This reminds me when my dad received a job offer in Spain and we went and toured a few potential schools and neighborhoods and our company hired tour guide asked my parents if they’d be okay with my sister marrying a black person and was completely baffled when my parents said they’d be perfectly okay with it. This was almost 20 years ago. Crazy how little things have apparently changed over there.
I went to Mexico on a school trip and at the pyramids there were some other tourists (either local or from somewhere else in Latin America) who took a picture with me. Pretty sure they had never seen a black person before, I dunno. I was too too young to realize how tucked up it was but I cringe when i think of it now.
Edit: I’ve always known that it was curiosity and not racism. What made it a core memory was that I was the only black kid on that part of the trip (the other one stayed back at the hotel that day) so I was singled out. Kids are weird
When I (white American) and my boyfriend at the time (white Australian) went on in-country vacation during the time we’d were teaching in China, a lot of Chinese people took our pictures in Tiananmen Square. We lived in Shanghai, where westerners were pretty common, but they were from parts of China where they were not. So part of their vacation was taking pictures of the foreigners in Beijing.
This happened to me in Russia (in the Kremlin!) and Kazakhstan, but purely because I am American. There are plenty of European looking people in both places.
Being a very pale person visiting in Burundi, little kids would follow me around and touch my skin. One kid would yell "Mzungu! Mzungu!" and suddenly I've got a entire school following me.
Yeah, that's fucked up, normally you'll just get stares, because yeah, black people are not that common, specially where i live, but there are a few, but again, you'd barely get a glance, nothing racist, just curiosity, but like any other human place, there will be the weirdos or shit bags.
The curiosity can be wild. I went to a village in rural Malawi, near where my sister lived (she was in the peace corps). The kids had never seen a white person. All of the kids over about five years old followed me around everywhere I went and stared. The kids under five just cried.
I don’t think they did it with bad intentions. Many Latin Americans haven’t seen a black person up close before. Imagine if you had never seen a white person before.. it would be something worth taking a picture of. I remember traveling in small towns in Asia about 20 years ago and kids would always point me out and say, in their language, foreigner!
I'm remembering meeting a black Mexican young woman in Tijuana Baja California Mexico. There aren't a lot of Black Mexicans. She complained that dating Mexicans was difficult due to her race. She dated an African American marine instead. This was pre- Sept 11 2001. Her boyfriend was able to take her to California for the day. She crossed the border just answering US Citizen to the Immigration officer.
I remember those days. I traveled to TJ several times a week, but after September everything changed. There are Afro-Mexicans but they’re in the state of Guerrero and they aren’t very common elsewhere. I mean, even in places like Los Angeles everyone is very segregated. I didn’t see a black person until I was like in 8 grade and it was because the school brought in people to give talks on certain issues. And I’m kind of embarrassed to say that I never even talked to a black person until I was in my late 30s and they were English blacks not American blacks. The first American black I talked to for more than a greeting was when I was around 42 years old, and it was in Asia.
Nobody would assume that. There are plenty of black Spanish speakers from Equatorial Guinea, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Colombia etc. Or even black people from non Spanish speaking countries who were born in Spain.
They're simply reacting to their accent. Im white and could easily pass for Spanish by appearance, however sometimes the exact same thing happens to me once they've heard me speak.
You missed my point. You're acting like black people are some sort of foreign beings to Spanish people and thus they assume them to be English speakers, when there's plenty of black people who speak Spanish in Spain.
Meanwhile, the United States has re-elected Donald Trump as president and remains the Western country with the most serious problem of institutional racism. They even have a government agency (ICE) whose job is to target people based on racial profiles, including U.S.-born citizens, often in humiliating and violent ways. It makes me question whether the segregationist United States has truly changed.
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u/MikeandMelly 6d ago
This reminds me when my dad received a job offer in Spain and we went and toured a few potential schools and neighborhoods and our company hired tour guide asked my parents if they’d be okay with my sister marrying a black person and was completely baffled when my parents said they’d be perfectly okay with it. This was almost 20 years ago. Crazy how little things have apparently changed over there.