Tikkel Bounty
So I stood there for maybe 20 minutes and then decided to leave.
The black people in the middle and the further away from the center of this get together the whiter and more socially distant.
“I am black and I am proud” shouts a man through a megaphone. The people in the middle shout it after him. On the white outskirts it’s quiet and a little awkward. As much as ‘we’ want to be part of something we can’t join in with this choir.
I am always a little jealous of real black people, because at least it is clear. In the same way as I can be sometimes a little bit jealous of people with a clear profession that doesn’t raise questions: I am a nurse, I am an accountant, I am a hairdresser.
I have identity issues; Everytime I identify myself as black, people tell me I am kinda not black. And it is true and yet I identify as black with a white culture but it could just as well be the other way around. I think I will start calling myself a halfwhite, which is almost a half wit.
Which reminds me that:
Yesterday my Bjorn and I had a discussion about self hate and self love. Now I don’t think I have self hate or hate myself I just have a hard time convincing others how funny and amazing I am, but proud is definitely not a word I identify with. I don’t understand that sentiment too much, even though I did feel it for a moment after finishing a project recently, but it didn’t last very long. I think it is because I don’t walk around the earth with a sense of belonging: I don’t feel Dutch. I don’t feel Surinamese, I don’t feel black, I don’t feel white. I don’t have a certain type of music that became part of my identity, a weird pick and mix set of beliefs form my religion and I don’t have a favorite soccer team either. I think in order to be proud of something you need to be sort of against something else, or have overcome some major obstacle or have achieved some clear goal.
See the funny thing is I was raised by a black woman and a not so black woman who was very much not white. My mother’s life was definitely influenced by her awareness of racism and being discriminated against. I always thought it was nonsense because I thought that since her character and her ideas were pretty extreme at times, the rejection she faced might have been caused by something else. For example: her contract as a teacher at a secondary school wasn’t extended. She blamed it on racism, but she had made a point about the imagery of the evolution theory in the schools hallway being incorrect and therefore needed to be removed (humans were created by God as stated in the bible and we don’t come from monkeys) and I know she had been handing out bibles to people who didn’t want them. So yeah, racism or something else. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.
By the way, those images of the ape that transforms into a human might be painful to black people as well. Because the last one looks like a white person, whereas the one before kinda looks like a black man, at least that did in the past, as if black people are the stage before the human perfection that is white people. Yeah, we all heard that one before.
My grandmother was light skinned, same as me, but very much rooted in the caribbean culture that Suriname is despite being on the South American continent. Carribean culture basically means a cultural heritage derived from a former non-latin colony, populated by descendants of slaves and migrant workers who were brought in to take over the work on the plantations after the abolishment of slavery. What you see mostly is a beautiful range of 40 shades of brown. From the darkest shiniest black, that we like to call blue, mixed with Caucasian, Chinese, Indian, Native Indian, did I forget a culture?
My grandmother changed country in her early fifties.
She told me: “once you are even a little bit black you will never be white again”.
And it is true. Her grandmother oma Roosje is the earliest ancestor I am aware of who was born in slavery but only 4 years old when slavery was abolished in Suriname, so lucky for her she probably didn’t experience much of the misery.
“She was colored’ was how my grandmother described her, meaning she wasn’t dark black, but light black, meaning her daddy was probably white, as the other way round didn’t go down well in those days. Despite the fact that she was 50% white, just as much as 50% black did not mean she would not be a slave. Maybe a more fortunate one, closer to civilized, more pleasing to the white eye perhaps, so allowed to serve at the table instead of perish in the fields.
She also told me that if you make a long journey around the time of the menopause you don’t suffer any of the symptoms so I am planning for that now. She traveled from Suriname to the Netherlands on the very last passenger boat and spent three weeks at sea.
My white Dutch father took us out for fun things on the weekends when we were kids: White people things I still like today: cycling, hiking, sailing, camping, ice skating.
I also like white people things I did not learn from my father, like drinking beer in grouchy bars (still do) and smoking a lot (not anymore).
Also I never learnt the Suriname language, so every family gathering I sat quietly in a corner, with the feeling of fear of doing something wrong. When people made jokes and everyone laughed, I had to wait and then ask my mother or grandmother what the joke was about. But as it goes with jokes, they are not really funny when translated or repeated. Also on my mother's side I am the youngest, I was a child when the others were in their teens on my father's side the other way around. So not much connection was made with my family until my mother and grandmother died not so long ago and I experienced the comfort of cultural rituals in times of loss and grief and that some family will be there when things get real rough.
I found some identity in being an artist in my early twenties. And when that failed things got very difficult for me for a while, but I have come out at the other side not wanting to belong to anything anymore. I stopped longing for a box that would fit me (or have me) to enjoy all the freedom outside.
Back to the square: It is much easier to scream away with the next fella who talks about us all: we all need change, we all need to be safe, we all need peace. Amen to that I suppose. But the next person up is a woman who shouts the popular phrases: “No justice, No peace!”
The shouting gets louder and seems to be a crowd pleaser. The fun thing with Ireland is there are only a few people who are not white. Migrants are new here, there is no box for them yet. And the Irish themselves be they (very) white, they identify with being oppressed and colonised.
Famous phrase from the commitments: “The Irish are the blacks of Europe, The Dubliners the Blacks of Ireland and the North Siders are the blacks of Dublin… so say it loud: I’m black and I'm proud”.
I wonder who we are screaming at. Despite that the energy of these people translates as shivers through my body and it makes me emotional, a bit teary eyed even, I don’t really know why.
Do I feel supported?
As in I wish my mother could see this or do I feel proud that even though I think nobody really gets the subtleties of it, they do want to stand up for each other. They want to move past something that maybe they have maybe they haven’t. And I know how much black people have made me feel non black. I think about the other half whites, with that other religion and all the Facebooks saying Je suis Charlie instead of I can’t breathe. Are we fighting for them too? Or is it still ok to hate those?
No justice, no peace.
But I can’t demonstrate for the opposite of peace, however noble the desire behind it.
No justice, no peace. It isn't war anyone should be asking for. It is for dumb and hateful people to become less and less powerful and for open minded people to become more.
This and the gatherings around the world are to show people that still hate how weird and backwards they are and that they hopefully quiet their minds for a bit and think about who and why they are so against what is different.
Hopefully black people will do the same and be more open. The more anger about racism the more separation between black people and white people. The white trying to come closer, the blacks taking a step back.
I saw a ‘blind date’ on camera where a boy and a girl asked each other questions from cards. They were both what I would call light black Americans in their twenties.
“The first question from a card was: What was the first thing you noticed about me?”
The answer: That you were not white.
He laughs: me too.
A testimony of yet another generation of grown-ups shaped with a culture of them and us. And whether you identify as black or as white, if we keep making the difference important this ‘war’ will never go away.