Today I woke up in Prilep after a fitful night sleep, having watched San Francisco and Baltimore reach the Super Bowl. It should be a fun couple of weeks leading up to the big game, and I think we'll have some sort of party in Prilep for it since our maniac 49er-fan Nick lives here in town.
More important to my purpose in writing this is to talk about an experience I had while riding in a van back to my site. I was sitting in the middle row, with an English speaker to my right. It's not particularly strange that this man spoke English, a lot of people in Macedonia do, but in my region it's less common, especially as you get farther from a population center. The men sitting behind me were particularly keen to ask me questions, even if they didn't always understand the answers (or pretended not to, trying to be funny). One particularly choice encounter went like this:
"Hey Alex, where are you from?"
"United States of America"
"Where is that?"
I'm not positive they were joking, but I assume...
Still, it was a later comment that has stuck with me. I suppose given the inauguration of our president today, as well as its being Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I found it particularly striking. The man asked, through our mutual translator, "Why are black people black?" I should say, first, that racial questions aren't uncommon, nor are they usually motivated by anything other than curiosity. I have only once felt like I was being asked a question born from prejudice, and it wasn't in Crniliste. Still, given the circumstances of the day it was a startling question. I hesitated for a moment, trying to decide if this was a teachable moment, or a laugh-and-shrug-it-off moment. I went with teachable and responded, "Why are white people white?" To which there was a curious look, a moment of consideration, and then a sort of gracious nod conceding that I had made a very fair point.
The initial question presumes there is a 'normal' color for people to be, and that any other skin tone is a deviation. In this case, the normal skin tone is white, and so it's only natural to ask why black people are black. The question, as I said before, wasn't coming from a place of prejudice, it was coming from a place of honest curiosity. But, it was a question that a factual answer wouldn't have actually addressed. If I had said, "well it has to do with the level of melanin in the skin, which is probably a direct result of prolonged sun exposure. As you may know, most of Africa is considerably closer to the equator than here, and so therefore receives more sunshine during the year. If you were to move to Africa, generations from now your descendents would probably have developed dark skin as a result of sun exposure."
That factual answer does nothing to question the assumption evident in the original question, namely, that white is normal and there must be a reason why black is different. It's not a question of what is normal and what is different from that, but how we're all different from one another and that's normal.
So that was my combi ride back, and where my mind has drifted during its unoccupied moments today.
