Mas desde Barranquilla

Woah.

My first blog comment (from New College friend Steve Waldmyn -- and yes, Patrick Haller (site is down now) is right), and what does it say?

Steve´s been to Barranquilla!

No, haven´t been to the zoo, but saw a sign at the airport. When he emailed me to tell me he´d posted a comment, I was like¨"How´d he know about the zoo?" Then I read the comment -- cool.

Meanwhile, I´m having a touch of, uh, "traveler´s distress," and I´m typing this in an internet cafe -- so time to go.

Caribbean Racism -- A Response, and American Racism.

My wife read "Caribbean Racism," above, and had three points in response.

First, Juan, the cerrador (security guard and general helper) was asked to carry the suitcases upstairs. Second, one of the "European-appearing" people I was thinking of as I wrote my post -- the owner of a pharmacy -- is actually Lebanese. And third, that the United States is also very racist.

I replied that the history of the United States was -- and in some ways still is -- racist in a horrible way that the Caribbean never has been. Slavery, Jim Crow, fire hoses in Birmingham, lynching (which happened to Jews, of course -- to Leo Frank, in Atlanta).

Slavery. That one word, though, horrible as it is, just skips through the mind. But think of it -- people, treated as property. Arbitrary punishment. Rape. Families broken up by whim or for economic advantage.

There are few mass wrongs that compare with the Shoah, the destruction of European Jewry, for the intensity of the images they invoke, that they should invoke. Slavery is one.

Afrocolombians and indigenous Colombians are as much a part of the social fabric in Colombia (to my eyes) -- though at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum -- as the Europeans, which I don´t think is the case with African-Americans in the United States. When African slaves were brought to the U.S., practicing their religion and speaking their native languages were punished harshly. The obviousness of African-Americans´ difference from Caucasians -- racism in the United States is binary, white or black, in a way that doesn´t seem to exist in Colombia -- has kept them separate from whites -- marked and unmarked cultures and marked and unmarked linguistic traits (Black English Vernacular, q.v.).

Of course, the U.S. isn´t alone in its binary racism -- there´s a really funny bit in Zadie Smith´s vacation essay in the current New Yorker about how if you are a brown woman dating a white British man, you will eventually receive a Gauguin image from his Tahitian period -- it´s happened to her three times with three different men. (I don´t have the magazine to hand, when I do, I´ll blog the quote right in a subsequent entry.)

Rant finished. More later.

Mas Saludos

Hello again.

B´quilla is still hot. Very hot. And very humid. Becky and I took a shower, uh, walk yesterday, five blocks each way. When I got back to my in-laws´, I had to put every item of clothing on my body in the dirty clothes, and take my second shower of the day.

And I have four words for you: No. Central. Air. Conditioning.

And I thought South Florida was bad.

Ugly American? Me? Nah. I´m having a great -- and very relaxing -- time. The people are (mostly) wonderful (nicer than in South Florida), and the city is beautiful in a very Latin American way. It´s the exact opposite of Buenos Aires -- everything is different.

Plus, I hope we can get zapotes -- a delicious, exotic fruit --back home.

Caribbean Racism

racism n 2: discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of another race.

I've only been in Colombia for three days, and I've already realized something: As a rule, the more European-looking you are, the better off. The more indigenous or African ("Afrocolombian"), the less well-off.

Perhaps it's the servility -- I am not used to being waited on virtually hand and foot. My in-laws have a full-time (six days a week) housekeeper/cook (who helped raise my wife -- they're very close) and a guard in the parking area under the building 24 hours a day. (The guard on duty, when we arrived carried our luggage up two flights of stairs, without even being asked.) And they´re all darker than any of my family and I are.

That is only one data point. Here's another: in the June 7-14, 2004 issue of of Semana, a well-respected Colombian national newsmagazine, there is an article "Sin Cedula," about Colombians in the area the article discusses -- "an Afrocolombian population," the article says -- 85% of whom are without identification documents, either the cedula, the Colombian national I.D. card, or even birth certificates. As the article says, "They are people of whose existence the State never has knowledge. They do not exist in the statistics, nor are they considered for development projects. Partly for that reason they are so abandoned."

There are three pictures with that article. In those pictures are
18 people. OF those 18, four are European in appearance -- and they are all wearing UN High Commission on Refugees (in Spanish, "Acnur") T-shirts. The UNHCR is helping the Colombian government register these citizens.

My wife thinks that I have a slanted view of all this, that I haven't met many non-Jewish European Colombians.

Nonetheless, my rule of thumb (not a politically-incorrect term, really!) is retrodictive, and predictive as well. But I'm not wedded to it -- I am prepared to admit I'm full of it (and delete this post? Nah).

Time will tell.

¡Saludos desde Barranquilla!

Greetings from sunny -- and hot! -- downtown Barranquilla!

I´m down here with my wife, visiting my in-laws for Father´s Day.

Again, no thirty.

Same-Sex Marriage

I just wrote (well, just finished) a long post about same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, it was so long that Blogger didn't see fit to put it on the main page -- ever.

So anyway, go read it. Or else. Please?

I Am My Own Wife

Doug Wright's play I Am My Own Wife just won two Tonys, one for its entire cast (Jefferson Mays, as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf) and one for Best Play. My wife and I saw it on Broadway in March. It blew us away. If you get the chance to see it (I doubt it will play anywhere other than New York -- it is very dependent on Jefferson Mays' abilty to play several dozen characters), I highly recommend it.

What's New College?

According to Patrick Haller's website, this blog is written by an alumnus of New College of Florida.

I have no idea what he's talking about.

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