school. So, I thought – yay, racism in Canada is getting better. They are not experiencing racism like I did in school. I thought things were better, foolishly. But it’s only because they were too young to recognize what racism was. As a visible minority, I’m ashamed to admit that, but I do admit it now. Please forgive my ignorance. I see evidence of it every day. I had to re-educate myself a bit. Not only do I see it out there in the world, but I experience it myself.

Racism and White Privilege are opposite sides of the same coin. My daughter Kira wrote this the other day. Some of you may have seen it already on my social channels.

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white privilege

i was raised by a brown mother and a white father and have lived in the middle of these two worlds my entire life. i know that despite my mixed ethnicity, i am considered privileged because of my fairer skin tone. this means i will not face the same barriers in life as my sri lankan mother, or even my darker-skinned brother. all my childhood, i have witnessed the racial injustices that exists between my parents. from people assuming my poc mother is my nanny because there’s “no way her daughter could be white.” to being told by adults that i’m “lucky i look like my daddy.” i have both benefitted and been oppressed by white privilege. i will never deny its existence, and it’s painful to see how many people still do when there are others out there being mistreated, abused, and murdered because of it.

~ kira giesen

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