by Alisya Moon on 9 Februar 2020
While I was living in the UK, I received an invitation through one of the Swiss university societies to join a Facebook group for Swiss people in the UK. When I looked at their page, I was
surprised by their rather rigid requirements: one had to prove one’s Swiss-ness in order to become a member. Their group description was scattered with declarations highlighting that they were
very strict with incoming applications and often did background checks on potential members. I was wary of these warnings, as I have often encountered obstacles to the acceptance of my
Swiss-ness, being a visible person of colour. Despite my accent-free Swiss German and having lived in Switzerland my entire life, these facts rarely mattered when it came to the classic question
of where I was from, where I was really from. I thought I would give it a try nevertheless and join the Swiss expat community.
I encountered the first barrier in a questionnaire that I needed to fill in to apply to the group. In this questionnaire, I was asked for my place of origin. I wondered to myself why the place of origin mattered, but I filled in the place where my passport was issued.
The second issue was that my Facebook name was an acronym. The group admins asked me for my full name, which I gave them.
Finally, not surprised, yet annoyed, my name, not a typical Swiss-German sounding name, caused further interrogation about my ‘real’ origin. They asked if I was a dual citizen and made surprised remarks when I told them I wasn’t. It became clear that the admin was struggling with the concept that someone could be Swiss despite carrying a ‘foreign’ name. The conversation went back and forth, and I asked where the problem was with my admission to the group until, with some hesitance, I was finally admitted.
This inability of other people to accept my Swiss-ness
makes it difficult for me to feel that I can belong,
as from the very outset, I am often already made an Other.
I shared my thoughts with the new Swiss in the UK Facebook group to which I had been granted admission. I wrote about the unpleasantness of this racist experience, and about how I was pretty irritated to be questioned about my Swiss-ness and my ‘real’ origin, and about being encountered with surprise that I did not have a second citizenship given my strange sounding name. I was aware that my experience as a Swiss PoC may not necessarily be appreciated – and it wasn’t. When the admin read that I had been hurt by their somewhat insensitive questions, they messaged me privately, informing me that they had kicked me out of the social community, as my comments were ‘out of place’ and ‘undesirable’. Instead of an apology, I was criticised as a person with bad intentions, who wanted to ‘trick’ them into a social experiment. It turns out they had made investigations into my name and found that I was a student at a top university. In their message, they made personal attacks about my research ethics – by doing so, they entirely missed the point of my critique and did not acknowledged their implicit racist bias in the ways they interrogated and admitted people based on their own notion who was really Swiss.
This inability of other people to accept my Swiss-ness makes it difficult for me to feel that I can belong, as from the very outset, I am often already made an Other. Even when it comes to being a Swiss person overseas, as simple an act as entering a Facebook community is not frictionless: I am met with suspicion, rejection and attack. I also notice that I am seen as a threat or a killjoy to the wider Swiss community due to the opinions I have about Switzerland, which makes me question how true ‘freedom of speech’ really is, if you’re a PoC calling out racism. After this incident, I obscured my name on Facebook because my vocality regarding racism constantly seems to activate a defence mechanism and a sort of ‘white fragility’ mode*, causing the offended to use my personal background to attack me. I would have hoped that, one day, people would be conscious enough to reflect about their problematic language that causes an everyday form of marginalisation of their fellow non-white Swiss.
* An opinion piece on “white fragility” is coming soon (independent of Alisya Moon). Here is the first part of it (article in German).
by Alisya Moon on 9 Februar 2020
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