When I was a teenage girl, my now-deceased great Aunt Salima would tell me about how my relatives came to find themselves in this country. I’d sit there, fascinated, at a time in my life when I should have been consumed by boy bands and romance novels and boys who were bad news.
I was mesmerised by their tales of upheaval and struggle. About how there were dirt roads in the suburbs where they settled and scarcely a store in sight. About how their neighbours didn’t understand them. But mostly, I was captivated by their bonds: about how one by one, the members of my parents’ village in northern Lebanon came out, sponsoring one another, working together in factories, sending their children to local public schools before they could afford Catholic ones and before their Maronite Catholic Church had a presence in the place in which they settled.
They helped build one another’s future, she’d tell me, with multiple families often living under one roof in the tiniest fibro houses, schooling each other on which letters of the English alphabet they’d need to identify in order to get off at the right train station. I learned early on about what they did for a better life for their children, something that always lived in the back of my mind as I navigated my own identity as an Australian-born girl growing up in Lebanon’s great shadow.
These days, the children and grandchildren of those late 1960s Lebanese migrants – among the first imports in the dying days of the White Australia Policy – enjoy a life their forebears couldn’t even dream of. And in my family and outside it, Australians of foreign heritage, Arabs and non-Arabs alike, run successful companies, they’re doctors and lawyers and academics, they own good homes and fancy cars and more than one nice dress or suit. I don’t know if they all think about their history in the same way I do, or if it’s easily taken for granted.
Young people of colour... are to one another what those early migrant communities were to each and every new arrival
That’s the funny thing about success – the more we have, the closer we guard it, an irony I see in our conversations about refugees and the now much-shared quote about fortune, longer tables and higher fences.
After some 15 years in the workforce, in different jobs across different industries, I’ve come to realise that young people of colour – first and second generation migrants only now realising how their otherness has impacted their success – are to one another what those early migrant communities were to each and every new arrival. Where our parents and grandparents survived on an unofficial altruistic kind of socialism, an ‘I make it, you make it’ kind of philosophy, people like me are thriving on it.
That’s not to say it’s something we inherited. Instead, it’s been a by-product of our realisation that because of our otherness, we’re always two steps behind our more privileged, often white, peers. And yet, personal experience has demonstrated to me that despite all the privilege and wealth and success that comes with whiteness, many white people are still so protective of their success.
I’m not denying that theirs is hard-earned, but the success of POC is earned under a different set of circumstances and in spite of conditions that others would find difficult. The fact that we have to work harder for our success, contemplate changing our names in order to get jobs, and either whitewash our experiences or be completely pigeon-holed by them, has reconciled us to the fact that we need to band together to get ahead.
Consider organisations like Sweatshop, which exists to support culturally and linguistically diverse writers share their stories, and Diversity Arts Australia, which advocates for a cultural industry that represents the Australia’s cultural landscape, both of which are run by POC. Or places like Moroccan Soup Bar, which only hires Muslim women to help empower them amidst a rising Islamophobia. Turn up to the book launch of a WOC or see one perform at a Bankstown Poetry Slam and you’ll see the waves of encouragement and pride reverberate in the room. Even though we are conditioned to assimilate, I know for certain that my opportunities grew when I began making connections with other POC in my industry.
It is the making of connections that help reconcile past and present, identity and place; it’s a way of building networks and solidarity
Even though these are the people that have the most limited opportunities, whose stories are tokenised and whose success lies at the margins of everyone else’s, they were willing to extend a hand every time they successfully climbed another rung on that precarious career ladder. Like their forebears, their success was made better by sharing it.
I guess for POC, it’s always so much more than work. It is the making of connections that help reconcile past and present, identity and place; it’s a way of building networks and solidarity, it’s a way of establishing a presence and having a say. It is toiling with the sacrifice of their ancestors weighing heavily on their heart and supporting others in distant lands.
When POC work, they don’t just work for themselves. In the darkest moments of my career, when people who I thought were my friends did not have my back because they saw me as an opponent in a race I didn’t know I’d entered, it was the people of colour, often just acquaintances who had far more to lose, that held my hands and propelled me forward.
