I’ve been unsure of what to say in response to the Atlanta spa shootings, and I needed a few days to gather my thoughts. My heart goes out to the victims and all the people who loved them. It’s something that should not have happened, at the hands of yet another weak white fool. And the subsequent impact felt by the Asian-American community is very real.

But I’ve recently also become very disillusioned with the sensationalist way the media reports such incidents. Righteous anger is a valid motivation to do better for our communities, but I am not in favour of activism fuelled solely by “clickbait hate”, as a friend of mine put it. I see people capitalizing on what happened, clearly just posting about this issue to further their own personal agendas. Before I posted this, I needed to do some introspection to make sure I didn’t have that kind of motivation.

Here’s my opinion.

I see people debating the motivation of the shooter, but regardless of whether there was racial motivation or not, anti-Asian discrimination DOES unquestionably exist. The fetishization of Asian women DOES exist. I’m grateful that I haven’t felt it much in Toronto, but I’ve had my fair share of tense conversations about race with white people where I’ve felt misunderstood and invalidated when I’ve opened up about the emotional scarring I obtained from living in the UK.

I wrote this song a few months ago about a conversation on race where I felt like I was doing all the emotional labour, and at the end the person I was talking to said it stressed them out, they’d had a busy day, and they’d rather revisit the topic another day. In that moment I was struck by how much privilege they had just displayed without even realizing it.

The point is: racism is something I can’t “revisit another day”, because of who I am. I cannot escape the tiny cumulative traumas that I relive because of incidents like these, because of the discourse they raise. To this day, I get panicky if I’m in an area where there are only white people and no PoC. That trauma response has yet to go away. The only thing I can do is use music as a creative outlet to express my pain, because I am tired of doing it in heavy conversations with others.

If you are white or even a PoC in a privileged position where you can’t relate as much, I just ask that you give your friends who feel affected by this an open ear, along with your time and your love, and ask them what you can do. There is no place for the ego when it comes to things like this.

White Fragility (demo)

When you been grinding 24/7 and you just need to take a lazy day

Day of Delusion (Demo)

Clowns (i don't scare easy)

CLOWNS V2

A song I wrote for my love. #4years TO BE RELEASED ON ALL PLATFORMS APRIL 2020

Written and produced by me
Mixed by 5PiECE

Ice Cream

Iridescent Love

I wrote this song about hopelessness. The past few months unveiled to me a side of humanity I knew had always been there, but now I saw it amplified. I saw governments betraying their people while protecting their own, racist attacks happening all over the world, and billionaires getting richer by the day at the expense of the marginalized. I got to a point where if I were given the choice to end humanity with the push of a button, I would have done it, because I was drowning in despair. Although I wrote this song at the start of lockdown in March, I’ve felt a lot of that same despair and anger this week with the death of George Floyd, the incident with Amy Cooper, the UK apocalypse instigated by Dominic Cummings, and at a local level the death of Houdini. But as much as this song is about hopelessness, it’s also about remembering that joy still exists. That optimism and a desire to help is the driving force for so many essential workers on the front line. The global outpouring of grief and anger at injustices is indicative of the love and empathy that we have for complete strangers. There are many things in this world we cannot control, but there are some things we can, and we can choose to act or we can wallow. To quote a character from my favourite book series: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” This song isn’t meant to be a message of hope, or me telling people to “just be happy”. Be angry. Be sad. That’s how it should be, and that’s how change starts. This is a personal song about my determination to find and do good in life, because for me it’s the ultimate “fuck you” to everyone who wants us to give in.

CHARA KAI-LE

Popular tracks