Vesna’s voyages

I feel like I have faced both directly and indirectly, more racism, or ethnical stigmatization, than ever before in my life, right here in the lovely French Riviera. Oh, I can say so much about the French, but I’ll try to just be even more general and wander out loud whether humans have just lost their bloody minds or if I’m just being too sensitive and/or politically correct.

Well, here it goes…errr!!! Of course, the prize for the least favored ethnic group that I know of goes to the Africans, particularly those from the Arabic reaches in the North. I’ve gotten a good taste of the stereotyping and social ostracization since my closest friend here is from Algeria and he constantly faces boundaries in finding work, crossing borders and simply meeting people outside his own ethnic circle, since, quite frankly they are considered a dishonest, sniveling group of sub-humans that most people avoid socializing with. I wondered at this so many times when I used to visit Shisha cafes with my friend in Chartres and realized I was the only non-Arab in the place ever. But, it didn’t matter, because we had one important thing in common and that was that no matter how friendly or sincere souls we were, our neighbors would never give us the time of day — Quelle heure est-il?..silence! — the same, literally and figuratively.

Now, for the Asian question. I’ve witnessed both discrimination and reverse discrimination. A good friend and classmate had bed bugs in his room and was bitten endlessly for two months. When he reported the problem they merely said he had brought it with him from China – “We are always having problems with you asian people, the manager quipped – and he had to endure it until now. There seems to be an air of mistrust and uneasiness in the way our kind hosts look towards these far east strangers.

Now, I’m not saying there is outright racism, but there is certainly an air of avoidance and a stick- to-your-own-kind mentality that in my opinion is unsurpassed anywhere in the world. Now, on the other hand Asians, who make up the vast majority in my major of study, receive lofty praise from our English teacher, who is regrettably American born, but Asian proud. She spent a good amount of time in China and speaks Chinese the majority of time in class, and repeatedly bashes any way of behaving which is explicitly “Western.” Those few of us from Europe and North America have to work extra hard to steal crumbs of  praise.

In the past weeks I have almost forgotten that I am even a simple person at all as our program centers on the idiosyncracies and customs that lie within strict cultural boundaries, I feel almost bounded and shackled to my country, which isn’t even my country at all. My “Americanism” is denied and my “Europeanism” is contested and my lack of “Asianism” is lamented. I don’t know if this concept truly exists, but can’t we all just be equal, damn it?? And can’t we just all get along despite the territory we were born and reared in. Oh, what is this world coming to…a march of progress or just around the rusty spiral to the same place we’ve been returning to cycle after cycle leading man to the same tired old historical conflicts, the same mutterings and laws and precepts which will only be reversed as time repeats itself all over again. We really don’t know anything anyway and everything we do know will be erased with time and we will have to relearn it again, like studying in France over and over again only to learn the same things that are to be forgotten once more.