One Soy Flat White Please

“One soy flat white please” my white skin among the sea of whiteness.

I am an immigrant. This soil hasn’t raised me.
This air didn’t open my lungs as I breathed my first breath
Do you understand what it means to be an immigrant?

A bunch of white soccer mums throwing looks
Talking about investment properties and trips overseas
Not noticing 2 Asian and 1 Indian mums by themselves.
Or worse. Noticing.

Behind the customs counter, a white woman talks down at a Latino woman who can’t fill out an immigration card.
In a tongue that is not hers.
I bite my own and smile through the rage as I am next in the line with a passport of colour you don’t recognise.

Drunk boys in town scream Ni Hao at me
As I walk home from work on the main street of our proud “melting pot” city.

Screaming that racism is dead while holding a rope that through the years extends to a neck.

You scream that your whiteness didn’t get you a job. Your hard work did.
How about your grandfather? Tell me.
Was he scared to look in the wrong direction?
Was he scared of
Discrimination, prejudice, bigotry, oppression, differentiation?

Just because I am a privileged brat with a fancy degree and a fancy fucking cat
You don’t get to call yourself inclusive for accepting my twang or my eye colour
While meeting a refugee crisis in full body armour.

Watching a documentary from mere 50 years ago.
A black guy asking to be in the same church as the white folk
Armed whiteness spits in the face of courage
I am sobbing.
Does it have to be this for you to acknowledge that racism exists?

I call white people out as if I don’t belong to their group
But there are soap dispensers out there that will work on my white hands and not on yours.

I am an immigrant but I might seem white to you. One of your own.
Let me point out, jokingly, that I am here for diversity.
I am not joking though.

“One soy flat white please”. Sip.

My white skins burns on my bones as I walk past 50th homeless man whose skin is darker than my own.