Reckoning

The drama of life is incomplete if one has not had the singular experience, each time, of being singled out; I speak of the occasions when I have felt uneasy at an interaction with someone in authority whilst being treated with less dignity than the perpetrator(s) would probably afford their domestic pet; an occurrence that leaves me feeling bereft of an easy categorisation within which to place a particular episode in and amongst the behavioural pantheon of modern neuroses.

When I do have these experiences the response is generally to try to forget it as quickly as it happened, in the vain hope that the emotion generated hence does not add to the flood of unwanted rumination that readily already occurs in spite of repeating ad nauseam the modern mantra that I am, indeed, a being of agency and free will.
Subjectivity is key here - I was singled out; I was unfairly treated; my person-hood, at the time, was unfairly maligned; of these there can be little doubt.
Add to this the perceived and manifest inadequacies that we already bring to social interactions; perhaps a bad day at work was had; perhaps I woke up feeling not my best self; perhaps we live in a society that accepts discrimination based on colour, creed, religion, and race as a condition of life that everyone must accept lest one is asked to love it or leave.
The debate, here, is how to accept these interactions as inevitable episodes conditional on critical-mass and boilerplate acceptance of the argument that fresh air, clean water and workable infrastructure is worth the bargain.

Let me illustrate:
- A family of three travels to the CBD by train in the days when one could still buy a printed ticket from a vending machine in a suburban railway station platform. They display their tickets at the exit gate to transit officers. The transit officers see that one of the three tickets has been erroneously purchased in place of the correct one that is 20 cents more than the price of the ticket so produced. The transit officers question the family about their antecedents, especially related to how long they have resided in the country, and then levy a $100 fine on the family, whose day, by now, is irrevocably ruined.
The argument is not that a fine isn't warranted in the case above, but rather that the perpetuation of a narrative of institutional bias and the upending of a sense of security that the episode fosters is added on to a preponderance of existing subjective cultural narratives about inequality and discrimination and subservience.

Another illustration:
- There are three students in vocational education. After a year of attending classes, submitting assignments, and completing placements, only two students are granted diplomas. The third student is informed that their paperwork is incorrect even though they did receive prior verbal guarantees from the tutor that it was acceptable. The third student is the only immigrant of the three.
The argument here, again, is not that the third student is immune from sanction because of their nationality, but that their presentation is inextricably bound to their experience of educational (and employment) outcomes that have a decidedly emphatic effect on their psycho-social functionality.

There are many other occurrences over the last five and a half years, each with its own unique modality concomitant to an underlying experience that has contributed to driving a narrative of victimisation and discrimination, that I have had to overcome so as to sustain the myth of an empowered day-to-day existence in this country.

I am sure that this is a part of every immigrant's narrative. I am also sure that I could have done without them.