A few years ago, I boarded a plane heading to a small American college-town. It was my first time in the United States, and I was starting my freshman year at a prominent institution of higher learning I will call Undisclosed University. I had traveled from my country of birth to Chicago, where I spent a week with a former classmate, before heading down South.
I am originally from a Muslim country. I’d lived in the UK before, and had traveled extensively throughout the world, but the US had hitherto been something of an enigma to me. I was incredibly excited at the prospect of spending the next four years of my life at one of the U.S.’s premier institutions. I remember sitting at O’Hare, waiting to board my flight. At one point, I asked one of the airport staff as to the reason for the seemingly unending delays. The staff member in question happened to be an African-American. As much as I tried to decipher his response, it was completely beyond my grasp – his manner of speech was completely unfamiliar to me, and took me by surprise. I had never before interacted with an individual who spoke what I would later learn to be Ebonics, or African American Vernacular English. At first I assumed that it was a regional American accent, and was surprised to discover its racial history. Over the coming four years I would learn that the colour of one’s skin determined a whole lot more than merely a way of talking.
One of the first things I noticed when I arrived at Undisclosed was the almost automatic separation of freshmen into various racial groups. Diversity in the incoming class, meanwhile, was heralded as adding to the overall experience of being at Undisclosed. The implication of this sentiment was that people of different races had different cultures, even if they were clearly far removed from any immigrant backgrounds. Despite my efforts to notice any tangible cultural differences between different races of American students, I failed to do so, realizing, to my horror, that this whole notion of cultural diversity primarily stemmed from skin colour.
As someone from outside the American paradigm, I found it extremely hard to appreciate the perceived “cultural differences” between Americans with different skin colours and facial features. Most of my classmates appeared to shame the same values: dedication, hard work, and commitment to learning. They were virtually all extremely tolerant and welcoming to a foreigner like me. The majority of them came from families who were at least marginally well-off. My American classmates listened to the same music, enjoyed very similar culinary traditions, and were primarily of the same religion, Christianity. Religion clearly crossed racial lines with Baptists and Methodists having Black White and Asian adherents. The Catholics also had in their midst a mix of primarily White and Latino adherents. I also met Muslims who were white, black, South Asian and Arab.
As my time at Undisclosed went on, I dwelled on the issue of race. To an outsider coming from a racially homogenous society the politics of race fascinated me. The more I thought about it, the less cultural differences there seemed to be between the races. The only visible differences I could appreciate had to do with the fact that certain African Americans seemed to speak in a different dialect. However, at times it even seemed put on. I would observe how a group of African American friends spoke to each other in Ebonics, and then watch as an individual from that very same group went on to speak to me in a bland Midwestern accent. Interestingly enough, these same people would often speak a blander version of English with their parents when they visited campus. This pattern of speech repeated itself over and over before my eyes.
The fact of the matter is the “racially inspired” cultural differences are nothing more than, to use the cliché, skin deep. It is part of a myth being propagated by both extreme political correctness and a deep-seated desire for society to remain comfortably segregated. It reduces the individual to a set of stereotypes based on skin colour, and perpetuates dehumanization.
The rise in this cultural racialism comes from the manner in which civil society in the US decided to deal with racism. Historically, the idea was that in order to erase institutional and societal racism, white society had to acknowledge the difference between them and other races and tolerate those differences. But as open racism lost ground, a more insidious, covert form of prejudice crept in to take its place. A new belief system was introduced – that which dictated people of different colours to be “intrinsically different,” and demanded society remain racialised for the sake of this supposed difference. It is perfectly OK for large groups to remain segregated in this environment; it is even preferable, after all their “culture” demands it!
I don not believe that a society can eradicate racism, to create a space where race does not factor into the manner in which individuals deal with each other, through continuously propping up race and creating the myth of racial culture. Quite the opposite, I believe that insisting that colour of one’s skin brings with it certain cultural attributes is the worst form of racism. The colour of one skin should never be a label or an identifier of individual or communal personality traits. I cannot accept that the colour of your skin defines who you are, or should enable anyone to fit into any readily available molds.
When I walked into the main dining hall for the last time in my college career, I remember looking around and seeing groups of African Americans, Asian, WASPs (or people who looked like WASPs, who knows, perhaps their parents were from Poland), and Latinos all sitting separately. I could see that these people appeared to truly believe that the colour of skin brought them together. I remember thinking to myself how so far, the fight against racism seems to have failed, considering that people have started believing that they are the product of the differentiated pigmentation of an organ.