Colorblind (Irate Chinese American Psychotherapist)

I think it’s interesting how conversations can be an organizing receptacle for scattered experiences…and the conversations that especially feel this way are the ones I most love. Tonight’s meeting was no exception. I’ve been meeting with a group of guys for over a year (I think it’s been that long), where we’d share about our lives and pray for each other on a regular basis. Although none of us are homeless or flossin’ twenty inch blades on the Impala, we’re socioeconomically diverse. We’re also ethnically and culturally diverse, with each of us representing various races and heritages. Some of us are married. Some single. Some single and divorced. Most of us attend different churches. I haven’t attended a church for some time. But we all are young men. We come together holding these differences and similarities in an effort to love and support each other; and with that, come many times where we’d get into animated discussions about how our struggles with the same thing can sometimes look so different…such as romantic relationships, encounters with the police, what family means to us, how others perceive us, how we perceive others perceiving us, etc. Our assorted perspectives collide like the reverberations of various instruments in a jazz improv, taking form and simultaneously adjusting, making melodies that provoke and inspire. Or at least that’s a fanciful way of how I’d like to think of our conversations. Sometimes it also sounds like a bunch of guys laughing and cussing up a storm, as it did tonight. So as we ended up talking about race, dating, and self-perception; tonight’s song sounded like, and reminded me of, a poem that I wrote a couple years ago to process something that struck me while I was sitting with one of my therapy clients. I’m still processing it...


Colorblind (Irate Chinese American Psychotherapist)

So he says to me,
“I’m colorblind. I don’t see color. I don’t see difference.”
Now, I’ve learned about countertransference dominance and I’m trying to build a therapeutic alliance.
I get it; in non-psychoanalytic terms it means don’t let your shit get in the way of your client sorting through his own shit.
But now the shit has hit the fan,
It’s flying everywhere and I’m trying to pretend like it doesn’t bother me as the flying feces bespeckles my face.
Okay, take a deep breath and go slowly…watch...your…pace.
Do you even see my face!!!
As someone who isn’t color blind, I see clearly that this bothers me.
As he IS colorblind or as he claims to be, he either doesn’t see that this bothers me
Or he’s in denial or he is stuck in a strange mix of sight and unsight from which understanding, knowledge, and relationship can flee.
Colorblind,
I think I understand the thought behind it. Treat everyone the same. Don’t focus on difference. Be blind to it.
And as a person who:
Has had so much fear, having grown up feeling like the striking features of my hair, eyes, cheekbones, skin tone have been consciously or unconsciously highlighted to align me with the popular media portrayal of exotic dragon ladies, martial arts masters, sidekicks, nerds, and seldom the main character in a non-Asian film;
This by default makes me an intelligent exotic nerdy subservient sidekick kung fu master who never gets the lady at the end of the film.
Damn it’s demeaning!
Who wants to be pigeon holed into that caricature?!?
Colorblind, I see
That you don’t want to see -
These things have been proliferated into the mass consciousness of Western sensibility.
I’d love to love to believe you,
But the fact that Jackie Chan and Jet Li recently starred in a kung fu movie as side characters to a no name Caucasian kid actor who gets the Chinese girl at the end of the story leaves me to believe otherwise.
Damn I’m pissed! Because real life seems to reflect this skewed perspective!
Yellow fever spreads as I watch my Asian sisters go for the White guys
Because for some reason a guy like me is a second place prize.
Do you not see this?
Do you not want to see this?
I guess that’s why you’re colorblind.
I guess that’s why you have color denial.
Sometimes the truth of our difference is too much to handle
And the fact that your simple statement to me is not so simple to me
Highlights a difference from which my mind’s eye will refuse to be blinded to and from which you will not claim to see.
Yes, we are all God’s people, but God has made me different and there is such tragedy and glory in it that it must be seen.
I want to believe that God’s glory can be found in my unique traits that only color can communicate. Do you see what I mean?
So I wipe the shit off my face
I watch my pace
I leave the rant in my head and heart
And return to the session