Greetings from Paris.

~and racial curiosities: all cringe, all by yours truly~

Greetings from Paris.

The Louvre! (photo by timea_kadar on pexels.com)

I’m writing this at the tail-end of a few days spent in the Latin Quarter. It’s been divine. I’ve eaten lots of bread, written lots of things. However, something that I’ve been wrestling with is the French perception of race, and how it’s a blasphemous thing to point out and preposterous to suggest that there’s a difference between people.

“Here, we’re all French,” is a common perception, or a common reaction. (This has been explained to us in a variety of circumstances: white French tour guides, professors, students; black tour guides, professors, students.) I like that perception—however, I understand how nice language usually blankets something else.

* * *

I come from the Midwest—specifically Oklahoma, which is one of the friendliest places in the United States. (smiles proudly)

However, being a minority in a homogenous place was confusing. I didn’t realize it until I got older, but many people who I gravitated to and who gravitated to me were usually perceived as different, while I perceived them as cool.*

*(It’s also probably very important to note that, in the United States, we obsess over labels. It’s insane but there’s a reason for it. For many minorities, especially Black Americans, there’s a devastation regarding origin. While many other people can respond where they are from—they are French, or Nigerian, or Senegalese—black Americans cannot. We are American, but specifically for us, that means that our heritage began with slavery. Our roots are nearly impossible to trace outside of the enslavement of our ancestors. Their languages, their cultures, and their intelligences have been replaced with the English language and the colonized circumstances of a capitalist country. As a result, many of us feel a severance from a very important and vital essence of identity.)

However, they were cool because they stood out. You know how this can be seen as a bad thing, or distasteful? This wasn’t the case. I oftentimes found people who were left out of perceptions of what is normal or acceptable to be some of the most intriguing.

But was this bad? And was this misleading?

* * *

As someone who was oftentimes among the few black people in her neighborhood, or her school classrooms, I realized that I wasn’t alone in curiosity of different people. Once, my mother said that she was in a retail store and saw a girl with a lot of piercings and colorful hair. “You look like my daughter would be friends with you,” she told the girl. Apparently she was delighted; she asked my name.

It turns out, we knew each other. And yes, we were friends.

But specifically, in terms of race, this curiosity was also a bit alarming. I had people who wanted to get to know me to learn the ways in which they were above me. There was a curiosity for the sake of justification of stereotypes or discrimination. As for myself, that competition was also reciprocated. “This person thinks black people are terrible? Let me show them just how much better I’ll perform than them.” It was somewhat ridiculous, but it was also necessary.

When you’re a child, you’re navigating perceptions of the world and what you’ve inherited from it. I inherited this indebted perception that I would need to prove myself to others who would otherwise be irrelevant for my life. And for others, they inherited a perception about themselves that they probably wanted to experiment with conflicting bodies of people to see what was true or not, or what they could disregard.

* * *

Racial curiosity is something that I understand in particular because of the American obsession with labels. The irony is that labels rarely ever check out in the ways that we believe they can be effective.

In high school, I had a biracial classmate who sometimes took digs at me for being black. (Yes, it’s as strange as it sounds, but hear me out.) He’d share with whoever would listen that he was hurt and felt betrayed by his father who left, and developed a disgust towards blackness because of this. For him: blackness represented abandonment, shame, and a burden placed upon a white woman who was his mother. I’d heard him lament about this more than once—so imagine the shock when he turned around in class and asked loudly, “Patience, you’re black—what’s it like to be on food stamps?”

Here was that test. I was so embarrassed and angry that he’d asked me that but I felt so good that I couldn’t justify his negative and degrading perception of blackness. I mentioned how upset I was to a friend, and she ended up telling him about it. He found me in the hallway and apologized for it.

“You’re black-- what’s it like not to have a dad?” I asked.

No, I didn’t ask that. But a part of me wanted to. The question alone would probably have made him mad and frustrated him in a similar way that his question frustrated me. However, this frustration reflects a reality: his father leaving had nothing to do with his being black. And being on food stamps is not a reflection of being black. Neither of these situations has anything to do with race, no matter how much stereotypes want to insist that this is the case.

* * *

I hate racial stereotypes because they’re so limiting and damaging. If I could, I’d probably abandon most discussions about race because they’re really hard and conflicting.

However.

I am definitely intrigued by people with different racial backgrounds than mine. I love hearing about where someone is from and how they were raised. This includes white people as well.

Overall, I love hearing about people’s lives. And the parts that are difficult are good, too.

* * *

In terms of curiosity, I’m probably most fortunate that nothing detrimental came out of my inquisitions regarding others and their inquisitions about me. I’ve definitely built friendships with people that I didn’t particularly like and who didn’t particularly like me either, but we knew that there were things about ourselves that we wanted (or needed) to debunk and that required another person in some capacity.

Here’s an excerpt from my novella manuscript titled AN OKLAHOMA STORY detailing this:

Something happens and Hunter is bawling in front of the gymnasium because his dad is a white supremacist and no one is helping him deal with that. Should they? I walk past and give him a hug. No, I won’t hang out with him, but I will give him a hug. He wears his sadness and boys punch it out of him like their mothers promised pizza dinner and never showed up. Ethan walks past carrying a football because he’s on varsity and has a thrifted letterman’s jacket. He thinks I’m weird because I read a lot and carry calligraphy pens to every class. I think he’s annoying because he’s dealing with homelessness that I don’t know about and he keeps asking me if I’ll come to a game. For what? The bad hasn’t come yet, but then it does and I show up to Grace’s funeral wearing a veil. I feel guilt— not about Brody, but about how I feel about everything. In the midst of what seems to be going terribly wrong, there will be people who die.

I’ve befriended people who would say insane things that left me feeling ashamed and guilty. I didn’t know how to intervene or correct them, but a mood would change and it could be equally felt.

The interesting and insightful parts of moments like these is how people communicate how they feel about what they’ve done. This has happened on both ends. Once, a friend hurt my feelings pretty badly and came back with a large meal of all of my favorite food. Another time, I said something really disingenuous and realized how it affected that person. I planned an outing as a surprise so that we could laugh together.

There’s something scary and teachable in moments when you realize that people are actually just people. It shouldn’t be scary, but it is—because so many of us have been conditioned to think differently, and no one has really been taught how to deal with that. The result? You realize that you know this person in a capacity deeper than their label, and you’ve seen their heart exposed to you.

This is something really compassionate that many of us have been striving to do and to be since we were children—to be considerate, and to be considered, no matter what the circumstance.

* * *

I don’t think that friendships like this last very long—sometimes, they’re too intense and they’re meant to be brief—but they’re significant. The conflicting relationships I had with people in my youth matter a lot to me because I recognized how identities are formed in complication. I love a complicated identity; the better are the chances to acknowledge the humanity within us all.

ummar_mukhthar, pexels.com

I don’t care how I’ve come off in France—my labeling of people’s nationalities and my interactions with them— yes, my friends from Germany, or my Kurdish boyfriend—because I think people’s distinctions are beautiful. (It’s very American of me, I know.) However, as much as I used to really dislike how I was unintentionally teaching people things about my identity, I was reaping the benefits in the ways in which they were unintentionally teaching me things about theirs.

You can think a label fits until something changes and you prefer another, or not one at all. You’re just you.

You’re incredibly you.