Monday, October 6, 2008

Black

In Australia, and probably many other Western countries, some very simple statements are considered which I believe it is itself actually racist to consider so. I will give you some examples that have happened to me or my close friends.

1- If you say "I work with a black guy in the office," you are being racist. You aren’t supposed to talk about the skin colour of someone who is black. But why not? What is wrong with calling someone black? If you say someone is white, do you still think that it is racism? Thinking like this is racism. This is to imagine that talking about white skin is no problem but that black colouring is unmentionable.

2- Pouya has a new colleague from Sweden, she is not blond. She has dark hair and olive skin. Pouya said to his other colleague, who is a white girl, "I thought that all Swedish people had blond hair and blue eyes." The girl said to Pouya, "You don’t have to be racist!"
Why? How can this sentence be racist? Why do some white people think that they are the best race? Who says Pouya meant that their new colleague would better if she were blond?

3- A friend of mine lives in Paris. She has a French boy friend. Once he asked her, "What was the weirdest thing that you saw when you first came to France?" We have barely any black people in Iran. In fact I myself had only ever seen black people in movies, or maybe a couple from 10 meters away in the streets in Iran. The same must have been true of my friend and she gave this simple answer to her boyfriend: "Black people," and then started to explain that she had not seen black people before and their skin colour was really amazing and unbelievable to her. This was the case with me too. When I arrived in Australia I could not believe my eyes when I saw there were actually there were actually people with black skin. I am not saying that it is bad. In fact it is kind of nice and beautiful, but it was not normal for us. We simply had not seen it before.
Her boy friend thought that she was very racist to say a thing like this. I am sure if she had said that blond people were the weirdest thing she had seen, that would not have been considered racist. This is racism, I think.

Maybe I am wrong.

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