Today is Will's 25th birthday, so in honor of him, I'm going to make a short comment about the Sami people of northern Scandinavia, not that that has anything to do with Will...
I know that the Ute people used to pick wild strawberries in the valley where I was born, and I know that they soaked in the same hot springs in which I first made out with Katie L or saw the Corona Borealis. I also spent a few days with Jackson, a 300-pound Hopi guy at Dinosaur, and through his easy laugh and trunk of flatbread, I learned a titch about the reservation. Even though I know little about Native American people, I "know" why they are different, and I "know" that they are different.
Tonight my Norwegian roommate Ingrid told me about the Sami, who live in Northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and take the brunt of a serious dose of racism. Ingrid told George and I that they look very distinct, and that her boyfriend "looks quite like a Sami." But when she tried to show George and I pictures of what Sami people look like, we laughed, cuz these were "just white people."
"This person has classic Sami cheeks," she'd say. Or, "do you see how their eyes are?" But we just saw blond people in high-collared jackets with reindeer. "It's Mrs. Claus!" we'd say.
In the United States, we have learned to look for certain characteristics to single out the "people who are different." Most often it is skin color. It makes sense to the American-trained mind that a dark-skinned person would be the brunt of political or social prejudice. But here I was looking at pictures of blue-eyed europeans who, for some reason, "looked Sami."
It really reinforces for me the concept that Alejandro de la Fuente recently shared, and that Dennis van Gerven once stated, that there is no such thing as race. If the world would have been discovered by walking, instead of by boat, we never could have made racial distinctions, only acknowledged a gradient. There is no such thing as race, only the perception of race. That was painted clearly tonight by a Norwegian girl looking at a picture of a perfectly "white" person and saying, "Yeah, this person has the Sami look, and would definitely be discriminated against.
Whoa.
1 comment:
I just got back from the hot springs. A light snow was falling, there was enough glow from the moon above the clouds to illuminate everything. As I was walking between the pools, I found myself behind a couple of swimtrunkwearingfolks. With a giggle, one of their fellow swimtrunkwearingfolks told the female swimtrunkwearingfolk in front of me to turn around. I felt the sting of discrimination. Here these swimtrunkwearingfolks were coming into my place with their swimtrunkwearingfolk culture and making me feel like a second or third class citizen. If only we didn't take boats!!
rimisms
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