No matter what freedoms and law changes that come to pass... our appearances always create per-existing ideas in society. There is no profit to gain by denying the fact that it is easier to be a white under-achiever and poor than to be black over-achiever and rich.
I know many people do not see it that way, but it is true.
I have challenged myself to find out the origins of any kind of slavery, to investigate the reasons for the Holocaust, the truth about racial differences and intelligence. And the simplest way I could start this was to set myself a level playing field and ask, "Why?"
I am a human being and according to today's anthropological manner, the map classifies me as being from Ethiopia , gender classifies me as a female and time classifies me as being 33 years and 10 months of age.
I am also in a relationship with a white man. And I learn everyday how different and similar we are. Growing up in Addis Ababa, where I was never confronted by questions of skin color and race and daily life in new environments, I never really dared ask any of these questions because I know my Ethiopian parents were not interested in this topic. They would also probably brush it under the carpet and continue to encourage the belief in education and awareness but.... that does not make much sense to me now.
The world has changed to much since I was a little girl.
The first time I realized that my skin color was a problem for another person was in 5th grade. My parents had me in a school called ICS (International Community School) in Addis Ababa. I am sure their intentions were good.
There was a white girl called Jessica Ballard, she had blonde hair and blue eyes and she was the principles daughter and she made days really tough for me. The school was for upper class kids from all over the world and the school fees were astronomical. Since I was born in Nigeria, my parent enrolled me as a Nigerian by birth even though they were both Ethiopian and I thought I was Ethiopian too... like my brothers and sisters.
The school had an insane rule that no Ethiopians were allowed to attend and that was and still is insane in my mind as the school grounds claimed the best plots of land in the capital and the best facilities than any other school I had ever seen at the time.
Racial issues came to a head when a fist fight broke out between me and Jessica which culminated in all the black kids(about 80% of the entire school population) getting involved and all the white kids feeling cornered and it was a bad situation. This resulted in many expulsions and problems for black kids... me especially....
I remember being branded as a trouble maker. to my parents, it did not matter that I was standing up for myself, they could not get past the fact that I created such a problem for them and they had to find me a new school. I never stopped wondering why they did not see my logic though. and ever since then I knew I could never talk about race to them because it was just not such a problem in Ethiopia where the likelihood of running into a white person was so slim at the time. We only saw them on TV occasionally. We knew they existed but only in the TV box.
So the first time I traveled out of Ethiopia (at 19 years of age) on my first job in South Korea to teach Amharic to KOV's(Korean overseas volunteers), I was so naively shocked and excited to be surrounded by so many kinds of people at airport terminals. I loved it. I wondered how they lived and what cultures they had. What I imagined was making friends with everyone and having a great old time as you would in an Ethiopian town with the people of your age. I was not prepared for the reality that many did not want to know me... were uncomfortable by me. My parents had not prepared me for this part.
I know my father studied at Leeds University in the mid 50s... his college photo shows him as the only black man in a class of about 12... but he remained tight lipped about his life in the UK and everywhere else for that matter. I remember him once, while we were watching roots, he told us how he was out on a pub crawl with about 4 other white guys from his college and how he could not enter into a bar cause of a sign on the outside saying, "NO DOGS, NO BLACKS". I remember how shocked I was but how the subject was changed so quickly... What a shame... how I would have loved to know the real reason why that kind of sign existed... but I guess he thought I was so young and I was really.... I probably would not have understood him and had an explosive angry response. I guess he also did not want me to see race and color.
So for the most of my life, I did not see color... until I traveled.
My experiences with the cognitive mutiny that is taking place around me today amongst people from different places continues to educate me in a whole new way.
I have always wondered my there is a general understanding in western society that Africans have a lower I.Q. ... to me that is stating that Africans are more stupid than people from other continents.
I have deflected the expected and common emotional response (anger, resentment, hatred) to this questions and posed the question myself asking why? why is this the case? how can we measure this? and Rageh Omaar explodes myths about race and IQ and reveals what he thinks are important lessons for society in his documentary called, "Race and Intelligence: Science's Last Taboo".
In that doco, James Robert Flynn a Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand is famous for his discovery of the Flynn effect, revealed that I.Q. has increased by about 3 points per decade... this was interesting.
He also states that differences in I.Q. gap can be closed environmentally by the need to think in abstract categories. I.Q.scores do not give a score for intelligence but they give a score for the level of adaptation to modernity and civilization. That explains the reason for the low I.Q. in Africa as that is the area where modernity is not prominent in everyday life. With globalization the I.Q. of Africans is developing like crazy... people like me are proof of this...
But there is still a lingering question of why modernity was not prominent in Africa at the same time it was prominent in Europe... the racial classification of intelligence still does not stack up... there are too many holes unfilled with genuine believable answers.
While economic and social factors cannot be sufficient reasons to accept or live by the status quo... the mountain high journey of cultural evolution and change seems to be the only way we can change Africa.
