I’m the first fluent English speaker in my family. The first college graduate. The first to navigate white settler society on my own terms. As a second-generation Chinese diasporic person, I straddled two worlds: my family’s cultural world and the larger English-speaking society around me.

Simply by being born into and raised within an Anglo world, I gained a kind of local and global fluency that my elders didn’t have access to. That’s privilege.

Over the past decade, there’s been a quiet but significant shift within the Chinese diaspora in North America. Later-generation Chinese descendants, particularly those in the third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation, are shaping narratives about race, identity, and belonging. They’re the faces of institutions and media defining what it means to be Chinese here today.

Yet, something important is getting overwritten.

Some later-generation Chinese diaspora mistake heritage fluency for cultural privilege. But the real privilege rewarded in this white settler society is their inherited fluency in navigating Anglo-dominant social systems.

Raised in a large family of first- and 1.5-generation immigrants and working within Vancouver Chinatown’s multigenerational community, I’ve witnessed how power and privilege differ across generations, even when we all “look” the same.

Many later-generation diaspora mourn the loss of heritage language and culture. And yes, that’s a real loss. It’s trauma through assimilation. I know it too.

But now, some regard heritage knowledge as an unfair advantage. As if attending Chinese school, reading a Chinese restaurant menu, or speaking the language is privileged.

Would you really call my parents’ survival of culture—a refusal to assimilate—a privilege?

I think about friends, like my parents, who spent decades learning English for study and work through migration. For them, knowing multiple languages doesn’t confer them privileges in this Anglophone dominant society. Instead, they are scrutinized for their non-Westernized accents, ridiculed, pigeonholed, and further de-skilled, regardless of how many other languages they know. Their non-Anglicized names are treated as unpronounceable, unfamiliar, even suspicious under the Anglophone gaze. But still, they found ways to sustain their cultures across two worlds.

What many third-plus-generation diaspora overlook is this: heritage language and cultural fluency are not privileges.

The real privilege in a white settler world is generational fluency in settler social language: the inherited ability, passed down over time, to navigate English-dominant institutions and instinctively understand their codes and rules. 

That’s power. That’s privilege in a settler colonial context. 

It rewards not only whiteness, but its reproduction through racialized bodies trained in settler norms.

Sure, heritage language and cultural fluency can carry value within diasporic communities, but that value rarely translates into institutional power in Anglo dominant societies.

Generational settler fluency is the quiet key to higher education and career success. It’s knowing how to vote, and how to run for office. It’s making a phone call and being recognized as Canadian, because you know which words to use and speak with the “right” accent. It’s the social reverence granted to those who can trace their lineage through Canada’s “nation-building” narrative, while simultaneously receiving sympathies for generations of direct historical discrimination.

Yet, many later-generation diaspora struggle in heritage-language spaces. They call these spaces “not inclusive,” “inaccessible,” or “unintelligible” to English speakers, including themselves.

This isn’t just personal preference. It’s settler logic. It’s internalized colonial training that treats English as the default, everything else a barrier. It’s entitlement born of settler fluency—the belief that speaking English means every space should include and belong to you.

Instead of sharing space and power, they reassert English dominance. Signage for Chinatown cultural events they organize ends up in English-only because “I can’t write Chinese.” Some become visibly distressed when Chinese is spoken, and when this is named, they insist it’s about inclusivity.

But equity means seeing your own privilege and understanding the social contexts that sustain it.

Rather, comfort is centred around those with mics and money, not the truly marginalized. Inclusion becomes a performance of charity, not a practice of justice. It soothes the powerful while leaving power exactly where it has always been.

Sound familiar? It mirrors how some white people react to discomfort in non-white spaces. They call it “unwelcoming” or “reverse racism”, as if their discomfort is oppression. In other words: white fragility.

They refuse to ask: Who actually holds power here? Who has real access? Which language and culture dominate in this world? Who is platformed? Who is not? What kind of fluency signals real privilege?

This is how cultural erasure begins. How gentrification continues. How white supremacy replicates itself, but just in a different form, asserted within our own diasporic generations.

Often, these individuals find it easier to be allies to cultures they don’t belong to. They rush to pass the mic to outsiders they think need help, but fail to empower marginalized people within their own communities. Being “other” lets them avoid confronting their own assimilation and cultural loss. They choose erasure over facing their own erasure.

I get it. It is easier to focus outward where English and Anglo cultural norms are the default language and conduct between cultural groups than to engage within one’s own community, where navigating heritage languages and cultural ways can feel harder, even painful.

But I wonder: without truly knowing, reflecting on, and exploring one’s own identities and cultures, how can anyone genuinely claim solidarity? How can they understand belonging and resist erasure without this internal work? 

Solidarity isn’t just about showing up for others. It’s about knowing where you stand when you show up. 

Without rootedness, solidarity becomes a hollow performance that risks harm through misrepresentation, intra-community discrimination, and performative allyship that ultimately reinforces white supremacy. 

This is a new form of multiculturalism embraced by white settler society, a type of DEI that gentrifiers love.

If we’re serious about justice, then we need to be more honest, not just about race, but about power, language, and the deep, generational complexities of diaspora.

Resisting erasure starts with refusing assimilation. 

And sometimes, justice means giving up power, not repackaging it into another person of colour who fits settler norms.

This isn’t just a Chinese diaspora phenomenon. Every racialized community grapples with generational hierarchies shaped by assimilation, access to English, and proximity to whiteness. 

When we don’t interrogate them, we risk rebuilding the very structures we seek to dismantle.

We don’t need new faces on the same structures. We need the structures to shift.