Racism’s myriad manifestations

Where should change begin in a society where racially motivated behaviour and blatant anti-Black practices tied to local traditions are, unfortunately, not a thing of the past?

My most uncomfortable moments living in Tramin have involved children stopping to stare at me as if I were a curiosity. During my early days in this town, I’d often frequent cafes on my own and would find a blonde child anywhere between the ages of 2 and 5 staring at me point blank. They never smiled, they never attempted to talk to me, they just looked at me in a way that made it seem like I was out of place, like I had descended into their landscape from another planet, an alien being. Their mothers would then arrive and scoop them away without ever apologising to me for their child’s strange behaviour or explaining to their child that it was not cool to stare at strangers. When I met this lovely African feminist who, like me, because of her marriage to someone in South Tyrol, moved here more than a decade ago, I got the confirmation I needed that these gazes were somehow racially motivated. She has been living in a town in Meran and at the time when she moved, most of its inhabitants simply hadn’t encountered a Black body before. She was always stared at, more indiscreetly than politely. She assured me that it had gotten a lot better than it used to be.

The first time I was here during Christmas, I was alarmed to see photographs in the town magazine of children dressed as the three kings who visit Christ, one of them in blackface. Alarmed sounds mild. I felt shocked, enraged and horrified that this was so routine, the Church didn’t even bat an eyelid. I complained to my mother-in-law, who grew up in Augsburg and retains her outsider lens. She shared my anger but told me the Traminers saw this as an act of inclusivity. I found it ridiculous, the lengths they would go to in order to depict that one of the three kings was not white while retaining the myth of Jesus Christ as white saviour. It was absurd considering Christ was, in all likelihood, a brown Palestinian, or a person of colour. This Christmas I found an explanation for the Western depiction of Christ; he is a manifestation of the white coloniser Jesus, which could be seen as standing in opposition to the Brown refugee Christ.

I’m still trying to unpack the complexity of how racism manifests where I live. During the Carnival celebrations on Tuesday, I saw one whole swarm of traditional characters dressed head to toe in blackface, wearing clothes reminiscent of the Jim Crow era depictions of enslaved people and acting as uncivilised sub-human. They go around blackening the faces of carnival goers. Tramin takes Carnival very seriously. So seriously they even applied once for UNESCO world heritage status because their version of it so uniquely embodies a small-town collective unconscious. I watched from the windows of my in-laws’ apartment the insane festivities. On the one hand, it looked like so much fun, a full-on street party with more people than I had ever seen anywhere in South Tyrol. I liked the cross-dressing but having experienced, first-hand, the transphobia and homophobia of the inhabitants, felt wary of the jubilation. Still, I saw some kids dressed in drag who seemed to really relish the opportunity to inhabit another state of being, and I wondered what it may mean to someone who might otherwise experience gender dysphoria. But the blackface I found impossible to digest. I was lucky to have an excuse for not participating this year. My almost one-year-old was happy to observe the festivities from the window but would have been mortified to have been around so many bizarrely costumed people. I kept wondering whether my participation would be read as a sanctioning of their inherently anti-Black practices or could be interpreted as a queering of space.

The next morning as my partner and I walked our child towards the parking lot to drive to the health centre where I had a blood test scheduled, I turned towards the magnolia tree in front of the middle school, to see if it bore traces of an almost spring. I was jolted out of my reverie when I found the ‘N’ word scratched upon its trunk. I’m still seething. I’ve asked my partner’s aunt to take care of it, and I know she will, but I’m still strategising further courses of action. My worst fear is that I will be alone in my anger. It pains me to think of our child going to school in a place where his classmates would happily wear blackface without even considering its racist implications. Where should the change begin?

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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