Are you black, white, brown, coloured, chocolate, olive, mixed, fair? #WorldAfroDay18
I’m reflecting on the many events and conversations that have taken place in my vicinity this week.
It seems the issue of race is always on the agenda. We are so inquisitive about people’s origins or place of birth, or parents origin. Even I find it exciting to enquire about language spoken, places people call home and parent’s cultures.
Is it so bad to want to know these things?
It was so sweet and lovely to have met a “mixed” couple – dark (aka black) and fair, Caucasian (aka white). I was so excited I stopped to ask how they met. They told me they had been together about 20 years. I wish there were so many more of people like this who have come to recognise we are all the same – people. It’s interesting that I stopped to ask knowing that we recognise some groups of people – Negro, Caucasian, Asian, Mongloid or similar.
Who created these different groups? Any why are we so curious as to how these may be mixed when we meet people who do not quite fit into our known or accepted categories?
Imagine how in this day and age technology begins to reveal myth-shattering ideaologies, ground-breaking discoveries that shake the very foundations of what we have held true for so many years. In this day and age people still say to children under 25, “Go back to where you come from!”
What is the correct answer to that I wonder? This young person say they replied “I was born here” to the shock of the other person. I think maybe I would have said something like, “where is that then?”
Anyhow technology, archaeology and DNA typing suggests the existence of the cheddar man – a mixed featured dark-skinned individual blue eyes that some have argued against for reasons best known to them.
What does it even matter what race or colour you possess anyway? And why is it so difficult to accept equality that a group of people seem to have to work so hard to gain approval, esteem and respect. Personally there have been comments made to me like “you are so intelligent!” What am i supposed to have done with that? Feel sorry, apologise, cry or make excuses?
I used to feel years ago that I had to explain my friendly, outgoing, happy disposition. Whenever I was singing, people would always have something to say; “you’re happy?” And these kind of comments were so confusing. I could never understand why being happy or singing was something so difficult to grasp. At other times I was told off for being enthusiastic or bubbly in nature and I used to feel I had to apologise. But why would I apologise for being me? I did not create me. I just am! I am here.
Many years ago in the UK🇬🇧, there were told stories about knife crimes, extreme racially motivated attacks and unrest which still simmer and reappear in other creative ways. The “ceiling” concept and exclusion of other people’s outside “white “ loses out on the many creative contributions of these “other” people.
Imagine being told while training as a nurse by a white person to a dark one, “don’t touch me so that your skin colour does not wash into mine” or “how do you feel being black” “black monkey” and many more inhumane comments and utterances. My source of these stories said they had responded “how do you feel being white?” “Did I create myself?”
How did we get here? Different peoples and colours?
I recall a story in the bible where God had to call an emergency meeting to stop the people in the world from creating a tower – Babel, to the skies and into the heavens so they could get to God. And why – because they could! Imagine God almost “running scared” at the union of man, created in God’s own image and likeness!
So after this meeting, God and team decided to create confusion (Babel) among the people. They then began to speak different languages and move away, together, with people that they could understand.
So that’s how the languages, cultures and peoples all started…
Maybe together if we all accepted that we are one, irrespective of skin colour, race, languages we could move closer towards a unified beautifully multicultural and well integrated society today.
Happy world Afro day!
Arinola Araba 