SooJin: Welcome to the first episode of Decolonize Yourself. In thinking about who to have for this inaugural episode, I thought it fitting to have me, myself, as the first guest, to share my story, so that you can get to know me better: where I come from and why I’ve committed to decolonization.
I pride myself in not asking people to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. So if I’m going to be asking my guests to share their journey of decolonization, it would only be right and fair if I did the same. So I guess that’s where we’ll begin. So here I go.
My story of decolonization begins during my first year of college. I didn’t have the language or vocabulary to call it decolonization at the time, but that’s precisely what I was doing when I started therapy to undo all the negative things I accumulated from my adoptive mom.
My sole purpose in going to therapy was to prepare myself to be the best mother I could be because I knew I wanted to become a mom. I’d known that I wanted to be a mother since I was five years old. But I wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t become like Linda, my adoptive mom, so I embarked on therapy to undo the ways in which I ingested and integrated her way of seeing, being, and relating in the world.
I knew that I needed to go to therapy to identify and root out the parts of my adoptive mom in me because I found myself saying the same things she would say, using the same tactics she would use on my own self! All the ways in which she belittled and shamed me, I adopted as my own and used it against myself own self. I knew that if I would treat myself like she treated me, then for sure I was going to treat my children the way she treated me. And that was the last thing I wanted to happen: to become like Linda.
Her primary mode and method of parenting was shaming. The byproduct of that shaming was self-hatred. Her parenting style cultivated in me a deep hatred of my own self.
That was the last thing I ever wanted my future children to feel: self-hate. That was the last thing I ever wanted to happen to my children: for them to hate themselves.
So I found a therapist as soon as I left Fairmont, MN, for college. I went to therapy to “undo” all that I was taught by Linda. But I didn’t realize that this “undoing” was actually a decolonizing act – not until I went to Howard for grad school.
It was at Howard University where I developed the language, the tools, and the skill set to decolonize myself. There, I came across blueprints and examples of what decolonization looked and felt like, as I was immersed in postcolonial theory, Afrocentrism, and Black liberation politics and practices. In reading the works of WEB DuBois, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Ngugi wa’Thiongo, Aimee Cesaire, etc.—the list goes on and on. In reading them and so many others, I had a framework – for the first time in my life – to understand what my body, spirit, and mind endured in the hands of my adoptive family and in living in this white supremacist country. Reading those authors, being schooled by these thinkers, they taught me that I was experiencing colonization. And that I was a colonized subject.
Now you might think that that awareness made me feel like a victim. On the contrary! It had the complete opposite effect. In coming to realize that there were external forces working to colonize my mind, body, and spirit, I realized that I could resist those external forces. I could fight back against those external forces. Not only could I fight back but I could take back my mind, body, and spirit.
So coming to that realization—that I was a colonized subject—made me realize that I had the power and agency to undo the effects of colonization and put my own healing into my own hands. Coming to this realization catapulted me to decolonizing myself because the antidote to colonization is DECOLONIZATION!!!
I’ll never forget the day I picked up a copy of Ngugi wa’Thiongo’s book Decolonizing the Mind. In the first few pages, I learned that the greatest, most effective, and most sustaining weapon of imperialism, of colonialism, is to attack and occupy the mind of the people you are trying to colonize. The goal of colonizing the mind is to make people “identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves” (3). A Korean girl who grew up thinking she was white – what greater evidence to prove that I was a colonized subject? What greater proof was there that transracial, transnational adoption is indeed a project of colonization than that? The primary thesis and argument for my first book From Orphan to Adoptee: U.S. Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption actually originates from Ngugi wa’Thiongo’s book, which is where I first realized that I was a colonized subject and that my adoption is what led to my colonization. But I digress.
So going back to wa’Thiongo: colonizing the mind is key to colonizing a people because, once you’ve occupied their psyche, you can still have control over them without being physically present.
And the way you colonize a mind is through cultural genocide: by destroying the native culture and replacing it with the culture of the colonizer so that the colonizer can get you to think like them, have the same values as them, and identify with them so completely that you see the world and yourself through their eyes, through the eyes of your colonizer.
Being raised by white people, being educated by white people, being inundated with whiteness from the age of five, I had become a colonized subject through and through. I had identified with whiteness and white supremacy so thoroughly that I thought I was white, I pined to be white. My greatest desire was to be white.
Okay, I just want you to take a moment to just think about that. Think about how that kind of relationship totally sets us up for failure. Colonialism sets colonized subjects up for failure, as we're pining to be something that we can never be.
Another thing that wa Thiongo’s taught me was that one of the first things a colonizer does is strip your name and language and replace it with their own. And that’s exactly what happened to me: My Korean name Park SooJin was eliminated and tossed out and replaced with Katherine Soo Link. The Korean language that I spoke, thought, and dreamed in was bulldozed out of me with English-only lessons.
So given this, the first steps I took in decolonizing myself was to take back and reclaim my Korean name and language. I legally changed my name back to my Korean name, and I enrolled in Korean language classes.
These were just the first two steps that catapulted me into a life-long journey of decolonization – a journey where I worked to disidentify with the oppressor and decolonize myself. I don’t want to be like the oppressor, think like the oppressor, act like the oppressor, treat myself and others like the oppressor. And so in interrupting and making sure that I'm not like the oppressor, that's how I disidentify with the oppressor.
And the third step I took, which is an ongoing practice that was seeded by Audre Lorde—my spiritual mother, ancestral guide, teacher—is to define things for myself vs. being defined by others or having other people’s definitions of things define me.
This white supremacist world we live in was and is not made for people like me. It’s actually made to be against me and countless others who don’t fit the mainstream ideal of who gets to be seen and treated as fully human. So essentially you're considered fully human in our world, in our society, if you're a white, straight, propertied, able-bodied cisgendered man or woman. And if you fit that, you get to be considered normal. You get to be considered and treated fully human. And if you are outside of that, then you are dehumanized.
Given that this society we live in isn’t made for me, if I adopt mainstream definitions of “power” or “success” or what it means to be “normal” or to be a “citizen,” I would end up participating in my own oppression because these definitions were not created with me in mind. Actually scratch that. They were created with me in mind in the sense that these definitions were constructed in such a way to exclude me. Mainstream definitions of power and success, for example, are created to raise some and diminish others. And for the majority of my adult life, I did adopt these mainstream definitions and strove to be like “white people.”
And where did that leave me? Well, it left me feeling like a complete and utter failure. And I realized that I could tap into a never-ending supply of insecurity, self-hatred, and feelings of never being enough, if I adopted other people's definitions of things.
I don't know about you, but I hate feeling shitty. I especially hate feeling shitty about myself. And I knew that I would only continue to feel self-hatred as long as my value and worth was at the mercy of other people's assessment, evaluation and opinion of me.
So I committed to decolonizing myself because it is the pathway to freedom and wholeness – where I can determine for myself who I am, what I value, and what kind of relationships I want to have—not only towards work but also towards the people that I surround myself with.
Audre Lorde, she explains in Sister Outsider that one of the reasons why the social movements of the 1960s failed is because we failed to identify, address, and root out “that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us”– the part of us that only knows the oppressor’s ways, tactics, strategies, and relationships (123).
If we are to be truly free, we need to root out the part of us that identifies with the oppressor so much that we’d rather be like our oppressor than to be free. I'm going to say that again. If we truly want to be free. We need to root out the part of us that identifies with the oppressor so much that we'd rather be like our oppressor than to be free.
So that's why I've started this podcast. And why I'm sharing my story. And why I'll be asking my guests to share theirs. So that we can collectively come together and engage in this process of rooting out the oppressor that is deeply planted within each of us.
My hope is that the stories will inspire you to decolonize yourself, to root out the oppressor who lives inside you because our collective liberation is dependent on that. Our collective liberation is dependent on our internal liberation. As Adrienne Maree Brown says, “Small is All.” So we begin with the small: one person, one story, one blueprint at a time.
You know the phrase, “hurt people hurt people”? I love the addition that Shilpa Jain, the Executive Director of YES, makes: She says that “hurt people hurt people and create systems that hurt people.” Oh, I just love that. And she goes even further to point out that the opposite is also true: “If hurt people hurt people and create systems that hurt people, then healed people are healing people and create systems that heal people.”
The more we operate from our healed selves, the better our world will be. And as colonized subjects, our healing is rooted in decolonization. So join me in decolonizing our minds, spirits, and bodies so that you and we can truly heal. So that you and we can truly be free.
Thanks for listening.