Race

I hallucinated yesterday. Or so I thought. I’ve been sick all week, have gone through bits of delirium, and had just come from a class during which I got the cold sweats for a few minutes. So when I saw a little blond white girl standing outside the main door leading to my office, I thought my flu had reached its apex and was concocting visions of myself as a child. Thankfully, I was wrong.

The girl belonged to a blond white couple, whom I saw upon entering the building. What struck me afterward was how out of place that little girl had looked to me -- not because I thought she was a younger version of myself come as the harbinger of my imminent death due to this flu but simply because she was white. The same feeling of discordance happened when I went into the building and saw the couple, who were also glaringly white. And then I realized how obviously different I must look everyday on campus here.

When I was a high school teacher, I taught a unit on race to my AP English class. It began with a classroom discussion about the idea that race is a social construct used to categorize people in order to maintain the power structure of society, not an accurate way of defining people or their ethnic backgrounds or skin color. So even though I use the terms that have been designed to talk about peoples of different ‘races,’ I actually don’t believe in the simplicity of this construct. For one, the people of the U.S. are too complex to be narrowed down to a few check-boxes (African-American, Hispanic, White, Asian, American Indian, Pacific Islander) that are supposed to define all of the ethnicities and backgrounds and histories of the people who make up our country.

I wish that here in Eastern Africa – the heart of the earliest human ancestors, near what National Geographic calls ‘humanity’s hometown’ – racism did not exist. The first couple of times I heard racist comments here, I was actually speechless. Not because I am naïve and think there are places in the world where racism does not reach but because the people who made the comments to me had literally just met me. (For the record, it was not the couple mentioned above.) It was as if to them my blinding whiteness screamed, “Of course I’ll commiserate with you about ‘these blacks!’ My skin demands it!” My skin may demand SPF 90, but it definitely does not demand ignorant comments.

So what to do when people here make assumptions, based on my being white, that I'm just as racist as they are? First, I imagine locking them in a tiny room with Tim Wise for a few days. And then I use what has become my kuchiguse (Japanese for: the phrase that I use a lot); referring to whatever inappropriate comment was made,  I tell the person simply: "That's not okay."