No matter what letter the description starts with, this topic always reminds me of this quote from John Irving's book "Son of the Circus": "Immigrants are immigrants all their lives." It doesn't matter how well you integrate into a society, locals will always perceive you as being a foreigner. It might be easier to pick out foreigners that have noticeably different looks, language, or behaviour, but even if you look similar, speak the language perfectly, and behave "like a local", you'll always be the person that came from somewhere else.
Once you have become an immigrant somewhere, you'll also be known as an emigrant should you ever return to where you originated... I've been back in my old hometown for six years after my four-decade-long "gap year" in Europe and I'm still treated as a foreigner here by people who moved here from a neighbouring province.
Perhaps it's a subconscious fear of the foreign or a need to feel a sense of belonging to a group/tribe that keeps the walls up between locals and foreigners, even if the foreigner is a snowy white person in a land full of snowy white people?
I love this, Paul. This is so well said, and I relate to it completely. Of course, like you, I'm referring to the Okanagan, so I'm not 100% sure if that feeling of being an "emigrant" is everywhere. It might be different in more cosmopolitan areas.
Nolan, great topic! And you know what, I have a draft half-finished about the same topic 😂 all the ways we call foreigners.
I didn't think about the coincidence that these words start with G... and we can add 'gabacho' to the list, which is how French people are called here in Spain.
I'd be very curious to hear how being described in these ways made you feel. Have you ever been hurt when someone has used a slur against you?
It's interesting for me to think about. I've definitely received some looks over the past seven years of nomading that indicated the person didn't think much of me. But no one has ever said anything to me in English. Perhaps I've been slammed and had no idea what was being said. But far and away most people have been lovely.
I've always thought being gay in the 80s and 90s gave me a little insight into what it's like to be judged on stereotypes and immutable characteristics that have nothing to do with "who" I am. And to have hurtful comments made about me.
But even though some part of my mind always kept in mind I was a white American male which still afforded me a lot of privilege.
Ironically, the nastiest thing ever said to me was by a younger lesbian about ten years ago!
Did you mention what the younger lesbian said in an article or comment before? This rings a bell.
The only term people have said out loud is “guiri,” and no, it never hurts. The last time I got hurt by single words or phrases was a child—foreign fuck, etc. Now I’d just laugh, forget about it, or use it as a way to describe myself with humor instead of hate.
However, as I mentioned in this article, these labels can affect how people view me, so it’s worth reflecting on. It’s also just something to bring into a conversation. Like “Hey, do you think you judged my socks and sandals based on me being a Guiri or who I truly am?” to “Hey, did you pretend I wasn't there because of the word Gweilo or were you ashamed to see me at the restaurant for another reason?”
No, I don't think I've mentioned it anywhere you would've seen.
It was a comment thread and we'd been discussing LGBTQ equality and the ongoing struggle. At one point I commented about the things we'd done back in the day on the road to marriage equality.
Up until that point it hadn't been acrimonious and my comment had strictly been factual and not judgmental, as we were discussing strategy.
To which she responded, "Oh, great. Another fucking white gay male who thinks he saved the world for the rest of us."
Writing it out this way it doesn't sound that awful. But I was shocked and utterly taken aback because I never thought any such thing. I've always been aware that the progress we made was built on top of the work of others and that more work had to be done.
I confess that comment shut down any more interaction with her -- and a lot more wary of having any similar interactions at all.
Some people have so much anger and hate in their hearts that it makes it difficult to have a constructive conversation with them. I would have left the conversation as well. There’s no amount of reasoning to change thoughts and comments like that. If it were in person, I’d try to show them love because that would be the first step to get them to see things clearly.
You left out the very elastic word “gook,” which can also be included in your G list. I know the general group the word is meant to insult, but I’ve also heard white Canadians called gooks in the US, probably in a joking way.
I think the history of a particular racial slur makes it carry more weight. I don't mind being called a gringo in Mexico as I understand it is the word for white foreigner. So Europeans are gringos to. I recently learned the word gabacho. Now that is supposed to be a slur directed at people from the US. This doesn't bother me either because I have no history with the word. Of course knowing what it means I realize that anyone who calls me a gabacho doesn't want to be my friend.
In the US there are lots of slurs for white people. I just roll on. There are always going to be people who hate and I'm not interested in giving weight to their words.
I'm sure people judge me for being white or being from the US. But those people are judged by others as well. I can't make them see me for who I am. And if they don't, it doesn't hurt me. I do feel bad for people who have been judged, who have racial slurs hurled at them, their famil, their ancestors.
I completely agree. The racial slurs toward white people do not carry nearly the same weight as some racial slurs towards people of colour. The point I tried to make here is that even when a word doesn't hurt someone, using it and having it can still make people view you differently because of the cultural context loaded in the word.
It’s a mixed bag of unfamiliarity of the Other (I have no feelings one way or another about those people because I never met one) and racism (I hate them because they are from a certain race) and it’s a worldwide phenomenon.
During my years in Southern Africa, I was amused when a gaggle of village children would run after my car gleefully shouting “Azungu, Azungu,” meaning foreigner, but especially a white foreigner. It was not offensive because they always seemed so delighted, but there is still the underlying human tendency to characterize others by immutable physical characteristics. Someone taught the children to identify people by their skin color.
The word “kaffir” is extremely offensive in a Southern African context, the equivalent to the “n” word in North America, but it is derived from a religious context to identify nonbelievers, although now, even in a religious context, the word has become offensive. I once heard a story in Zimbabwe shortly after Independence where a black gardener called the white neighbor “comrade,” a term widely used by the new Mugabe regime as an honorific. The white neighbor asked the gardener if he knew what comrade meant in Russian and the gardener said no. The white neighbor told him it was the Russian word for kaffir. Racism always finds a way.
During post revolutionary times and changing cultural status, it can be difficult to get things centered properly. I remember reading Zimbabwean newspapers where an uncomfortable binary cropped up. A Simeon Ndlovhu was always referred to as “Cde Ndlovhu,” or “Comrade Ndlovhu,” and a Justin Smythe was always “Mr. Smythe.” Instead of uniting people as fellow citizens, the new normal was to classify people by race. As I think about, the country of my birth also classifies people based on race and ethnicity. I wonder if it helps foster or discourage people of different backgrounds from respecting and trusting one another?
Once, when I was on a Zimbabwe Airline flight from Bulawayo to Harare, a government dignitary and his wife were the guests of honor. When the captain made his preflight announcements, he started by saying, “Welcome aboard, Comrade Minister Nkomo, Madame Comrade Nkomo, Ladies and Gentlemen, Comrades and Madame Comrades. . .” Everyone on the aircraft chuckled at the absurdity of the new order.
I was twice arrested, once in Zimbabwe and once in Zambia, for driving while white. Cars were stopped at police road blocks and depending on the color of the driver, were either detained or allowed to proceed. I was in the detained group that was eventually escorted en masse in our vehicles to local police compounds where we were individually questioned. I never found out what crime I was detained for in Zambia, but in Zimbabwe, I learned I was under suspicion for setting fire to Zimbabwe Air Force aircraft at Thornhill Air Force Base, because it was thought that white former Rhodesian Air Force personnel torched the aircraft as a last gasp of colonial belligerence. Since I was white, of course I was under suspicion, flat American accent notwithstanding.
In Haiti, where I was often referred to as a “blanc,” I never really knew if it was a racist term or if it was simply something a group of innocent, enthusiastic children in an African village might say.
"As I think about, the country of my birth also classifies people based on race and ethnicity. I wonder if it helps foster or discourage people of different backgrounds to respect and trust one another?"
Yeah, it's a tricky topic. It's why I see just as as many problems as benefits with intersectionality. Of course, that's not just about race, but it classifies people under various labels. Of course, it's important not to ignore the history behind each label, but on the other hand, labels are what oppressors used to marginalize in the first place.
Also, did you notice how although kaffir is equally offensive as the "n" word, you still spelled it out instead of referring to it as the "k" word? Why do you think that is?
Because it is not a familiar word to North Americans and if I wrote only the “k” word, few people would know what I meant. In fact, there is a type of tea sold in South Africa called rooibos tea. I found the same kind of tea marketed in the US as Kaffir Tea. Try to sell it in South Africa by that name and there would be riots.
In the US, there is very little stigma attached to the word. When I hear it used, it evokes a strong reaction because it reminds me of the abuse suffered by people towards whom the word was directed, including people I shared deep friendships with.
The US is especially rife these days with people using subtle racist epithets. A majority of Latinos reject the term Latinx, because a) they didn’t choose it and b) it bastardizes Spanish grammar, and yet it continues to be used. At what point does its use become a racist epithet?
One of the steps toward genocide is labeling people as a way to dehumanize them. I saw it happen in Rwanda and in the Balkans. As soon as a person or group’s humanity is taken away, the next step is much easier.
The US approach to creating racial categories is a bureaucratic construct. How does it make any sense that are Portuguese speaking German immigrants to Brazil are lumped together with Quechua speaking Bolivians as Latinos? And why are Vietnamese, Philipinos, Mongolians, and blue eyed, blond hair Russians living in Vladivostok lumped together as Asians? Racial classification as practiced by the US government is not only silly, but it’s also divisive. It would be much easier to work toward solutions for social problems by taking into account factors such as income, region, and other non-subjective factors?
When I hear discussions about intersectionality, I’m somewhat puzzled, because there has long been a way of describing people without resorting to such nonsense. It was called an individual’s personality. The main difference I see between intersectionality and personality is that intersectionality gives people a sense of superiority over others they perceive as less intersectional than themselves and it also gives them something to become all pissy about. Not much progress with that one.
Intersectionality is just a way to conceptualize complexity. In academia, it’s an approach to study that doesn’t look strictly at one or two factors shaping some experience and excluding many others. For example, I read a book on female entrepreneurialism in immigrant communities in the UK. It didn’t just look at the specific cultural heritage (in this case, Chinese and British). It also examined how this heritage intersected with class and gender (in this case, as relates to inheritance laws in China/the social status of women in China) along with colonialism (in this case, expat families in Asia who hired Chinese women and brought them back to the UK). It’s a way of telling a richer story — and therefore likely more accurate — about the larger forces shaping people’s experiences and behaviour.
Words like “intersectionality” can get politicized in public discourse. But you yourself are calling for a sort of intersectional lens in your own comment. It’s just a framework for understanding.
I understand intersectionality as you describe it and I agree that it is a useful tool for telling, as you say, a richer story. Unfortunately, the tool jumped species from serious academic research to political fights (we are well past the point of thoughtful public discussion) and now is used as another weapon in the culture wars. At some point it turned into a victimhood point system and in practice, politically, isn’t really much different from theories about racial hierarchies by colonialist proponents in the late 19th and early 20th century. The cultural and anthropological characteristics of this group are superior and those of that group are inferior and ripe for subjugation.
In the real world of day-to-day cross cultural management, politically weaponized interpretations of intersectionality are deadly. The only way I know to sustain a productive and content team of highly diverse individuals is to focus on our shared humanity and to honor the everyday experiences, emotions, and aspirations we all share.
The high point in my career was when I led a team of talented, highly skilled and motivated individuals. We were 22 team members in half a dozen professional disciplines from 16 countries on 5 continents who altogether spoke well over 30 languages.
We were all highly motivated by our mission to provide humanitarian assistance in a diverse portfolio of countries from the republics that emerged from the former USSR, the Balkans, the Horn of Africa, West and Southeastern Africa, Haiti, several countries in Central and South America, and Indonesia.
I remember sitting in a conference room with the team as we discussed a very difficult issue in one of our field office. At some point as I listened to all the various arguments and perspectives, it dawned on me that I was watching a group of people describing the facets of a metaphorical diamond through each of our cultural lenses, and because we were all committed to being people of good will, we were able to synthesize solutions that each of us individually could not produce.
It was an extraordinary experience, not because we were “diverse” as an end in itself, but because our different perspectives helped us see problems and find solutions from the diversity of our experiences . It worked without top down ideological mandates, and it would have failed without a leitmotif of shared humanity.
But I disagree with you here: "At some point it turned into a victimhood point system and in practice, politically, isn’t really much different from theories about racial hierarchies by colonialist proponents in the late 19th and early 20th century." I don't think it is practiced politically at all; political rhetoric is just rhetoric. It obscures rather than reveals.
Diversity *is* a value and end in itself – as you recognize in your own comment! Diversity brings into contact different perspectives, which helps you see problems/solutions in a different light. That's precisely its value, and this has been established by researchers in many different fields. Even the task of research itself benefits from diversity. When academic researchers work together with Indigenous knowledge holders, for instance, they produce better research. This also extends to groups: when mainstream historians (history is a very white and male discipline) began to take seriously the claims of black American historians (a small group), they were able to establish that Thomas Jefferson indeed had a child Sally Hemings. That claim had been supported by the cultural memory of black Americans, but long dismissed by white historians who had no such cultural memory. We receive a better understanding of US history as a result.
Diversity isn't a flat attribute that only extends from appearance. As human beings living within societies that have sorted us one way or another, our appearance often implicates our general experiences and therefore our perspectives. This applies to our own societies as much as it does to the global one, which is what you experienced at your conference.
I’ll stand by my comment about how, when the idea of intersectionality left academia as an idea to understand the human condition and become politicized as a new strain of racism, it became a divisive idea. And with all due respect, it is practiced politically. Diversity is also, historically, a negative factor, and only occasionally, and at best, a neutral but potentially unstable factor. Intersectional dissection is deadly outside a clinical research setting.
I gave a couple of examples of diversity as a positive thing, such as my very diverse work team, but it wasn’t a forced or politicized diversity and it was a very specific setting with people who had experience working collegially in diverse team environments. For example, my colleague and friend C. did not present herself as a collection of attributes: Honduran, born on the Moskito Coast as bilingual with English and Spanish as mother tongues, a descendant of African slaves and Spanish settlers, a single mom, politically center-left leaning, and an immigrant. She probably grew up impoverished although that was not an attribute I could observe and she was not one to complain. She never described her self as the nexus of all those factors. She was C., a technical expert in her field, a genial colleague, someone who relied on me to moderate her extreme dislike for a couple of individuals in foreign postings, someone I relied upon for empathy and support when I moved on to a very difficult and tragic international posting.
The academic idea of intersectionality would allow one to consider all the factors I mentioned. In our working context, her personality was an extraordinary gift all our team members appreciated, but was not dissected and assigned values for degrees of oppression. At a personal level, she was a dear friend. But I did not dissect her personality nor did she think of her herself as an intersection of components that might somehow give her additional status as a collection of elements that constitute grounds for grievance and victimhood, but the political doctrine of intersectionality does so viciously and vehemently.
I think you have either may not experienced or observed the politicization of the idea of intersectionality “in the wild” where it drives wedges between people who are otherwise able to freely mix, marry, and live as neighbors. I worked in places where people were divided politically into racial and cultural components that torched off genocides and ethnic cleanings. My career included assignments in Zimbabwe when people were reduced to cultural and ethnic definitions, dehumanized and murdered, perhaps 20,000 victims during a campaign called to Gukurahundi. A similar process of cultural dissection caused the civil wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda where 800,000 were butchered, in Sudan, in Somalia, and in the Caucuses region of the former Soviet Union, all of which I observed first hand.
While dissection, including cultural and social dissection, may be a useful tool in a laboratory for research to better understand the human condition, when it leaves the academic environment and infects the political realm, people suffer and people die.
And those kinds of reactions from young children are in no way malicious. They see people who are different from what they are used to seeing and are either jubilant or horrified.
I was once introducing a community health worker training in a village in Malawi’s Lower Shire Valley and the venue was a small, windowless, wattle and daub, thatched roof church. As I stood in front and welcomed the attendees, a pantsless little boy waddled toward the front of the church, looked up, and saw me. His eyes opened wide in surprise and terror and then he peed right where he stood.
I have learned two other languages, French and Chinese, and spent time in international circles listening to people speak various languages. Why anglophones tend to sound bad in other languages I think is due to history: neither the Brits nor the Americans nor the Australians have much of a history of second language learning. I did not notice this until I was at a pub quiz listening to a Brit absolutely butcher basic Spanish (“si se puede”) and it dawned on me that they tend to be as resolutely monolingual as (white) Americans. I guess linguistic hegemony is the natural outcome of cultural hegemony.
It’s not as though non-anglophones necessarily have a better attitude — the French and their insistence that they monopolize the French language, that they can “correct” Quebecois words or fetishize the accent, are so annoying! But they, too, were colonizers and therefore cultural hegemons.
On that note, one of the funniest accents I’ve ever heard in my life was a French woman who spoke minimal English (and had a very strong French accent) trying to speak simple Chinese. The worst was a German woman with excellent English but zero ear for Chinese phonemes. Some accent combinations really do grate the ear while others make you laugh for years afterward.
There’s a lot of cultural assumptions and history tied up in our views of language and I always enjoy trying to unpack some of it.
That’s all very true, but I was thinking about the difference between an anglophone who puts in the effort to speak another language vs accents in English. If someone speaks English with, let’s say, a French, Spanish, or Russian accent, we might say it’s sexy or cool or whatever. But if an English person (who has put in the effort to learn the language well) keeps their accent, it’s far from sexy or cool haha. For instance, my Spanish is pretty good, but my accent definitely isn’t a turn on haha.
I don't know, I think it *really* depends on the accent. And also that our perceptions of sexiness, etc., are very cultural. For example, I know a lot of Americans who love British accents, who immediately think British=refined, who go on and on about it. Whereas hearing a particular British accent tends to just give me the creeps, thanks to some bad experiences working for a British boss.
Maybe it's that anglophone accents are so common, since there's so many English speakers in the world, along with the fact that relatively few anglophones are thoroughly fluent in other languages. So people have plenty of opportunities to get annoyed with them, lol.
"Relatively few anglophones are thoroughly fluent in other languages. So people have plenty of opportunities to get annoyed with them, lol." Haha, this explanation is good enough for me!
This is an interesting read. There are definitely so many names for white people. Could it really be a coincidence? :)
For someone who speaks Cantonese, "gweilo" is no stranger to me. By the way, for a woman, it would be "gweipo"! Anyway, it's not used anymore in Malaysia, at least not widely. Back in the days when it was rare to see another white person, this term was used to refer to a white person who was strange or "not from here." But nowadays, with so many tourists and migrants, this term has lost its meaning. We also have another term from the Hokkien dialect, "angmoh." It means red hair, dating back to history when there were many traders from the Netherlands, who often had red hair. We even called our imported potatoes "Holland potatoes"! :)
But back to labeling and how it affects everyone involved. I do think that calling someone "gweilo" would inevitably create a gap between them and "us," labeling them as someone who does not belong. It's a good thing we don't use it anymore, except for jokes in Malaysia. :)
I have genuinely mixed feelings about the ease with which people outside of America make sweeping racial and cultural generalizations. Part of me thinks, "It's nice that people are so much less likely to walk on eggshells, compared to America." But part of me thinks, "Can we all -- all of us! -- just start seeing people as individuals?"
I do now think a lot of this is just people. But sometimes it really is racism, which is a problem. I dunno.
For sure. Sometimes, it’s racism, and sometimes, they are just generalizations. Often, when someone makes a general comment, and I keep talking and digging deeper, I notice that many people do see people as individuals. It’s just a longer conversation because we're so nuanced.
Great piece. Whats funny is that one can be a foreigner just by moving to another state. We lived in the Boston area for 12 years and were still considered “newbies” by the “townies.”
No matter what letter the description starts with, this topic always reminds me of this quote from John Irving's book "Son of the Circus": "Immigrants are immigrants all their lives." It doesn't matter how well you integrate into a society, locals will always perceive you as being a foreigner. It might be easier to pick out foreigners that have noticeably different looks, language, or behaviour, but even if you look similar, speak the language perfectly, and behave "like a local", you'll always be the person that came from somewhere else.
Once you have become an immigrant somewhere, you'll also be known as an emigrant should you ever return to where you originated... I've been back in my old hometown for six years after my four-decade-long "gap year" in Europe and I'm still treated as a foreigner here by people who moved here from a neighbouring province.
Perhaps it's a subconscious fear of the foreign or a need to feel a sense of belonging to a group/tribe that keeps the walls up between locals and foreigners, even if the foreigner is a snowy white person in a land full of snowy white people?
I love this, Paul. This is so well said, and I relate to it completely. Of course, like you, I'm referring to the Okanagan, so I'm not 100% sure if that feeling of being an "emigrant" is everywhere. It might be different in more cosmopolitan areas.
Nolan, great topic! And you know what, I have a draft half-finished about the same topic 😂 all the ways we call foreigners.
I didn't think about the coincidence that these words start with G... and we can add 'gabacho' to the list, which is how French people are called here in Spain.
And Gachupin, for Spanish in Latin America!
I'd be very curious to hear how being described in these ways made you feel. Have you ever been hurt when someone has used a slur against you?
It's interesting for me to think about. I've definitely received some looks over the past seven years of nomading that indicated the person didn't think much of me. But no one has ever said anything to me in English. Perhaps I've been slammed and had no idea what was being said. But far and away most people have been lovely.
I've always thought being gay in the 80s and 90s gave me a little insight into what it's like to be judged on stereotypes and immutable characteristics that have nothing to do with "who" I am. And to have hurtful comments made about me.
But even though some part of my mind always kept in mind I was a white American male which still afforded me a lot of privilege.
Ironically, the nastiest thing ever said to me was by a younger lesbian about ten years ago!
Did you mention what the younger lesbian said in an article or comment before? This rings a bell.
The only term people have said out loud is “guiri,” and no, it never hurts. The last time I got hurt by single words or phrases was a child—foreign fuck, etc. Now I’d just laugh, forget about it, or use it as a way to describe myself with humor instead of hate.
However, as I mentioned in this article, these labels can affect how people view me, so it’s worth reflecting on. It’s also just something to bring into a conversation. Like “Hey, do you think you judged my socks and sandals based on me being a Guiri or who I truly am?” to “Hey, did you pretend I wasn't there because of the word Gweilo or were you ashamed to see me at the restaurant for another reason?”
No, I don't think I've mentioned it anywhere you would've seen.
It was a comment thread and we'd been discussing LGBTQ equality and the ongoing struggle. At one point I commented about the things we'd done back in the day on the road to marriage equality.
Up until that point it hadn't been acrimonious and my comment had strictly been factual and not judgmental, as we were discussing strategy.
To which she responded, "Oh, great. Another fucking white gay male who thinks he saved the world for the rest of us."
Writing it out this way it doesn't sound that awful. But I was shocked and utterly taken aback because I never thought any such thing. I've always been aware that the progress we made was built on top of the work of others and that more work had to be done.
I confess that comment shut down any more interaction with her -- and a lot more wary of having any similar interactions at all.
Some people have so much anger and hate in their hearts that it makes it difficult to have a constructive conversation with them. I would have left the conversation as well. There’s no amount of reasoning to change thoughts and comments like that. If it were in person, I’d try to show them love because that would be the first step to get them to see things clearly.
You left out the very elastic word “gook,” which can also be included in your G list. I know the general group the word is meant to insult, but I’ve also heard white Canadians called gooks in the US, probably in a joking way.
I think the history of a particular racial slur makes it carry more weight. I don't mind being called a gringo in Mexico as I understand it is the word for white foreigner. So Europeans are gringos to. I recently learned the word gabacho. Now that is supposed to be a slur directed at people from the US. This doesn't bother me either because I have no history with the word. Of course knowing what it means I realize that anyone who calls me a gabacho doesn't want to be my friend.
In the US there are lots of slurs for white people. I just roll on. There are always going to be people who hate and I'm not interested in giving weight to their words.
I'm sure people judge me for being white or being from the US. But those people are judged by others as well. I can't make them see me for who I am. And if they don't, it doesn't hurt me. I do feel bad for people who have been judged, who have racial slurs hurled at them, their famil, their ancestors.
I completely agree. The racial slurs toward white people do not carry nearly the same weight as some racial slurs towards people of colour. The point I tried to make here is that even when a word doesn't hurt someone, using it and having it can still make people view you differently because of the cultural context loaded in the word.
It’s a mixed bag of unfamiliarity of the Other (I have no feelings one way or another about those people because I never met one) and racism (I hate them because they are from a certain race) and it’s a worldwide phenomenon.
During my years in Southern Africa, I was amused when a gaggle of village children would run after my car gleefully shouting “Azungu, Azungu,” meaning foreigner, but especially a white foreigner. It was not offensive because they always seemed so delighted, but there is still the underlying human tendency to characterize others by immutable physical characteristics. Someone taught the children to identify people by their skin color.
The word “kaffir” is extremely offensive in a Southern African context, the equivalent to the “n” word in North America, but it is derived from a religious context to identify nonbelievers, although now, even in a religious context, the word has become offensive. I once heard a story in Zimbabwe shortly after Independence where a black gardener called the white neighbor “comrade,” a term widely used by the new Mugabe regime as an honorific. The white neighbor asked the gardener if he knew what comrade meant in Russian and the gardener said no. The white neighbor told him it was the Russian word for kaffir. Racism always finds a way.
During post revolutionary times and changing cultural status, it can be difficult to get things centered properly. I remember reading Zimbabwean newspapers where an uncomfortable binary cropped up. A Simeon Ndlovhu was always referred to as “Cde Ndlovhu,” or “Comrade Ndlovhu,” and a Justin Smythe was always “Mr. Smythe.” Instead of uniting people as fellow citizens, the new normal was to classify people by race. As I think about, the country of my birth also classifies people based on race and ethnicity. I wonder if it helps foster or discourage people of different backgrounds from respecting and trusting one another?
Once, when I was on a Zimbabwe Airline flight from Bulawayo to Harare, a government dignitary and his wife were the guests of honor. When the captain made his preflight announcements, he started by saying, “Welcome aboard, Comrade Minister Nkomo, Madame Comrade Nkomo, Ladies and Gentlemen, Comrades and Madame Comrades. . .” Everyone on the aircraft chuckled at the absurdity of the new order.
I was twice arrested, once in Zimbabwe and once in Zambia, for driving while white. Cars were stopped at police road blocks and depending on the color of the driver, were either detained or allowed to proceed. I was in the detained group that was eventually escorted en masse in our vehicles to local police compounds where we were individually questioned. I never found out what crime I was detained for in Zambia, but in Zimbabwe, I learned I was under suspicion for setting fire to Zimbabwe Air Force aircraft at Thornhill Air Force Base, because it was thought that white former Rhodesian Air Force personnel torched the aircraft as a last gasp of colonial belligerence. Since I was white, of course I was under suspicion, flat American accent notwithstanding.
In Haiti, where I was often referred to as a “blanc,” I never really knew if it was a racist term or if it was simply something a group of innocent, enthusiastic children in an African village might say.
Racism is a difficult topic to stay current on.
"As I think about, the country of my birth also classifies people based on race and ethnicity. I wonder if it helps foster or discourage people of different backgrounds to respect and trust one another?"
Yeah, it's a tricky topic. It's why I see just as as many problems as benefits with intersectionality. Of course, that's not just about race, but it classifies people under various labels. Of course, it's important not to ignore the history behind each label, but on the other hand, labels are what oppressors used to marginalize in the first place.
Also, did you notice how although kaffir is equally offensive as the "n" word, you still spelled it out instead of referring to it as the "k" word? Why do you think that is?
Because it is not a familiar word to North Americans and if I wrote only the “k” word, few people would know what I meant. In fact, there is a type of tea sold in South Africa called rooibos tea. I found the same kind of tea marketed in the US as Kaffir Tea. Try to sell it in South Africa by that name and there would be riots.
In the US, there is very little stigma attached to the word. When I hear it used, it evokes a strong reaction because it reminds me of the abuse suffered by people towards whom the word was directed, including people I shared deep friendships with.
The US is especially rife these days with people using subtle racist epithets. A majority of Latinos reject the term Latinx, because a) they didn’t choose it and b) it bastardizes Spanish grammar, and yet it continues to be used. At what point does its use become a racist epithet?
One of the steps toward genocide is labeling people as a way to dehumanize them. I saw it happen in Rwanda and in the Balkans. As soon as a person or group’s humanity is taken away, the next step is much easier.
The US approach to creating racial categories is a bureaucratic construct. How does it make any sense that are Portuguese speaking German immigrants to Brazil are lumped together with Quechua speaking Bolivians as Latinos? And why are Vietnamese, Philipinos, Mongolians, and blue eyed, blond hair Russians living in Vladivostok lumped together as Asians? Racial classification as practiced by the US government is not only silly, but it’s also divisive. It would be much easier to work toward solutions for social problems by taking into account factors such as income, region, and other non-subjective factors?
When I hear discussions about intersectionality, I’m somewhat puzzled, because there has long been a way of describing people without resorting to such nonsense. It was called an individual’s personality. The main difference I see between intersectionality and personality is that intersectionality gives people a sense of superiority over others they perceive as less intersectional than themselves and it also gives them something to become all pissy about. Not much progress with that one.
Hell yes to all of this!!
Intersectionality is just a way to conceptualize complexity. In academia, it’s an approach to study that doesn’t look strictly at one or two factors shaping some experience and excluding many others. For example, I read a book on female entrepreneurialism in immigrant communities in the UK. It didn’t just look at the specific cultural heritage (in this case, Chinese and British). It also examined how this heritage intersected with class and gender (in this case, as relates to inheritance laws in China/the social status of women in China) along with colonialism (in this case, expat families in Asia who hired Chinese women and brought them back to the UK). It’s a way of telling a richer story — and therefore likely more accurate — about the larger forces shaping people’s experiences and behaviour.
Words like “intersectionality” can get politicized in public discourse. But you yourself are calling for a sort of intersectional lens in your own comment. It’s just a framework for understanding.
I understand intersectionality as you describe it and I agree that it is a useful tool for telling, as you say, a richer story. Unfortunately, the tool jumped species from serious academic research to political fights (we are well past the point of thoughtful public discussion) and now is used as another weapon in the culture wars. At some point it turned into a victimhood point system and in practice, politically, isn’t really much different from theories about racial hierarchies by colonialist proponents in the late 19th and early 20th century. The cultural and anthropological characteristics of this group are superior and those of that group are inferior and ripe for subjugation.
In the real world of day-to-day cross cultural management, politically weaponized interpretations of intersectionality are deadly. The only way I know to sustain a productive and content team of highly diverse individuals is to focus on our shared humanity and to honor the everyday experiences, emotions, and aspirations we all share.
The high point in my career was when I led a team of talented, highly skilled and motivated individuals. We were 22 team members in half a dozen professional disciplines from 16 countries on 5 continents who altogether spoke well over 30 languages.
We were all highly motivated by our mission to provide humanitarian assistance in a diverse portfolio of countries from the republics that emerged from the former USSR, the Balkans, the Horn of Africa, West and Southeastern Africa, Haiti, several countries in Central and South America, and Indonesia.
I remember sitting in a conference room with the team as we discussed a very difficult issue in one of our field office. At some point as I listened to all the various arguments and perspectives, it dawned on me that I was watching a group of people describing the facets of a metaphorical diamond through each of our cultural lenses, and because we were all committed to being people of good will, we were able to synthesize solutions that each of us individually could not produce.
It was an extraordinary experience, not because we were “diverse” as an end in itself, but because our different perspectives helped us see problems and find solutions from the diversity of our experiences . It worked without top down ideological mandates, and it would have failed without a leitmotif of shared humanity.
But I disagree with you here: "At some point it turned into a victimhood point system and in practice, politically, isn’t really much different from theories about racial hierarchies by colonialist proponents in the late 19th and early 20th century." I don't think it is practiced politically at all; political rhetoric is just rhetoric. It obscures rather than reveals.
Diversity *is* a value and end in itself – as you recognize in your own comment! Diversity brings into contact different perspectives, which helps you see problems/solutions in a different light. That's precisely its value, and this has been established by researchers in many different fields. Even the task of research itself benefits from diversity. When academic researchers work together with Indigenous knowledge holders, for instance, they produce better research. This also extends to groups: when mainstream historians (history is a very white and male discipline) began to take seriously the claims of black American historians (a small group), they were able to establish that Thomas Jefferson indeed had a child Sally Hemings. That claim had been supported by the cultural memory of black Americans, but long dismissed by white historians who had no such cultural memory. We receive a better understanding of US history as a result.
Diversity isn't a flat attribute that only extends from appearance. As human beings living within societies that have sorted us one way or another, our appearance often implicates our general experiences and therefore our perspectives. This applies to our own societies as much as it does to the global one, which is what you experienced at your conference.
I’ll stand by my comment about how, when the idea of intersectionality left academia as an idea to understand the human condition and become politicized as a new strain of racism, it became a divisive idea. And with all due respect, it is practiced politically. Diversity is also, historically, a negative factor, and only occasionally, and at best, a neutral but potentially unstable factor. Intersectional dissection is deadly outside a clinical research setting.
I gave a couple of examples of diversity as a positive thing, such as my very diverse work team, but it wasn’t a forced or politicized diversity and it was a very specific setting with people who had experience working collegially in diverse team environments. For example, my colleague and friend C. did not present herself as a collection of attributes: Honduran, born on the Moskito Coast as bilingual with English and Spanish as mother tongues, a descendant of African slaves and Spanish settlers, a single mom, politically center-left leaning, and an immigrant. She probably grew up impoverished although that was not an attribute I could observe and she was not one to complain. She never described her self as the nexus of all those factors. She was C., a technical expert in her field, a genial colleague, someone who relied on me to moderate her extreme dislike for a couple of individuals in foreign postings, someone I relied upon for empathy and support when I moved on to a very difficult and tragic international posting.
The academic idea of intersectionality would allow one to consider all the factors I mentioned. In our working context, her personality was an extraordinary gift all our team members appreciated, but was not dissected and assigned values for degrees of oppression. At a personal level, she was a dear friend. But I did not dissect her personality nor did she think of her herself as an intersection of components that might somehow give her additional status as a collection of elements that constitute grounds for grievance and victimhood, but the political doctrine of intersectionality does so viciously and vehemently.
I think you have either may not experienced or observed the politicization of the idea of intersectionality “in the wild” where it drives wedges between people who are otherwise able to freely mix, marry, and live as neighbors. I worked in places where people were divided politically into racial and cultural components that torched off genocides and ethnic cleanings. My career included assignments in Zimbabwe when people were reduced to cultural and ethnic definitions, dehumanized and murdered, perhaps 20,000 victims during a campaign called to Gukurahundi. A similar process of cultural dissection caused the civil wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda where 800,000 were butchered, in Sudan, in Somalia, and in the Caucuses region of the former Soviet Union, all of which I observed first hand.
While dissection, including cultural and social dissection, may be a useful tool in a laboratory for research to better understand the human condition, when it leaves the academic environment and infects the political realm, people suffer and people die.
Oh, I remember the little boys and girls chasing the car in Haiti, saying, ou blanc! Ou blanc! I would laugh and say, ou pa blanc!
I have found this a pretty universal experience. They’re commenting on the obvious difference, one they’ve probably rarely if ever seen.
And those kinds of reactions from young children are in no way malicious. They see people who are different from what they are used to seeing and are either jubilant or horrified.
I was once introducing a community health worker training in a village in Malawi’s Lower Shire Valley and the venue was a small, windowless, wattle and daub, thatched roof church. As I stood in front and welcomed the attendees, a pantsless little boy waddled toward the front of the church, looked up, and saw me. His eyes opened wide in surprise and terror and then he peed right where he stood.
I have learned two other languages, French and Chinese, and spent time in international circles listening to people speak various languages. Why anglophones tend to sound bad in other languages I think is due to history: neither the Brits nor the Americans nor the Australians have much of a history of second language learning. I did not notice this until I was at a pub quiz listening to a Brit absolutely butcher basic Spanish (“si se puede”) and it dawned on me that they tend to be as resolutely monolingual as (white) Americans. I guess linguistic hegemony is the natural outcome of cultural hegemony.
It’s not as though non-anglophones necessarily have a better attitude — the French and their insistence that they monopolize the French language, that they can “correct” Quebecois words or fetishize the accent, are so annoying! But they, too, were colonizers and therefore cultural hegemons.
On that note, one of the funniest accents I’ve ever heard in my life was a French woman who spoke minimal English (and had a very strong French accent) trying to speak simple Chinese. The worst was a German woman with excellent English but zero ear for Chinese phonemes. Some accent combinations really do grate the ear while others make you laugh for years afterward.
There’s a lot of cultural assumptions and history tied up in our views of language and I always enjoy trying to unpack some of it.
That’s all very true, but I was thinking about the difference between an anglophone who puts in the effort to speak another language vs accents in English. If someone speaks English with, let’s say, a French, Spanish, or Russian accent, we might say it’s sexy or cool or whatever. But if an English person (who has put in the effort to learn the language well) keeps their accent, it’s far from sexy or cool haha. For instance, my Spanish is pretty good, but my accent definitely isn’t a turn on haha.
I don't know, I think it *really* depends on the accent. And also that our perceptions of sexiness, etc., are very cultural. For example, I know a lot of Americans who love British accents, who immediately think British=refined, who go on and on about it. Whereas hearing a particular British accent tends to just give me the creeps, thanks to some bad experiences working for a British boss.
Maybe it's that anglophone accents are so common, since there's so many English speakers in the world, along with the fact that relatively few anglophones are thoroughly fluent in other languages. So people have plenty of opportunities to get annoyed with them, lol.
"Relatively few anglophones are thoroughly fluent in other languages. So people have plenty of opportunities to get annoyed with them, lol." Haha, this explanation is good enough for me!
This is an interesting read. There are definitely so many names for white people. Could it really be a coincidence? :)
For someone who speaks Cantonese, "gweilo" is no stranger to me. By the way, for a woman, it would be "gweipo"! Anyway, it's not used anymore in Malaysia, at least not widely. Back in the days when it was rare to see another white person, this term was used to refer to a white person who was strange or "not from here." But nowadays, with so many tourists and migrants, this term has lost its meaning. We also have another term from the Hokkien dialect, "angmoh." It means red hair, dating back to history when there were many traders from the Netherlands, who often had red hair. We even called our imported potatoes "Holland potatoes"! :)
But back to labeling and how it affects everyone involved. I do think that calling someone "gweilo" would inevitably create a gap between them and "us," labeling them as someone who does not belong. It's a good thing we don't use it anymore, except for jokes in Malaysia. :)
This is so good to know, Rachel! Thank you.
Same with laowai in China.
I have genuinely mixed feelings about the ease with which people outside of America make sweeping racial and cultural generalizations. Part of me thinks, "It's nice that people are so much less likely to walk on eggshells, compared to America." But part of me thinks, "Can we all -- all of us! -- just start seeing people as individuals?"
I do now think a lot of this is just people. But sometimes it really is racism, which is a problem. I dunno.
For sure. Sometimes, it’s racism, and sometimes, they are just generalizations. Often, when someone makes a general comment, and I keep talking and digging deeper, I notice that many people do see people as individuals. It’s just a longer conversation because we're so nuanced.
Us whiteys in Thailand are called 'falangs', it is not really rude. It comes from the first Europeans who came here, the French, 'falangset'.
That’s interesting! Thanks for sharing, Colin.
Great piece. Whats funny is that one can be a foreigner just by moving to another state. We lived in the Boston area for 12 years and were still considered “newbies” by the “townies.”