#1 - "Dad, I am black and poor"
Just like that. Those were her words. 5 years old. Welcome to the real world, Lidia.
As she was being picked up from the school, her tears were the palpable expression that something had happened, because the normal reaction would have been for her to come out with a smile from ear to ear. The monitors and a few other mothers tried to calm her inconsolable crying, trying to understand what had happened. My wife, who went to pick her up that day, didn't understand what was going on either until the matter was finally clarified. Another girl from the school had told my daughter that she, just like her mother and her siblings, was black and poor. Well, time to go home. Happy Easter, everyone.
The day finally came, I said to myself. Since one manages to somehow understand what it means to "be black", one knows that this day will come and that there will be no turning back. Your daughter will stop being just any other kid at school. From that day on, she will be aware of the difference not only in color, but in her identity, and you will know how that will mark her forever. Although, to be honest, while I can only come to understand it, it is my wife who has truly suffered it and knows what my daughter will be facing starting today. A shooting at her US school from which she miraculously survived and the case of her missing sister that the police department refused to investigate, as they do with thousand others missing black girls, are perhaps the most striking and chilling episodes. But it's not in the obvious, but in the subtlety of the bunch where racism's strength lies.
Poor children, I said to myself, no longer thinking about my daughter, whom we have been preparing for a long time and will have to continue to do so, but about children in general, victims of an ignorance that plunges most parents who have had the luck to be born in a place like Spain, great to live in, with great climate, good food, and full of benefits of all kinds (health, education, peace), but where we know very little about what being black, Africa, or the unconscious racism hidden beneath our privileged skin means.
My wife and I have discussed at length about skin color. My attitude has always been cautious about the subject, trying to avoid falling into easy victimhood because, after all, who hasn't had some clash with their friends when they were little at school, who hasn't been ridiculed on occasion for their way of being, dressing, or thinking... In some way, we are all different, aren't we? When I married her, little did I know of the magnitude of racism and to what extent it lies at another level, in the subconscious where we do not want to venture for fear of seeing something we might not like. Only then can I understand certain comments: "Racism?, in Spain? Come on!". Phrases that I myself said in the past and that today I hear not only coming from strangers but also from close friends and family members exclaiming in surprise as if we were talking about a problem from the time of Abraham Lincoln, and not from the year 2024.
My wife's position has always been calm, intelligent, and reflective, despite having enough experiences to take an aggressive and defensive attitude. No, she doesn't get upset. With respect and tranquility, she maintains that the biases suffered by a person of color in the way they are treated affects all spheres of life, starting long before they call you "black" at school, by how teachers, unknowingly, treat you already from childhood in daycare. There are too many examples, and many of us already know them, from sideways glances on the streets, inquisitive stops at police checkpoints, someone relating your lack of Spanish knowledge to general ignorance and talking to you like a 10-year-old child, or something as simple and humiliating as a employee at Mercadona (the Spanish largest supermarket chain), where we religiously spent 600€ a month, making her open her purse to see if she had stolen something... No ma'am, maybe the purse that should be checked is Mercadona's, which despite its good work of creating jobs and putting gluten-free cereals in its aisles, continues stealthily raising prices and making annual profits in the millions, while the average Spaniard becomes poorer. A little respect, please.
The first warning came to my daughter at three or four years old when they told her that she had to color and that there was a marker that was "flesh-colored" ('color carne', in Spanish). Do you guys remember that? Yes, the same pink color that apparently most closely represent Spaniards skin (does it actually?) and that ironically we all try to embarrassingly get rid of every summer at the Spanish beaches. My daughter came home wondering why I was flesh-colored and she wasn't. Boom. First warning. I showed her the Humanae project by the Brazilian Angelica Dass, trying to make her see that the color palette, something that we professionals in the audiovisual sector know well, is full of millions of shades.
The curious thing is that the last episode was probably the result of an action innocently good. The school, which otherwise has a good policy of integration to diversity, with explicit support for disabled students, had announced a charity race to raise funds for an ambulance in Ivory Coast. Nothing to object. However, imagine an educational center where children see the same images associated with the poorness at every race or with the average campaign year after year, with little black children with swollen bellies, flies around their faces, with slogans such as a "donate a euro a month" here, "sponsor a child" there. The intention to help is good. The message being conveyed, however, reinforces the stereotype. That girl who said that to my daughter, what fault does she have? For her, black is synonymous with poverty. She replicates what she sees, what we are teaching her in schools and on the news. A black person in Spain sells you tissues at the traffic light, and nothing more. Period.
And white, of course, is synonymous with civilization, reasoning, intellectuality. That's why we send ambulances to Africa. Not just ambulances. Sometimes even we ourselves dare to go. I went to Ethiopia for the first time in 2008 as a volunteer. What a wake-up call. I was basically going to tell them how to do things, how to teach kids. Because we are already an advanced civilization, and they still live in the Middle Ages ploughing the land, right? We go to Africa for voluntourism, and when we come back, we narrate to our families how good we are for having dedicated our time to the poor, we publish their photos on social networks to get a few likes, we win awards for cooperation and solidarity, for pictures taken to the poorest without explicit consent, our governments donate millions of euros (with the condition that they change their political agenda to our liking, of course), and our conscience sleeps peacefully: the white man has saved the black man. So, let me understand here: we plunder the African continent, come back 50 years later, give them a few pennies so we can tell them how to do things... and on top of that, we're the good guys in the movie. What nonsense!
To me, real poverty is not material. But intellectual. And I think that's where Europeans lose out, despite our degrees and scientific advances. Africa is the cradle of human civilization, it treasures a unique historical memory that we in the West do not know because it is not taught in schools. Europe took it upon itself to divide it and impoverish it with a square and a compass, creating conflicts that still persist today. We have children working in African mines to put on a gold ring as a sign of love and fidelity, and we talk on a smartphone whose raw material is the result of human exploitation. We sell weapons shamelessly and play a fundamental role in supporting civil wars that nobody talks about, probably because they are not white or European, like the Ukrainians, and therefore don't matter. And when the poor flee from misery, just like our grandparents did in post-war Spain, we, however, close the doors on them and let them die in the Mediterranean. Or worse, we shoot rubber balls at them and they die in the water. If a boat goes to help them, we prohibit it. Is there really anyone in the room who still thinks we are the advanced civilization?
Let's switch from drama to comedy for a minute. This summer, my cousin, who works as a teacher in a school in San Francisco, told me about the new way of educating wealthy children in the US: barefoot, in contact with nature, outdoors... I thought, "Damn, but that's what the indigenous people did until we colonized them!". Now it's becoming also fashionable to carry children wrapped in a blanket and breastfeed them for as long as possible to improve their immune system. Could it be that that is precisely what African mothers have been doing for thousands of years? Suddenly we have also realized that we all eat the same ultra-processed crap and we should go back to the local market to eat healthy and natural... Are you serious? My wife and I laughed out loud the other day recounting the number of advances of modern Western society, which are nothing but a return to what Africa and other cultures have been doing for millennia.
And that's why I think that true poverty is intellectual: the total ignorance of what Africa is beyond the circumstantial poverty in which we have plunged it and of which we are largely responsible for. Not to mention that in Africa there are more than 50 countries, each with its own idiosyncrasy, history, culture, and wealth. Putting them all in the same bag is an unfair reductionism that I myself am doing right now in this very same article.
I want to believe that my daughter is lucky to be different. As far as the economy allows, she will travel like those Greek relativists who observed that what was Truth at home did not even exist elsewhere. I hope that this will give her tools to understand the diversity of the world, not to judge, and to develop empathy and a different type of intelligence. She lived in Ethiopia as a baby and returned last summer at 4 years old, and I hope she returns many times. She will see material poverty in the streets, yes, but little by little, her eyes will see beyond the latent, and she will know something that cannot be explained because it can only be lived, something that to me, after a couple of trips to Ethiopia, made me leave everything behind, grab my backpack, and live there for a memorable decade. My daughter, more than certainties, will probably have many concerns and doubts, and will forge a singular identity, halfway between the three cultures that live in our home. To this will contribute, let's not deny it, that some Africans, ironies of life, will call her "white and rich". And she will have to live with that.
To us, her parents, fate has brought us the task of being a bridge between cultures. But knowing as I do that africans know us better than we know them, I think I should for now focus on talking about Africa, and more specifically Ethiopia. It is my duty to tell the other story and to show the always complex beauty that each place holds. Perhaps we will blush when we realize that black and poor are synonymous only in the minds of the ignorant. And perhaps then it turns out that the poor ignorant ones are us.