19 September 2007

whiteness, cont.

It’s a good thing I’ve been thinking about white privilege lately, because it came up again. It’s amazing how often it does when you are working in Africa. I had to have words with a quasi-colleague regarding the fact of the white people having all the power in a partner organization of ours, and then sitting back behind the circle at a training, whispering amongst themselves and pittering away on their laptops as if they were too vastly important to be trained. It really is shocking how often the white people have all the power, and how we don’t see anything wrong with it. A common quote among expats here is “There are just no qualified people in Southern Sudan.”

Who is going to speak up about this? My Sudanese colleagues, who need this job? Not feasible. The white people with the power? Not likely. I, on the other hand, don’t have a job to lose. This quasi-colleague said they had work that couldn’t wait, more important than anything that anyone else in the room could have been doing. Then she accused me of being too sensitive and said the Sudanese among us would never notice.

I said yes, I’m very sensitive about issues of race.

I said no, I know that at least two of my Sudanese colleagues noticed, because we talked about it.

And as I thought later, it’s an even bigger problem if some of our Sudanese colleagues didn’t notice, because that means they have gotten used to the white people having all the power in international organizations.

I wish I’d said that.

Today, for the first time in, well, as long as I can remember, I willingly woke up before the sunrise. In fact, the sky was glowing red when I left my room, and it wasn’t until after my shower that I clambered out past the bathroom to watch it rise through a stand of trees. The reasons I got up so early were two-fold: first, I found a much cleaner (girls only) shower off in another part of the place we are staying and I wanted to use it before there were too many people about, and second, I wanted to go for a walk before I had to be at a meeting.

There is almost nothing that makes me happier than a walk in rural Africa. The sun was bright and the air still cool at eight a.m. I followed a wide path along a river and through some neighborhoods. A little boy screamed in terror and fled into his mother’s arms, fortunately nearby. An old man stopped me and said, “Where are you walking? Will you greet people?”

“Of course I will greet people,” I said, and we exchanged names.

There is apparently no word in the language of this neighborhood for exercise. One man sitting by a kiosk asked me, on the way back, why I was walking. “I’m taking exercise,” I told him, and he called back to his friends a long sentence that ended in, in English, “exercise.” Laughter erupted among the houses.

It’s good to be reminded sometimes how comical we can be. Otherwise I get tempted to take myself all seriously, and I forget that purposeful exercise is a luxury of the ridiculously wealthy, we who don’t actually have to work for our food.

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