on being Romanian here, now

"You don’t have to say where you are from, it is not relevant for this conversation ” my friend, a successful business woman, was telling me during a business show we were both attending in London, where we live. 

“Why not?” I inquired, “especially if they ask?”

 “We all pay taxes just the same, and deal with the same issues. I am tired of being told I don’t look Romanian or that they are surprised of my level of English."

"Yes, I get this all the time too..."

"I am not willing to add their impression of me to the already built preconception of what that means. Their limited information they received about our culture and even more limited interactions they had with Romanians has built a picture in their head that I do not want to be a part of” “My identity does not “come" from one place, the place and time I was born, it is made up of so many things ”, she adds, and I agree.

Being asked numerous times about where we are from, sometimes with uninspired comments and follow-up questions that are actually perceived as microaggressions, a lot of us grow tired of answering the question. I have always said where I am from, I actually seek ways to say it, trying to share a piece of the sensitivity that this part of me brings. 

Prejudice is visible in people’s glare. This is all the more reason that we need to say out loud - with pride, a smile and compassion towards the behaviour – that what sets us apart is important and beautiful but irrelevant, as we all speak the common language of the important needs that make us human.

Sometimes we just have to be exposed to a different narrative. Nobody is born prejudiced - cultural, gender, socio-economic biases are not with us from birth, they stem from the information we were exposed to growing up. They are also being programmed into us every day through media and the tribes we belong to, in this day and age, in this particular society, in this global context.

In our case, they are coming from a culture that has pride as its core value, a lonely old veteran, strong and driven, willing to accept you as long as you pull your own weight. Our host country has suffered too many attacks throughout history and a lot of its people are now scared of more coming. An island with not enough links to the shore, so it had to rely on fighting to keep its roots. And fighting it still does, even with the ones that are not the enemy. 

In this context I ask you to play a game with me, inspired by another Romanian friend, from Marketing Academia: search on Google Images “Romanian man” and then try “Barbat din Romania” and “Successful Romanians in UK” and you will find different narrow aspects of a society being portrayed. There are so many of us, making all kinds of decisions, united in different tribes by different beliefs or by different ways we use to get our needs met. We have our own prejudices and our own pride, our own internal fight we face each day. Which aspect of Romania do you think is overrepresented where I live now, in the media that reaches everyone? How can the old veteran not feel scared, if the threat, although statistically irrelevant, is right there, in their face? The portrayals brought by algorithms which are biased in their own right influence big decisions at personal level and cascade down to societal level.

Being born in a certain place, at a certain time, in a particular context gave us this mask - the culture code we were programmed with. I sometimes see the code in the eyes of the people around me, I can recognise "my people" just by their expression. You can see the sensitivity and deep thinking, the submissive streak or the rebellion, the fear, the lack of trust. It was born from trauma, centuries of being submitted to larger cultures and decades of being under dictatorship, a time when the individual had no voice.

I encourage you to sit face to face, human to human and express your truth, with conviction but kindly.  It can be that we are Romanian, British, Syrian, or whatever nationality, be it that we have ADHD, or autism, or any physical disability, be it that we are rich or poor, right or left handed or managed to become ambidextrous, regardless of what color our skin is, our sexual preference, our level of education, how old we are and what gender we identify with. Let’s face prejudice of all kinds with knowledge and compassion rather than fear. We should all be proud of who we are and embrace what makes us different, while respecting the diversity of the ones in front of us.

The opposite of all kinds of discrimination is not any kind of extreme activism, which places blame and points fingers. What I find to be the common opposite of all these attitudes is tolerance. Let’s channel tolerance to those who need it so much, not only the hurt ones, but also the ones doing the hurting and let’s give them a chance to prove us that our trust in their capacity to change is well placed.

We are in this together, as we all have one common need, transcending all barriers, the need to be happy while being accepted. Happiness or fulfilment cannot be achieved without us feeling like we belong to something bigger, without feeling connected to people who can share our journey, or if we don’t feel empowered enough through knowledge, to choose our own path, with purpose, respecting what makes us us. Because we all have the chance to not only be what we were taught to be, or wanted to be, but who we are meant to or feel the need to be. It is based on our values, while eliminating or silencing the beliefs that no longer serve us and blocking out the programming that we have not agreed to take on. 

To conclude, I want to introduce myself, I am Ana-Maria and one of the things that identify me is that I am Romanian. I am also a Human who is reaching out a hand, here in this space up in the clouds, where new tribes are forming and the barriers of the old ones are being transgressed. Let's keep this conversation going... How do you do?