Racial Discrimination

Let me start of this post with a disclaimer:  Pretty obvious by the title, but within this post, I’m going to talk about Racial Discrimination. By no means am I in any way trying to say that I now understand what it was like to be African-American in the US during the 1950’s or during any other point in time for that matter, today included.  My personal experiences with racial discrimination stem from a handful of isolated incidents in the past that were a result of being Jewish, as well as the most recent one that I’ll describe below.  In no way, shape, or form does my experience growing up as a middle/upper-class privileged suburban white kid allow me to pretend like I now know exactly what it’s like to be part of a minority group just trying to live a normal life and make it in a community of people who are different.  But, I can say that after spending eight months living here as an estrangeiro (a general terms used to label outsiders, foreigners, and immigrants), being called out on a handful of painfully obvious superficial differences, and with my community continuing to discover an endless shopping list of internal ones as well, I have a much better idea.  On to the story…

Today, I was discriminated against because of my skin color.  I never thought it would happen to me.  There was no reason to think it would.  Not until I moved to Africa at least. And because I never thought it would happen to me, I never thought about what it would feel like and how to cope if it did. 
My immediate reactions to the happening is just as confusing and overwhelming as the event was itself.  Emotions running wild.  Anger and hatred against the guy who scorned me; confusion as to why he would judge me simply by the color of my skin; feelings of intense vulnerability make me feel weak, like even the slightest trauma could bring my whole world crashing down; I feel petty, unwanted, insignificant, and for the first time since I’ve been here, alone; but then there’s the most out-of-place and subtle feeling of pride, and I can’t understand why.

This all happened over a coke.  I didn’t know I was supposed to bring back the coke bottle.  This it.  All over a coke.  In my country, we bring the glass bottles of coke home, and when we are done with them, we put them in the recycling bin.  Here in Mozambique (and apparently in a lot of other African countries as well), you give the empty bottle back to whoever supplied it to you when it was full.  Usually, the shops, restaurants, bars, or stands that sell the coke to you don’t even let you take it with you.  You have to drink it there and then leave the bottle.

Well during my first month at site, the guy who runs a loja right around the corner from my school let me take a bottle home.  Little did I know, he was under the impression that I knew I had to bring it back immediately.  Meanwhile, oblivious me had not picked up on this apparently intuitive rule.  When I arrived to drop the bottle off the next day, he gave me an overly dramatic tongue lashing about my heresy.  Meanwhile, I was still practically fresh off the chapa and was still trying to grasp Portuguese.  What I heard him say was something along the lines of:  “Bark, bark, bark, you no return my bottle!  Bark, bark, bark, why you do?! Bark, you go, bark, milk and eggs, bark, bark, soda.”  I may not have understood everything, but I got the point.

Anyways, even though the guy sucks, I still would visit his loja after school sometimes to buy a quick snack or a soda.  He has an ice cream machine out front of his store, and even though the ice cream sucks, it’s an necessary evil when the temperature in Mozambique starts to peak.  I always tried my best to be nice and make small talk, but he was never having any of it. 

So finally, I guess he snapped.  I went to his store looking to buy a soda, when out of no-where he starts loudly berating me (literally, I hadn’t even reached his store when he started up) for not understanding Portuguese and never returning bottles on time.  Funny thing is, I haven’t taken home a bottle of coke since he yelled at me in December. 

I was caught off-guard and somewhere between embarrassment as a result of the loud and public accusations, and pride because I was understanding what he was saying.  It felt strange, but the feelings only got stranger with what happened next.  He concluded his tirade by trying to make a strong point about how all white people are terrible because they take and do whatever it is that they want, and then how I wasn’t welcome in his shop anymore because I was a white person and that meant I was going to harm him and his business.

The ironic thing is that he’s a “strangerio” too, he moved here from Somalia.

Taken back by the whole thing, I wasn’t sure how to react.  As he shouted, I began to build a rant of my own, jam-packed with curse words and insults, but that plan was foiled when I realized that I didn’t know how to translate the word asshole.  So instead I took a different route.  I laughed and walked off, feeling good about my actions, but terrible inside because I knew that this meant I would never be able to eat ice cream there again.

Jeez, drama de mais…all over a bottle of coke.