If I am most honest, I’ve probably encountered the deepest
veins of racism and ethnocentrism in myself in my relationships with non-white
men, and their families and circles of friends. It is no secret that my eldest
daughter is a bi-racial child and that I lived for several years with her
father, a Haitian Québécois, during the 14 years I lived in Montreal. In fact,
I have dated men from several different ethno-racial backgrounds, just as I
have had friends and colleagues from so many different parts of the world. It’s
not difficult in places like Toronto or Montreal to lose yourself in a
non-white world. Especially when you want
to lose your whiteness, and escape its endless monotony.
I remember when my daughter was born, how visible I suddenly
became. Whenever we went for a walk or a subway ride, young white women would
stop me in the street and moon over her. “Oh, I want a brown baby like her, she
is so beautiful!” Yes, she was a beautiful child, and I enjoyed the attention
for a time, I was a proud mother. After a while though, I started to feel
angered by the attention, and I would avoid slowing down when walking in public
to discourage people from connecting with me. I wanted to distance myself from
desires like that, a longing that seemed so shallow and racist. I was adamant
that this was not the intention of my mixed race relationship, to have a pretty
brown baby, for the sake of being different. I loved her father, and that was
all there was to it.
People say foolish things, horrible things, like ‘once you
go black, you never go back’. I had such a heart-breaking experience when that
relationship ended, I never went back to black. In fact I ran from black men
for some time, and had to come to terms with the racism that installed itself
in me after I was left with a 3-year old child and no support. My family’s
warnings about having a relationship with a black man came back to haunt me,
even if I rejected the racist assumptions they were based on. “Be careful, he
might be marrying you for citizenship” they whispered at the beginning, even
though he had been a Canadian citizen since he was an adolescent! Or the
coworker who glowered when I told her I was a single mother. “Another
fatherless black child!” I shared life on the margins with someone who had been
discriminated against his whole life, and I ended up feeling some of the same
sting of the whip intended for him.
But I did get over it and eventually I came to terms with
how we both got caught up in a story bounded by systemic racism and scripted by
colonial history. A post-colonial love story, some might say. At one point, a
feminist filmmaker in Montreal wanted desperately for me to tell my story for
her film, but I knew there was no way I could ever tell that story without
enflaming anti-black racist tendencies in white audiences, and even though she
called and pleaded for me to share what I’d been through, I never did. I had
buried it and wanted it left that way. Even my own family knows very little
about what happened back then in the mid 90’s.
I have no intention of detailing it all now either, only the
parts where I came to terms with my own racism, or some part of it, as I don’t
know if we ever find it all. What I do know is what I saw and experienced being
close to that black man, and his family and friends, and to other people of
other races and cultures. The racial profiling by Montreal police when we would
be stopped for no reason when driving together. The poverty I went through
because he couldn’t find work, his ego laid low by years of underemployment.
The mental health problems that surfaced from a childhood crushed by forces of
globalization and post-colonialism, leaving Haitian families to survive by
whatever means necessary. I might have been able to describe what racism looked
like before this relationship, but now I knew what it felt like.
The truth is, I didn’t quite believe him when he first told
me all the things police had done to him, randomly picking up his brother and
him as teenagers, giving them a beating “just in case they deserved it”: it’s
hard to believe in things that don’t happen to you. When he didn’t find a job
after being laid off, and started a doomed business in Haiti that ended up
destroying our relationship, I was angry with him, not the systemic racism that
left him short of options: despite his gifted ability for math, his high school
principal refused to allow him back into university level math after some
behavioural problems, and he gave up on his dream of becoming an engineer. And
when we went to Haiti to start the business, I had never had such a totalizing
experience of being white and privileged, a ‘déjà vu’ experience, as if I was in
some old movie from the Deep South: “Yes Ma’am, anything you like Ma’am”.
White colonialism is so old and so dissolved into the fabric
of North American life now, that we are hard-pressed to connect its legacy to
ourselves any more, but that day that Haitian boy looked up at me as he cleaned
the floors of our Port-au-Prince store, an educated boy in a white dress shirt
and pants, down on all fours, with an expression that told me he would do
anything to please me, that day I felt it hit me in my heavy, white bones. That
moment is still so fresh in my mind, it could be yesterday, or 300 years ago
when the whole imperial European expansionism project was just gathering steam
and African slaves were the norm. I was so upset, I had to run out of the store
to shake it off. But heavy white bones don’t shake off so easily.
It was several years later before I came to terms with our
cultural differences around money. At the time, everyone in Haiti seemed so
corrupt to me, and money would never pool in one place there for long. It would
be licked away like the rain disappears into the dry desert sands. The magouille or “maneuvering” of money in
order to get what you wanted, wetting palms for every government service you
sought, the constant outstretched hands from neighbours, it was exhausting for
me, emotionally and financially. I longed for more secure footing, where things
had a fixed price and money could fix a problem. It fueled some racist, or at
least discriminatory, feelings in me that I had to work to overcome. Now I see
the depths of communalism in Haitian monetary values, and in my partner’s way
of sharing whatever resource came his way. My own values, which I thought were
very socialist-minded, stood out in stark relief and my individualist culture
came roaring into view.
So I guess I would like to find some way to encourage rural
white people to learn, here, where they are, but the truth is I learned so much
when I was off in other places, in relationships with other people from other
cultures and races who just don’t live here in any sizable numbers. I feel like
giving up, like I have to admit some terrible secret – that it is true, you
have to have deep experiences inside other cultural contexts before you can
really see the hidden racism lurking in our white culture, and in our inner
world that is programmed by that culture.
I feel like I have just sabotaged my own research.
But then again, perhaps I have just peeled another layer off
the white onion.
