I, colonizer.
Part one, a story I tell about my existence is as follows:
I was born in 1982 in Fremont, California to two immigrant parents who came to the United States from India on work visas as resident physicians. Theirs was not an easy migration, but had the good fortune of entering this country on the grounds of what were destined to become very lucrative careers.
We had a privileged existence, as doctors in private practice were reimbursed very well at this time. My parents purchased a plot of land about 70 acres in the Fremont hills, apparently to the chagrin of the Planning Commission and many locals who felt the hills should remain bare. However, through perseverance, they prevailed and built a mansion with lush gardens overlooking the Bay Area, where they currently still reside. We had a full-time onsite gardener, a Cuban refugee, who tended the landscaping and the livestock. We had a continuous string of immigrant live-in housekeepers. I was afforded every opportunity money could buy, from prep school to private tutoring, elite tennis training, round-the-clock nannies, a luxury car, and ultimately, higher education including two masters degrees from which I walked away with zero debt.
In medical school, I met my soul mate, who came to the same place in life via apartment living, community college, and student loans. We struggled — struggled to graduate, struggled to find jobs near our family, struggled to have kids. But ultimately, we built our own privileged lives as two physicians, standing on the shoulders of our parents who sacrificed much so we could inherit the extremely blessed life we now have.
Part two, in which a different story must be told:
I was born in 1982 on land which was unceded territory of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe. This land I inhabited was brutally overtaken by the Spanish missionaries and selected as the site for Mission San Jose, a mission that still stands as a historic site which many schoolchildren, including myself, visit to learn certain narratives in American history. My parents, born at the same time as India’s independence from the British (sometimes known as midnight’s children) immigrated to the United States during a “golden age” for physicians, in which rates could be set by physicians and private practice reigned. This good fortune was not entirely by chance or hard work (though there was plenty of that), but also due to a healthcare system shaped in part by organized medicine’s successful opposition to national health insurance. Like many other wealthy families, my parents used their wealth to purchase land (always a good investment) that was not the owner’s to sell, with no moral or ethical obligation to the natives who were displaced, as the virtue of the day was, by default, simply capitalism.
I was raised by immigrants. Yes, my parents. But also Cubans and Mexicans and El Salvadoreans, who tended to us while our parents delivered babies and operated on emergencies in the night. I came to know their personal stories-countries devastated, children left behind, relying on coyotes, sending hard-earned money back to destitute relatives. I was revolutionized by their struggles, long before I knew my birth country needed revolution. It would be much later in life that I educated myself on causes of migration — land grabs, U.S. embargos, genocide, big oil, and the trafficking of humans, drugs, and weapons.
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Education was important to us, but it was education of a specific kind. I attended a private Christian elementary school with other privileged children where accomplishment, conformity and religion overruled diversity and originality of thought. I belonged, because we could afford it, but I did not, because I was a brown Muslim. I watched others receive communion. I learned about the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, but could not name the slave ships where over a million African people died in savage conditions as part of the slave trade. With my fellow second graders at St. Joseph’s elementary school, I packed a bag for Columbus Day, instructed to marvel at what I would have brought with me to be an “explorer” in the “New World” in 1492, sailing the ocean blue. But I could not have told you that they also brought smallpox and influenza (should I have packed that in my suitcase?). I did not know that Palestinian children my age were being killed as I was attending class, or that the First Intifada was taking place, or why.
I was taught that segregation ended, but no mention was made of the systems that created what happened to Rodney King or James Byrd Jr. I was not taught about Chicago police torture occurring during that time. Or that almost half of police killings were of Black people. Around this same time, prisons also became profitable with the advent of the Corrections Corporation of America. I was taught to marvel at Lincoln’s noble words, but nothing about what remains the largest mass execution in American history, of Dakota men, that he authorized. I was taught some of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speeches, but never warned those in power repeating his words decades later would often be the very people expressly committed to never allowing his dreams to become reality.
Then I went to college, and I was a UC Berkeley student when 9/11 happened and 2,900 innocent lives were lost. I did not understand the context, or the ensuing “war on terror” which killed millions, either directly or indirectly, with millions of civilian lives lost at American hands (including 7,000 U.S. service members). I was still referring to the location of this war as the “Middle East”, not realizing this colonist term centers British occupiers labeling the country of my ancestors as “Far East” — because the historical lens is always White and Western. I thought CNN was a more trustworthy source of information than Al-Jazeera, a stance that would reverse completely later in my life.
Then, medical school. I was a second year medical student holed up in the library, studying for Step 1 when Sandy Hook happened. 26 innocent lives were lost at an elementary school, and assault rifles are still readily available for civilian purchase in many states. Many more horrific mass school shootings would follow. We were taught how to run a level 1 trauma, but not how to advocate for gun reform. We were taught about maternal mortality, but not why Black maternal mortality is more than twice that of Whites (or what to do about it). We were taught the GFR equation but not how it denied Blacks the same consideration for renal transplant. We were taught that coumadin came from a plant, but also inherited modern medicine’s mistrust for Native medicinals as there is less “evidence-based literature” on them. We were taught how connection heals, but not how to navigate insurance companies or hospital systems built to maximize profit at the expense of the sick, and the healer. We were taught that vaccines save lives, but not how they were politicized, or how to respond. We were taught about social determinants of health, but not how to right the ills of systemic violence.
And finally, my husband and I became attending surgeons. The privileged of the privileged, raising privileged children. Any struggle we had was a privileged sort of struggle. Inheriting a crumbling medical system. Trying to advocate for the most vulnerable in an increasingly unpopular time. Attempting to stand with the marginalized when truth and justice are popularly devalued, depending on individual inherited or convenient biases. Including, it must be admitted, our own.
Part 3, in which I bear witness:
I, colonizer, have inherited complicity. I, colonizer, have had the luxury — nay, the arrogance — of ignorance. I, colonizer, bear witness against myself. I, colonizer, weep bitter tears of collective grief.
I am a brown female mother, physician, daughter of immigrants. I belong on this land, or anywhere on this planet, as much or as little as any other human, animal, plant or insect. I am complicit in systems of oppression passed down through centuries. And only when I, when each of us, can bear witness to these truths in our own ways, can we tell the stories that must be told. In ways they have not yet been told.
