The movie Hotel Rwanda depicted how a brave hotelier, Paul Rusesabagina played by Don Cheadle kept people safe during the Hutu-Tutsi Rwandan war. The movie also showed the international community's reluctance to help Rwandans mitigate their self-induced war and focused on evacuating their people out of the war torn country. Although this is seen throughout the movie, this reality was very poignant when the character Colonel Oliver portrayed by actor Nick Nolte stated; "You ain't even a nigger. You're an African." That statement has always stayed with me, that when the rubber hits the road, the world community may not get involved in African issues including the so called "World Big Brother" the good old US of A, as exemplified in the Colonel’s statement.
America understands that their black people are African Americans, who unfortunately, many times still don't get first rate treatment in their own homeland, however they are their problem and no other blacks are, so helping other blacks is optional. Though philosophically looking at the greater good, this isn't the best stance for the US to take considering the big brother role it tries to take in the world, but it can be seen as fair enough, since they aren't and shouldn't be held responsible for non-American blacks.
However, what made me remember this is that I was recently talking to a recent police recruit who just quit the police force after undergoing the rigorous 11 week training. This naturalized American citizen who is originally from Liberia and who to me often has his head in the clouds, got a heavy dose of racism recently. He sadly told me that during the police cadet training in a town in the East Coast, the Caucasian superiors gave the Caucasian and African American recruits blatant preferential treatment, while treating the three Africans in their set badly. At the end of the day, out of the three Africans, only one will continue with the police force as the two others have dropped out. However, he said he understands racism, but can't understand why they would treat African Americans and Africans differently. He can't understand the "You ain't even a nigger. You're an African" sentiment. I told him to keep on living, in time he will understand this and many other things as well.
Of course there are many general reasons for the preferential treatment of African Americans by Caucasian Americans including their history together, their familiarity and comfort level with African Americans, the fact that African Americans are often more connected to resources to help them fight injustice, the fact that they will cry racism much faster and louder than most other minority groups, and since they’ve been in America for generations, they know how the system works and how to use it to their advantage, while most times Africans don't.
I can get along with and appreciate people of all races and nationalities because that's how I was raised, but I know not everyone is like that and I was surprised at his naiveté, because in the world we live in, some people just dislike others. Even some African Americans dislike Africans and vice-versa, and display subtle and blatant behaviors that can be termed racism, however since we are the same race; maybe it would be called “ethnicism” instead. Even in African countries, there's both subtle and blatant tribalism. This former police cadet himself came to the US because of the Liberian war caused by Liberians, which destroyed many of their fellow Liberians and their country, so I don't know what rock he crawled out from under.
He went on to share about how in addition to that, a Caucasian female superior officer had serious issues with him and even wrote him up for insubordination because she believes all African men believe women are inferior. If what he claims about her is true, then her thought process is stereotypical, but not unbelievable, because it isn't true for all African men, especially those living in America who know they must respect women superiors in the work environment. However, there are two sides to every story and maybe knowingly or unknowingly, he didn't accord the woman as much respect as she would have liked or that she was used to. So in addition to the racism issues, he encountered issues because of his gender, which is sexism.
In a perfect world, we'd all treat each other well; evaluate people, based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin, and love each other, so we can all hold hands and sing Kumbayah together by a big camp fire. However, in reality, the world including the melting pot called the US of A this issue occurred in isn't perfect and racism, “ethnicism”, tribalism, sexism, and every other "ism" abounds. These things definitely exist and are going nowhere anytime soon, African American President and Latina Associate Justice of the Supreme Court or not. All who live here just have to keep trying to navigate and mitigate the effects as much as possible in our interactions and relationships.
A word is enough for the wise….
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