Marie Mathai, who worked as a Case Manager at the University of Toronto’s tri-campus Community Safety Office in 2017, here discusses the diverse makeup of the UTSC community and explains the “culture shock” she initially experienced when arriving on campus for the first time.
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[Marsaydees:] Had you ever been in the [Scarborough] area? Like what did you think about it? [Marie:] I knew that only from media and the papers, and let’s be honest, it’s not necessarily the most complimentary.
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It tends to have a lot of judgement or there’s a lot of perceptions. Or, I have to explain, when I moved to Toronto, I’m a brown woman, but I’m from Kitchener, Waterloo, where I was a minority.
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And so I arrived to Kitchener, Waterloo in 1970, and so we were a handful of brown people. So I actually went through a culture shock, as an individual, when I moved to Toronto and there was all these brown people.
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And so I had to adapt from a place of trying to figure out who I was in the midst of, in being brown, right? So then coming to Scarborough, this also reflects
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the brownness of Toronto and so it was a lot about my own need to adapt and figure out who I was in the midst of it and get more comfortable with my being brown, which also is what students taught me to call myself.
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I used to break it down all the time, call myself Southeast Asian, I’d call myself East Indian. I’d call myself Southeast Indian. And then I had student clients tell me, you can just call yourself brown.
