I meet one of his good friends. She’s warm and friendly, and we hit it off at once. She tells me stories of Josh, painting him as a generous friend. I meet her halfway through my relationship with Josh, a stage where I am seeing glimpses of the real him. It’s shocking when she mentions a project they worked on for weeks. Josh has been promising to help me build a table for my car for months. He barely makes time to see me, let alone help me with the table. As she speaks, her eyes glisten with love and adoration for my boyfriend. I struggle to reconcile her version of Josh with the cold and distant Josh I know. She flicks through her iPhone showing me photos of the final product. I look at the photos and feel irrationally jealous of her.
Another time, I stumble upon my boyfriend and a friend of his in his backyard, both crouched down as he helps her build a wooden table. The encounter would be ironic if I weren’t consumed with doubts about him. She talks about previous projects Josh has helped her with. I want to ask if we are talking about the same Josh, but I don’t.
*
I dream of Josh building things with his two female friends, both with fairer skin than mine. I experience a sort of sleep paralysis as I watch him try to bleach my skin white. I jolt awake, sheets damp with sweat.
*
Months pass, Josh asks me to come over to his shed. He’s finally helping me with the table project. I’m giddy with excitement all day. When I enter his shed, I sense his usual dark mood hanging in the air, making the shed feel colder than outside. My body tenses, but I ignore the knots forming in my back.
We start with the basics, how to build the table and what tools I will need. He’s short, frustrated, condescending, and the rising Sagittarius side of my natal chart keeps thinking that I’m just not having fun. I had just been with my girlfriends giggling and taking up space. In the shed, I am a shell of myself and I struggle to find myself here. He tells me to get hinges, and pardon me for being bilingual, with English being my second language, but I don’t know what a hinge is. When I ask him to explain, he snaps and says sardonically, “it’s such a basic tool, how do you not know it?” His comment stuns me. I look up, searching his eyes for any warmth, but there is none.
“Just ask one of the Bunnings guys, they’ll know what I’m talking about,” he says.
I start packing up my things. He asks me to stay for dinner, but I make up an excuse. He grabs my arm, forcing me to meet his stare again. For a moment, he is vulnerable and soft, the Josh I fell in love with. I always relent when this soft Josh appears, even if only briefly, until he becomes his usual cold self. My self-worth is too damaged now to break up with him, and I wonder if he knows this. Something stirs within me, and I silently promise myself to never ask Josh to help me build things again. He doesn’t apologise for being rude. An awkward tension fills the room. Josh waits for me to acquiesce, like the several other times he has been condescending. We would have dinner, and all would be forgotten. Except tonight, we don’t have dinner together, and nothing is forgotten.
I want to tell my boyfriend that while I don’t know how to build things, I know when a man disrespects me. Josh’s schooling had always been a given, his path smooth. Mine has been a fight – interrupted first because I am a girl, then losing my basic right to education. I worked two jobs while in high school, and remember wheeling our suitcase to foodbanks every week. I don’t know what a hinge is, but I know the art of survival. Having a black belt in survival means I can detect the subtle ways a white man might try to diminish a brown woman.
*
The dating scene in Naarm is filled with white kids from affluent backgrounds, burdened with repressed emotions about living on stolen lands. The Naarm society can raise men who become insecure, disingenuous, and emotionally manipulative. Globally, men are socially taught to exploit women, especially brown women. These norms lead me into a relationship with a white man who wants to reap the benefits of dating a brown woman without giving anything in return.
I wonder why Josh treats his female friends differently than he treats me. I can’t help but look at my dark skin and ask the universe whether global racial biases have seeped into my relationship. I’ve always known my existence is political, yet I naively thought that race wouldn’t play a role in romantic relationships.
BIPOC women have been portrayed in movies as second class to men, especially white men. Societies have raised boys to view brown women as their servants or objects of wonder. Beautiful brown women are referred to as exotic, like animals caged in a zoo on display for the wealthy. These animals are stripped of their instinct, becoming isolated, sad and duller versions of themselves. This practice also happened to BIPOC people. Human zoos are a thing of the past, but a very recent past – the last human zoo closed in 1958 in Belgium. I meditate on whether Josh dates me to flaunt his exotic brown woman to society without ever intending to attend to my needs.
Josh forgets my birthday. He buys me a table for my car as a birthday gift. We don’t really speak about the awkward time at the shed. I break up with him, and shortly after, he asks me to transfer money for the gift I didn’t ask for. I wonder if he has treated previous women the same way, or if I’m the special (and brown) one.
I wonder what growing up as a man in white australia does to someone. I imagine it would be difficult to live in a racist nation with racist peoples, and not adopt racist views. While Josh’s actions aren’t obvious forms of racial and sexist mistreatment, they are subtle and gradual. Throughout our relationship, I remain confused, taking a long time to realise he wants me to perpetuate the racist and patriarchal social system. Give me a man hitting a woman, and I can tell you he’s a misogynist. Give me a white man who shouts ‘go back to where you come from’ and I can tell you he’s racist. But give me a Naarm scene, private-schooled, softly-spoken white man wearing Salomons who likes camping, and it will take me a long time to figure out he is a man who does not respect or value women, especially brown women.
Josh’s actions revealed a troubling disparity, or cognitive dissonance. While he outwardly supported the rights of people like me, his disrespect for me suggested otherwise. His consistent condescension and dismissive behaviour underscored a deep-seated sense of superiority. The contradiction between his public self and private actions painted a picture of the racial and sexist biases that influenced our relationship. While he may not have been the first white man to behave this way, our relationship bluntly highlighted the pervasive nature of subtle racism and sexism, even among those who consider themselves white allies.
Echoes of Belonging and Identity on Stolen Land 
Leave a comment