OK, sounds pretentious, but…what if, one day, you realized that people with whom you identified ethnically thought you an outsider? A few years back, my (then) neighbour told me she had had to come to terms with exactly that…
At that time, my son was still a toddler, and her daughters (only a few years his seniors) thought him a doll. They would play with him endlessly, and he ate it up: big girls like me, Mom! And as is neighbourly, we would often chat as we watched them play.
This lady had many interesting stories. She was ‘black and proud of it’! Her origins were Caribbean, but she grew up in North America and derived a lot of her strength and self-identity from the achievements of great leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She used to get mad when people would use endless euphemisms to avoid saying the word ‘black’ or ‘negro’, demanding that those are beautiful words, and nobody should shame them. You get the picture.
Her husband was also an immigrant, who came here from Western Africa. One day, she told me that when they first got married, they decided to visit his family in Africa so that he could introduce her to his parents. Wonderful, his parents loved her, she loved them, all went better than they had hoped for. My friend told me she felt newly alive, reconnecting with her (generations removed) African heritage.
Yet, it was there, in that small African village, that she had to face this existential crisis.
One day, she was walking to the market, and the usual crowd of kids were running after her, calling out happily. After all, they were not used to many visitors from so far away – and they were happy and friendly. But, by this point, my friend had learned enough of the local language to understand what they were calling out:
“There goes the white lady!” and “The white lady smiled at me!” and so on…
At first she looked around, thinking there must be another visitor: but no. In their eyes, she was ‘the white lady’!
My neighbour laughed as she told me this story. But she added seriously, until that day, she never realized that the lighter shade of her skin would make her appear ‘white’ to black African kids. And that she kept thinking about this, for years….
Oh, don’t get me wrong: having re-examined who she was, she came out strong and laughing. But, next time you look into the mirror, ask yourself: if people suddenly saw you as the opposite of who you think you are, would you be able to come through it laughing?
All of us humans came from Africa at some point…
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
February 21, 2008 at 12:47
I think that the distinction between cultures based on skin color is pretty shallow, one might even say skin deep.
In the cosmopolitan world, skin color just doesn’t line up to culture the way it might have 200 years ago and yet for all that, there still seems to be a strong natural association with skin color and other physical features in grouping people into the insider group and the outsider group. Its probably hardwired into us.
I think it is really interesting that black and white are the two colors used to describe members of the outsider groups. I think the term black and the term white reach down to a psychological spot deeper than skin color. Both of those colors are obscuring colors. You can white something out, you can black something out, but you can’t red something out or yellow something out.
Back in the days before globalization when the world was less cosmopolitan, back when people moved around less, skin color and culture lined up better. Back then, there were red people and yellow people, I think there were even green people (the green people were Europeans… they were green because of their blue blood vessels and the fact that some languages divide between blue and green at different points along the spectrum).
But as the connection between skin color and culture has weakened over the years, all those colors have meshed together into black and white where possible and brown when black or white doesn’t cut it.
Brown is another obscuring color that can be used in conjunction with “out”. A brown out is not quite as severe as black outs, you can still see dimly through brown out. Someone who is brown is a little bit easier to identify than someone who is black or white. Brown people tend to immigrate from closer around that black or white people.
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When I was in a customs line last month, I overheard a conversation between a couple. The man said to the woman that they should probably follow the black man, his line looked the shortest. The woman turned to the man and said, “Oh he’s not black, he’s African, I sat next to him on the plane. His accent is just fantastic!”
I tend to hear myself and my friends say, I want to go to Germany, or I want to go to England, or I want to go to Greece, and I want to go to Africa.
I didn’t notice how strange it is to say, I want to go to Africa until I came to Japan and heard my friends talking about how they wanted to go to Asia. Before, I would have thought nothing of it, now, the question, “Oh really? Where in Asia do you want to go?” always pops out of my mouth.
It seems strange to me to call someone Asian. What does that mean? All the cultures in Asia are so varied. From that realization, it began to feel strange to hear myself talking about Africans. I wonder what that means.
I think that conversation reveals an interesting heirarchy of identification.
Black is what we call people who we don’t understand. White differs in the population, but the meaning is the same. People who identify themselves to me as white or black are often searching for their roots.
If we can add a little piece of geographical information to that blackness or whiteness or browness, we prefer to refer to people by that information. The African, the South American, the European, the Asian.
There is a desire to label soemone as closely as we can that exists in tension with a fear of the unknown.
There is a white man.
He is a European.
He is such a Frenchman.
He is a flamboyant character
Jean Jacques.
you
Each step of identification requires us to have a certain level of information about him. You have to talk to the white man to find out he is from Europe. You have to have watched a movie or gone to Europe in order for that label to have any meaning. You have to know something about the differences between several cultures in Europe to have the Frenchman label mean anything. You have to have had interactions with several people who fit the cultural archetype in order for the flamboyant label to have any meaning, you have to have had personal connections with someone named Jean-Jacques or at least someone named according to the French phonetic system for Jean-Jacques to have any meaning. And scariest, you have to be somewhat intimate in order for you to have an meaning and be useful as a label.
Making any of those jumps for the first time is scary.
I’m getting a bit winded, but if I see someone whose body language/accent/spoken language I don’t understand and they’re skin is lighter than mine, I label them white in my mind. If its the same situation, but their skin is darker than mine, I label them black in my mind.
Either way, the meaning is the same, it means they are culturally different from me and I don’t understand them.
All that said, I can imagine it probably was disturbing for your friend to find out that strangers in Africa understand her no better than strangers where she lives.
Back when the world was cosmopolitan, a stranger was someone from far away, now a stranger is someone across the street.
Makes one appreciate friends, eh!
Wow that is really long. I hope you stopped reading at some point along the way if you got bored!!!
February 21, 2008 at 15:56
Wow!
I menat to get people to think about it….but you REALLY thought about it!
Great points!