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.