2. The privilege of apathy, ignorance or obliviousness:
When he was 5, my eldest son came back home telling me that one of the other children told him he was ugly because he was black. I will always remember that conversation, because while teaching my son a few expletives, I also had to tell him that some people would not like him simply because of the color of his skin.
I personally had to learn that when I was 8.
Being black robs you at a young age of a certain innocence. POC children will believe in Santa Claus, in the tooth fairy but before that, they would have learned a bit about the ugliness of the world out there. I can try to shelter my kids, but I would do them a disservice if I don’t try to tell them how things work out there. Being a parent, I have to encourage my kids to stand strong and speak for themselves unapologetically. I am afraid that very soon, I will have to tell them: “but not too much tough ! just keep your head down and don’t say anything.” For some young men and women, it’s either being proud or being alive.
My children know the stories from my side of the family, my parents have started talking to them about colonization. My husband and I have started talking about slavery (we started that discussion the day he came back from school telling us about the positives of colonization, can you believe it?). You see, POC children cannot afford to be ignorant of race relationships and they learn early to be smart about it. They cannot walk around completely oblivious, because they see the impact it all has in their home, in their community. They can’t be sheltered.
Non POC can live their whole lives, without even once knowing about those issues. It’s a huge privilege.
Let me tell you another story: The Cameroonian ethnic group I come from is called Bassa. My mom told me once that when they started school, children were forbidden to speak Bassa, at all. They had to speak French. The teachers were clerics and they would beat every kid that would utter a word in Bassa. My parents were sent to school by their parents to the clerics, because that was the only way for them to become someone. They did not have the choice. My great grand-parents, my grand-parents, my parents, were all given names by those clerics. Christian names. So, they all had Christian names, and the Bassa language was beaten out of them. Later, my parents went on to earn multiple diplomas in France, and became what I called earlier the model minority.
Then they had me and my brother. My first name is Arlette, an 18th century French name. My parents did not speak Bassa to us on a regular basis. They would speak it among themselves (thank god, because otherwise I would not be able to speak it today), but they would not speak Bassa to us. So that is the reason why FRENCH IS MY FREAKING FIRST LANGAGE. I speak perfect French, perfect English. Some others speak perfect Portuguese or perfect Spanish. Some learn because their family immigrated to a western country. It’s has seldom been by choice, always by necessity and survival. It was beaten into them or imposed.
That’s is why I resent so much being asked how come is speak well such and such language.
It’s a trigger to a lot of Africans. And I have been asked multiple time over the years, believe me. I find it callous from a white person, to ask such a question to an Afro descendant. When I am at the receiving end of that question, I know the person has never open a world history book, and I know the question is not about being curious, but rather look for an anecdote. When one is curious is about something, he or she starts researching the object of his/her curiosity, reading and educating themselves. When one asks the question in passing, then I know it’s just for anecdotal purposes. So, they can say “oh I met this smart African girl and her English was sooo good!”. I don’t want to be an anecdote.
So, you see, white people can walk around ignorant and oblivious. They don’t have to learn about other cultures, if they don’t have to or want to. By the time I was 18, I had learned about Europe, US, Japan, Australia history, geography and sometimes politics, everything that would make it easier for me to move in predominantly white circles. For people like me, it’s always been a matter of survival. The more we knew, the best chances we had to be successful in life. Going to the best schools, learning all this history, in fact learning as much as possible, has always been for POC the only way out. No choice, failure not an option, only excellence accepted. So yes, all of it has made me the person I am today. I has shaped me, and I am proud of who I have become. You might see me and think “wow”… and sometimes I wow myself. But before making make stupid remarks in passing however, please be mindful of the generational trauma that has carried me where I am today.
White people can be apathetic, or ignorant about the issues that affect me as a POC, because those issues will never impact their lives. They have been taken out of their state of apathy or ignorance those past few days, because the recent movements have the ability to impact their own lives. That’s the sad true, but I remain optimistic that something good for all of us can come out of this.