So once again I have two hours to kill until my next interview. I sit down on a little park bench and a teenage boy who lives in one of the houses I tried to interview at, comes up. (I say tried, they were another family who had to be replaced eventually). I noticed when I first met him at his house that he was very odd but I couldn't put my finger on why exactly. He was sorta always grinning and at first I thought he was just being sorta the cocky teenager, laughing at my accent and what I was doing (trying to convince them to let me interview them). He'd never met a gringa and wow I spoke English and that's so wild! Imaginate! Still. He was a little over the top.
Anyway yesterday he came up and sat down with me and we had a long conversation and started ask ing me a million questions like what was it I was doing again and what was a non-profit organization and what was it like in the US? and did I live in New Jersey? And had I ever smoked marijuana? He's on some kind of pills but he doesn't like them but he takes them because the doctor said to and what kind of music do I like he likes rap and reggae and is the US very developed do they have lots of things there and why didn't I like that word developed, he meant advanced, was the US very advanced and why didn't I like that word either and did I have a boyfriend and why wasn't I married yet and he just broke up with his girlfriend why because of lack of communication and how old was I and no way could I be thirty years old I look like I'm in my twenties and I must have lots of experience for being thirty and really am I really thirty do I take a lot of care of my skin and could he have my phone number?
Later his mom passed by and I walked with her a bit. It seems he does have some kind of mental illness. (I didn't ask, she offered). I said I was sorry.
But another part of the conversation involved an description of racism in the US. Remember he said he liked rap and reggae? So he heard the n-word (which I'm not typing or I'll get even more racist Google searches leading to this blog) and so he wanted to know what the word meant. I said it was very complicated and that what it means depends on who's using it and how. He really didn't get that, I think, so I tried to explain the history of the word to the best of my knowledge but I didn't get very far because he kept cutting me off. Then he asked me something that surprised me a bit but it requires some explanation.
In Spanish, you might know that people use words that describe physical appearance a lot. Gordita (chubby -femenine diminutive), flaco (skinny -masculine), mono (light-skinned sorta, or pale or sometimes "cute"), morenito (dark skinned -masculine diminutive), including negro or negrito. It's not rude to do this as far as I can tell -calling someone gordita, for example- it's like a term of affection sorta. But being a gringa it's hard for me not to feel awkward using these terms and so I tend to avoid them. (There are lots of words like this I think. Some things just sound funny coming from a foreign mouth so best to stick to the rules more or less)
Anyway, in this case, though, I did use the term los negros together with afro-americanos because I didn't know if he'd understand me [insert background info here: Chile, by the way, is very homogenenous supposedly, not like Colombia for example where there's tons of people from African-Carribean descent because of the slave trade. In Chile people are mostly of mixed European indigenous descent if you don't count the immigrant populations. They are also have their racism, though it differs from our version of racism in the US. Here, the main minority group that's discriminated against are indians. In fact that's the exception to the above examples of describing someone by the physical characteristics. Calling someone an indian, or indio is unfortunately an insult, like in many Latin American countries. Also, someone here explained to me that "indigenous" is not far removed from "indian" so don't use that either. I used that term, indigenous populations but he said not to. Better to use the term "original peoples". So anyway, there's lots of racism against anyone with darker shades of skin but there's very few black people. I only saw one black person here and he was probably a gringo too. By the way, there's also neo-nazi groups here who regularly appear in the news. So all that is to explain that it's likely this kid had never seen a black person in his small town. Which leads to his question]. Who are the black people? Us? he asked. Not really, I explain, the people whose ancestors came from Africa as slaves. And there's lots of racism in the US? he asked. Yes, we have a long history and many problems ... and the conversation whirrled on.
All this is just to say it's interesting to find oneself asked to describe these things to someone within a different system. It's an interesting experience. Distance both distorts and clarifies. It's like the description I just wrote of Chile, which is of course the perception of a gringa, someone from the outside. It's different from what someone from here would write. I don't think it's wrong to talk about terms or situations that are not our own, we just have to be aware of 1.) the power imbalance within the history of white people doing that (describing and interpretting other people's cultures) and 2.)remember that a description is not just a description, it's a description from a certain perspective, a certain point of view. And that that perspective, that point of view changes the way the thing looks. Call it the social theory of relativity.
Or something like that.
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