In these last days, I’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of information and energy around BLM. Contrarily to my usual activity on commenting on a current situation in the world, I actually felt blocked. I felt the issue was (is) so complex:
Post the black square, don’t post it. Put the hashtag, don’t put it because it spams the feed and doesn’t allow relevant news to appear. Talk about it. Why just talk about it? Go protest. Protests are violent. Well, most human rights achievements in history have been achieved by not-so-pacific-protests. But it defeats the purpose of the protest. Please, don’t distract the issue. Wait, we also have racism in Peru. What about LGTBQI+ people? It’s June, pride month. Stop — this is not about this.
I felt my mind wandered about so many topics and even though I was quite all over the place with my thoughts, one thing was sure: it was 2020 and we still were talking about this. This is still an issue. As much as it makes me uncomfortable, I was not the one murdered. My discomfort about having to talk about this issue this year is not compared to the lives and impact racism has in the world. Therefore, I knew the fight was not over yet. If we were still talking about this in 2020, it was because we still had to fight. Who said this was over?
Why was this affecting me so much? Why couldn’t I have the same focus as I normally have? Why were my days invaded with a sudden sadness about this issue if I was not “affected” directly by it? Then I remembered.
I felt I was suddenly having a waterfall of not-so-nice-memories from my younger years, and even though I do experience racism nowadays in other “subtle” ways, I was sure this was not everybody’s case nowadays; as people were still being killed and treated unfairly just for something they never could have chosen: the color of their skin.
I was born in a town called Oxapampa, between the Andes mountains and the Amazon. It was an Austro-German colony settled in the XIX century by migrants from Europe, so naturally — the color of my skin was catching attention since I was little.
My parents always told me that the little they had, they would invest in my education. The thing is that Peru has a very serious problem with racism. And racism is so systemic, you can see it in the education sector. The better ranked the school, the more percentage of white people you’ll see. Nowadays this is somehow less extreme as before, but the pattern is still obvious.
I will always be thankful to my parents for the efforts they did into giving me the best, though it sometimes meant I had to be bullied for being the darkest-skin person in the school year, or I was mocked for not having the money to be able to travel abroad.
Children can be very mean. But also it is said that children learn everything they see and hear. If we do a quick 1+1, we could potentially bring the hypothesis that children are mean because they see and hear mean behavior. Were my friends from school learning this from the TV? from their own families? Did they see their parents being racists with other dark-skin people in Peru? The answer is — probably yes.
I remember being happy when a new student would enter my school year, and he was darker than me. It would mean I was not going to be the “negro” of the class anymore. But the jokes didn’t stop, and they continued. I even participated in jokes towards the new student. It made me feel somehow “better”. I apologize for this.
They say children are innocent and one day, from the bottom of my innocence, I told this to my mum:
“If you knew my dad was also black — why did you two decide to have me? If you knew I would be born with dark skin too”
My mind worked in strange ways. I was a child. I saw the fact of bringing a dark-skin child to the planet as a punishment to the kid. Why would you want somebody to suffer as I did? But nowadays I think — how hard must it be for a parent to hear this from their own child? Thinking that all the intention they had was to create a family from the love they had. I am not a parent, but I can only feel pain when I remember these words. How would you feel if your kid tells you anything like this?
But I was not the only one giving “silly” statements. Once, a relative of mine told me: “You should marry a white girl with green eyes so your children have nice features and you improve the race”. I’m sure this relative of mine loves me very much, but she didn’t know the impact of her words. Do you understand what effect you have on a child with those words? That your skin is not enough. That you have the obligation to “improve”. That you are not beautiful enough. From the moment that a person that doesn’t mean harm to you and actually wants the best for you, tells you this … you realize the issue has invaded us. Racism is deep in the minds of people. They think they are doing “well”.
And this is the reason why it is important to talk about it.
Even the people we love the most can fall in the trap of thinking in a racist way …
… and I feel sorry for them. I have the idea that they just don’t know any better. They were brought up like this. They probably got their confidence just from being white, their parents taught them this, they saw it on the TV or they were not exposed to interact with diverse groups of people. In some cases I see, it seems like it gets worse when these people don’t have anything to be “proud of” besides the color of their skin. What have they achieved? Isn’t it that perhaps their energy for being racists is powered by the fear of losing the “only thing they have”? Which is actually something they didn’t even earn, they were just born with. (not that somebody needs to achieve anything to be a merit of respect and pride — we all deserve respect).
If you wouldn’t be racist with me nowadays, just don’t ever be racist with anybody. You might know me, but random people still cross to the other side of the road when they see me walking on their side. I still get to be the only one stopped by police when disembarking a plane full of people. What are the criteria of the police to stop me? Just the looks. They don’t know me, but you do. I play the game. I talk to them with flawless English pronunciation so they don’t get my nationality, and I immediately say I work for a Swiss company that invests in innovation. Boom — they get intimidated. Why do I need to justify myself all the time?
Next time you think that BlackLivesMatter is just exaggerated, unimportant, or you haven’t made up your mind yet: I ask you to think of a little dark-skin child, who only wanted to be happy in this world, and didn’t understand the rationale behind the inequalities and suffering.
Talk about it. It’s important to put the topic in the spotlight, to start (continue) the conversations. Even if it’s just posting a black square: 1>0 (one is more than zero).
You are not born racist. You become racist. You learn it. Start to unlearn it. Promote other people to unlearn it. It doesn’t make you good, nor to anybody around. It just creates more insecurities in human beings and suffering. People get killed. It’s okay to start small. If you tell me you are racist and homophobic, but you empathize with BlackLivesMatter but not with lesbians, I’ll understand. It is not perfect, but I like to think you have triggered the process to become a more tolerant human being. You are not being hypocritical, you are just taking small steps to become a better you. And don’t you want to become a better person? The future generations will thank you, and children, including if you decide to have yours, will be brought into a happier world.
IG: romulo_navarrete
