I Was A Brown Kid Raised Among Other Brown Kids In South East Asia And Yet, Every Single Time I Wrote

I was a brown kid raised among other brown kids in South East Asia and yet, every single time I wrote a story in class or I came up with an idea for a play, I used traditional white European names and all my characters were white. So were those of the other kids. Even with no white people around us, the default race in anything fictional was white.

Every single book I read was white. Enid Blyton, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl all wrote books about white kids. The Hardy Boys, Harry Potter, the Meg Cabot novels. All the cartoons, all the early 2000s Disney channel shows, all the made for TV movies. Everything features straight, white children and all anyone wanted to do was to emulate them. When there was some representation of other races, it was secondary, tertiary characters. Or white passing actors. To think that our own stories aren’t worth it unless we acted white enough.

I didn’t want to be Shanti in the jungle or Jasmine in the Taj Mahal or the weird kid in the background everyone made fun of for being an “other”.I wanted to be Hermione and Annabeth and Nancy Drew. I would pretend my name wasn’t my full long Indian name but Keira, or Kara, or Katie and insert myself into the fantasies of my childhood. Even in my own head, I didn’t think I was good enough to be myself. I grew older and called myself Keer when I moved to the UK to compensate and shorten it for white people to pronounce better (why? racism.)

It took me a long time to accept that my story was worth telling, that my skin colour and heritage and religion were not inferior both in real life and on the page. It took me an even longer time to realize that I deserved to see people like me on the screen and the page in a way that doesn’t burden the character to be an ambassador for my entire race but she just exists, like I do. I still am shocked that I can’t even name one single Asian leading character from any of my childhood novels - Asian! The continent with 60% of all humans!

I want the default race to be non existent. I want a class of children to think up a story and not have 90% of them come up with straight white characters. White is not the default. Representation matters.