Fight. Racism.

I am so frustrated but I know that in a certain way they are right. Well, maybe not that they are right but that I should apologize. What started as me just trying to make a observation about how these guys behave between themselves developed in a full blown argument with accusations of racism and sexism and me crying in a corner. Of course rum was involved too, which didn't help anything. We were sitting around in the yard, drinking and talking. I was noticing that every time I tried to say something, someone interrupted me and argued with me before I had even said what I was trying to say. When I tried to point out that this was frustrating, unsurprisingly someone interrupted me and disagreed with me. Each time I tried to speak was point was made by the manner that they received me. I got so annoyed! It was like they didn't have to listen to other people, they could assume that they knew already what would be said, that no one but them had anything to offer, that they kept pushing for an opportunity to hear their own voice. This is how you debate, they said. Integrate! I've probably been spoiled by too much academia, too much hand raising. But this aggressive way of expressing oneself is a behavior that I believe often occurs among groups of men. And when women are present, nothing changes. It's assumed that they don't have a reason to listen to women, that women have nothing to offer, and I said this too. This what not what this group of supposedly enlightened male artists and freethinkers wanted to hear. But they were not so freethinking as to consider my observations, they just denied them out right. The whole manner that they conducted a debate was a case in point. I ended up basically demanding loudly the right to have just a few minutes to explain myself without anyone talking over me, which I was hardly granted. I was rude, but I made my point, then MK said, okay we gave you what you wanted and you didn't have anything to say! You had no point. Again, no one wanted to listen to me. But I was so naive. I thought I was talking about gender dynamics and the different ways men and women express themselves, how sexism is a behavior even more than a discourse, but for them it was all about race. I was a white person demanding that black people listen to me, take me seriously for a few minutes. I was a white person asserting the superiority of my ideas, criticizing how black people are between themselves. How stupid could I be that that never occurred to me? I took seriously my assumption that we were beyond race and racism, that these new friends were people I could except to see me as a human being and not the white skin of the colonizer. But it's impossible to escape that, and rather egotistical too. I'm not a human being, none of us are. We are primarily the overlap of a variety of social,cultural and economic categories. The way I was essentializing them for being men, they were essenitalizing me for being white. It's all there. I'm not beyond it and neither are they, whether I recognize it or not. I like to think that race doesn't matter, but it was foolish of me to assume that others are of the same mind. They accused me of being racist, I accused them of introducing the race question, by simplifying the argument into race when there are so many other ways to interpret the situation. Everyone was unhappy.

Earlier that afternoon one of these guys, under the pretense of teaching me kreyol, started to say offensive sexual comments to me. I reacted by saying that made me uncomfortable and that it was disrespectful to talk to women like that, that he had no right to discuss my sex life or use such vulgar terms with me. The expression I used was "une femme comme moi", a woman like me. This unfortunate phrase was brought up several times in the course of the argument that night in the yard. In their eyes, the distinction I was trying to make with it was "a white woman like me". I thought I was making the distinction between a whore, someone who doesn't mind being talked to like that, and a woman who has the right not to be aggressively sexualized. Are we both right? Was I unintentionally making a racist comment when I was trying to assert my right to be taken seriously as a woman? Probably. It's all there. But it is naive of me not to recognize for most of the people here, the fact that I have white skin trumps all. It is with that knowledge that people seek to understand me, that is who I am first and foremost. And why should they do otherwise? Money matters, and white skin often means more money than these folks will see in a long time. It's probably unjust to assume most Haitians are like these closed minded and self-important men I had the pleasure of spending the evening with, but obviously believing sincerely that race doesn't matter is foolish. Race matters, and it is through that lens that my presence here is viewed. It doesn't go away if I choose not to see it. But where is the line between recognition and participation? It doesn't matter that I am a feminist, my assertion of the right to be respected will be interpreted with race. How can we fight racism if we are not all on the same page? What's the point of putting down that category if other people don't do it too? Maybe it's not a question of putting down the category of race. To concern oneself with race, maybe it means in a certain way to cherish moments like this one, when you are forced to confront how your ideas differ greatly from those of others, and to try to comprehend why that is, to try to talk through the assumptions we arm ourselves with. Is the goal to annihilate racial distinctions (that's what I thought before) or is it to recognize and try to understand them?