Transcriber: Amy Qiu Reviewer: David DeRuwe
When you look at me, who do you see?
Ask yourself what you think you know about me, what you think is true.
Here are some actual things about me.
I’m Nigerian.
I grew up in London,
but I stayed very closely connected to my West African roots.
I moved out to Hong Kong in 2018 with my job at a global firm.
And I love this city. I adore it even.
Arriving in Hong Kong,
I could quickly see there weren’t many people that looked like me.
A five foot eight Black woman, I stood out. I really stood out.
People would stare, sometimes take pictures.
Taxi drivers would refuse to stop for me.
Security guards would take extra special care to check my ID,
even if they weren’t checking other people’s.
In fact, one security guard was so diligent,
he actually followed me all the way up to the apartment
that I was visiting to check that I did indeed know the residents.
What did he think I was up to?
And I know I’m not alone.
Sadly, many of the Black community here
have been in similar situations, sometimes worse.
Whether that’s not being able to rent an apartment
because the landlord doesn’t rent to Black people,
or not being able to access a restaurant or a bar, being turned away.
That one’s happened to me.
Let me ask you this:
How many times have you been stopped by the police in Hong Kong?
Once? Twice? Not at all?
Let me tell you about my friend, we’ll call him Emy.
Emy has been stopped 22 times by the Hong Kong police
in the five years that he’s lived here.
22.
Because he “looks suspicious.”
Apparently looking suspicious is walking down the street while Black,
being on your phone ...
while Black,
even leaving the office to grab some lunch ...
while Black.
Are you sensing a theme here?
What is it about our skin, our hair, our culture,
quite frankly, our very existence
that seems to scream bad, dangerous, criminal?
We need to challenge this bias.
In May 2020, George Floyd, a Black man,
was senselessly murdered by police in the US.
Globally, we saw protests, headlines, discourse.
Yet the response in Hong Kong was ...
muted.
Yes, the city had her own issues
with the protests, the impact of the pandemic,
but the silence to me was deafening.
My friends and I would talk about what it meant to be Black,
about the misconceptions we so often faced.
We say that as Black people,
it’s as if we have a public relations issue.
What could we do to change those misconceptions?
How do you handle a race-wide PR issue?
Well, you take ownership of the narrative,
and one of the most powerful ways to do that is by sharing stories
to enrich and rebalance that narrative.
Stories humanize us. They connect us.
They build empathy.
Move us beyond stereotypes and assumptions
by getting to the depth of an individual.
We find points of similarity, and we see ourselves reflected in each other.
So that's exactly what my friends and I did.
We started “Homegrown,” a podcast which serves as a voice
for the Black experience in Hong Kong.
It's been a powerful platform,
and I'm really proud to say now reaches people in over 80 countries.
Through the podcast, I've interviewed
a range of incredible Black people from many different walks of life,
and I myself, even as a Black woman, have learned more about history,
culture, identity through the eyes and the words of our guests.
but the biggest learnings for me
have been the reiteration that there is no one Black story,
and that while some aspects of our stories - plural stories -
might involve challenges, discrimination, pain,
those are just one part.
There is immense joy in Blackness
and triumph and excellence.
Take Harmony.
Harmony arrived in Hong Kong with her family as a refugee.
That would be one way to describe her,
but like all of us, Harmony is so much more than her immigration status.
She is a confident, beautiful, young Black woman.
She just graduated with a degree in psychology.
She’s modeled for local and international brands.
She even started Hong Kong's first diverse modeling agency.
Or there’s Mutaro.
Mutaro spent his childhood in Senegal as a talibé.
These are young kids who beg for food and for money on the streets.
Again, that’s one dimension.
Beyond that, Mutaro is a world-class chef.
He’s a loving father. He’s ambitious, adventurous.
And let’s go back to my “suspicious friend,” Emy.
Emy is a self-professed tech nerd.
He works at one of the largest technology companies in the world.
He loves camping.
He takes pride in his African and Caribbean roots.
We are all so much more than stereotypes.
So don’t we do both ourselves and each other
a disservice when we make assumptions based on one-dimensional narratives?
One of my favorite authors, and in fact a fellow Nigerian
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, warned of the dangers of a single story,
about how by flattening a person or a group to a single stereotype,
we essentially rob them of their dignity.
So I'm going to ask everyone today to challenge your assumptions.
We have to recognize that these assumptions are often built
on untrue racial and cultural stereotypes, and they’re rooted in bias.
It’s all around us, on TV, in the media,
so we have to do the work to unlearn these things.
I see it as four key steps:
First, we break the pattern.
Can we step outside of the stories we tell ourselves about people
who are different to us?
Can we ask ourselves,
“What’s the story I’m telling myself here? What am I missing?”
And then step two, be curious enough to find out.
That curiosity will look like listening, reading, questioning,
generally learning more.
And we take it a step further -
point three -
which is to share what we learned with others to help change the narrative.
We can all be a part of fixing that PR issue.
Finally, tell your story because people have assumptions about you too.
So I’ll leave you with this:
Look around you. Who do you see?
What story are you telling yourself about them?
What are you missing?
And what will you do now?
Thank you.
(Applause)