And bones in our hair

This past summer, the Spanish Olympic basketball team took out a full-page ad in a newspaper showing all the players pulling the sides of their eyes so as to look "Chinese" as an expression of solidarity with the host city of Beijing. Americans were outraged, the Chinese less so, and the Spaniards simply confused. How, they wondered, was this perceived as racism? How, the Americans wondered, could it not be perceived in such a way?

On Thanksgiving, I was with a gathering of some Americans, a few other varied English speakers, and several Spaniards. At the end of the evening, as most guests were leaving, one fellow American brought up the concept of racism in Spain; he argued that Spaniards were the most racist people he knew. He cited the incident of the Spanish basketball players. In the midst of Spaniards, he was fighting a losing battle. They countered that their potential ignorance should not be misinterpreted as discrimination. Should they be expected to know the difference between Chinese people and Vietnamese people, they wondered, if they'd never seen representatives of either? Hoping we Americans would support him, he turned to us. Yet, at the time, I could not say I agreed with him. I couldn't support the idea that ignorance is an allowable excuse for racism, yet I doubted racism could be determined by the same gestures and terms from one country to another. Moreover, could it not be a form of racism to overlook the reasons for another set of cultural assumptions, taboos, allowances? Certainly, Spaniards are not politically correct in the cautious way of Americans; at times this can even be refreshing for me. Yet I am still thoroughly American, with an American's capacity to be offended.

Tonight at choir practice, our directory passed out a new song. One I had sung previously, in fact, in my church choir: Siyahamba, a song of Zulu origin. The women to my left--fellow altos, women I love dearly--laughed. "Zulu?" they said. "We should paint our faces black for the concert!" one said, doubling over. "And put bones in our hair!" said the next, gleeful. Blackface--unequivocally racist in the USA--is still featured prominently in Spain's Christmas celebrations, as children sit not on Santa's lap to ask for presents, but on the laps of the three kings, one of whom wears dark brown makeup to portray Balthasar (Caspar being European and Melchior Asian in Spanish folklore). However uncomfortable I was seeing these blackface kings, the jokes from my altos were much further over the line into inexcusable xenophobia. My personal line, clearly, yet a firm one nonetheless.