Out of The Blue, White Montreal Mock Blacks at University

“Sorry, I don’t do blacks,” said a beautiful lady I tried to chat up years ago.

We had exchanged pleasantries when we found ourselves seated on the same row in the theatre. The play was Les Miserables, a performance that had run for an insane number of days. She had seen it three times and could sing the musical effortlessly. She was chatty and almost flirty, or so I wished. She had apples. She offered me one. We munched along as the players did their thing. She was so nice I thought she would give her phone number without me asking. So I asked for it. It would be nice to go for coffee sometime, I chipped in. Out of the blue came the shocker: ‘Sorry, I don’t do blacks.”

She was a student in a popular London university. I thought a sophomore would be civil, if not scholarly, in her utterances. But it seems race relations do not respect intellectual boundaries. Students at the University of Montréal Business School are reported to have recently made a whole cocktail of laughable racist stunts to mock the black race. The white students had painted their skin black to portray Jamaican-born Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt. Anthony Morgan, a Jamaican student from the prestigious McGill University, chanced on the stunt and recorded it on his blackberry. The recording, which is available on YouTube (Montreal Blackface incident..), also shows the white students chanting and mocking the Jamaican accent. Morgan has filed a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission. The University of Montreal has since apologised.



Maybe the racist stunt by the white students did not come out of the blue; it came from within a mindset they carry about, even as they share classrooms and dine and wine with their black friends. They may not ask the same question a seven year old boy asked me in England, but they would wish somebody dignified it with an answer. The boy, a son to an Asian couple, had asked; ‘Uncle Ben, why are you black?’ Like the Montreal university students, he didn’t want his parents to hear him ask the question. He looked me intently in the eye and whispered it. He knew something was not quite right with the question.

Perhaps, we should find reason to answer the little boy’s question. Sara Baartman looked funny when she first landed in France from native South Africa some 160 years ago. The white race was not used to a woman with large hips, thick lips and kinky hair. She became a walking circus, as adult whites smelt and felt her skin as she walked the streets. University scientists wrote in academic journals about the thick features of a black creature. Soon, an entertainment company would hire her to display her body for people to pay and watch. She didn’t look like one of them, so she was not normal. They would later dump her after they had made enough money off her body. Sara turned to prostitution to survive. Out of loneliness, shame and disease, she died at age 25. But the shame continued. White France yanked her vagina, lips and other ‘unusual’ parts of her body and displayed them at museums as side attraction. They also stored her plastered body. It was not until 2002 that her remains were shipped back to South Africa.

We fool ourselves when we pretend that the slave trade ever stopped. Wilberforce and others may have done some good work to condemn the institutionalisation of the evil practice, but that is exactly where it stopped–the institutionalisation. I saw The Help, a new film that hit the theatres only last month. A book about the same has already been published. With cinematographic lush and superior acting, the film takes us back to that regrettable time in American history, where black women served as nannies and cleaners in the homes of white people. While in the house of the white madam, the blacks were not supposed to receive visitors. They found them unworthy of sharing the same toilets with them, so separate miniature toilets were constructed mainly for their use. They were fired at will or discharged when they were too old to work hard. Yet, they raised the children of the white masters. Indeed most of the white kids knew their caretakers better than their own mothers. An angry white girl, who had benefited from the care and affection from the black nannies, wrote a book about the injustice -The Help.

Today, we are still the ones giving The Help in the care industries. Where does it stop? It hasn’t stopped. So, why remove the N word in Huckleberry Finn and replace it with Slave? It constitutes an unfortunate bastardisation of history and a funny attempt to ignore a problem in the hope that it would evaporate. What we have done in recent times to correct race tensions is to, as a cyber commentator put it ‘train young men to drop fire on people, but ask their commanders not allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene.’ Pretence doesn’t solve any problem. It decorates it.

Whatever we made of it, race is very much at the centre of our recent wikileaks bonanza. We spy and sell our kin to complete strangers and come back to break bread and laugh with our kinsfolk. Reminds me of when we used to needlessly report false stories about our siblings to our parents, to get daddy’s cane to lash them. After a short while we would forget it all happened and play together again. Soon, you were also framed and lashed. Who wins? Maybe daddy, but he doesn’t care much about winning; he would rather there was peace between the two of you. That is how far wikileaks go.

But how far do we go with race tensions in the 21st century? On public transports today, some light skinned people would not do black. They would rather stand than sit near me. The police would pull you over to ask how you were able to afford the SUV. A guy smelt his hand right after shaking hands with me. Even some white prostitutes do not do black. A Christian white girl dating a black finds no endorsement from their church leader. They had teased her until she broke his heart. Please, tell them to bring back the N word in Huck Finn. We were better when we were Negroes. Rev James Manning thinks so, too.

The world is succeeding at correcting many evils. Today, prostitution thrives and many young girls are sold daily into the trade by cartels of greedy traffickers and fraudsters. At the same time, many of these cartels are busted daily because of greater awareness and strategic policing. Poverty, famine and preventable diseases are killing children in war-torn poor countries at an alarming rate. At the same rate, aid and other intervention networks are getting more effective than yesterday. Many have made millions in the illegal drug trade, but many more are stopped at our airports and borders because of advanced technology in biometrics. The only evil that seems to be getting worse by the day is racism. And that is because we have failed to see that globalisation is a joke. Modern evidence of good race relations has, at best, succeeded in suppressing the expression of racism, but the reality is just as depressing as the slave trade.

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin lives in Ottawa, Canada.

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