Keeping Current
Keeping Current
OUR ACTIVISM COLUMN
The Day I Found Out I Was White
by Peter W. Pruyn, writing for the FAWCO magazine
The Seychelles had no indigenous
peoples. It was first settled by the
French as a colony for slaves and
freed slaves. It was then ceded to
the English when Napoleon lost.
Because it was along the trade
routes to Asia, there was also a
population of Chinese and Indians.
After 200 years of ethnic mixing,
the skin pigment of the Seychellois
people is a continuous spectrum.
As a result, this can create certain
challenges for Seychellois when
they travel for the first time to
countries that are more segregated.
The following are a couple of
anecdotes from Seychellois who
lived overseas, as well as one of
my own. Listening to their stories
helped educate me about my own
racial privilege and the dynamics
of power surrounding race.
The following story was told to me
by a Seychellois who studied at a
university in England:
When I arrived in the town, I knew
no one else there. Every afternoon
I would go jogging. Occasionally I
would run into a Swedish woman who
happened to go running around the
same time. One day the woman struck
up a conversation with me. She asked if
I was doing anything for dinner. That
night, while they were walking down
the street together to the restaurant,
a car full of young men drove by. As
they passed, one of them leaned out
the window and yelled, “You whitewoman-stealing
nigger!”
That was the day that I learned that I
was Black.
From a Seychellois named
Benjamin who attended a
university in Montreal:
One of my classes was in a large lecture
hall. One day, I realized that the rest of
the seats in my row always remained
untaken, regardless of which row I
sat in. This puzzled me. And then
suddenly, I realized, “Ahhh, so this is
racism.”
Brigitte was one of my students:
Brigitte briefly attended high
school in Alabama. On her first
day there, she was asked to fill out
a registration form. One of the
questions on the form was: “Check
one: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian,
Native American.” She did not
know what to put. She thought to
herself, “Well, I’m from Africa, so
I’ll put ‘Black.’”
That evening Brigitte told her
mother about the incident and
asked, “What am I?” Her mother
had recently gone through the
same experience in registering at
college. She didn‘t have an answer.
Later on she had to fill out some
other form that asked the same
question. This time she asked
the woman behind the counter,
“Excuse me, but what should I
put here?” The woman looked at
her a moment and said, “You’re …
Hispanic. Put ‘Hispanic’.”
When Brigitte went to take her
driver’s test, she filled out her
application as she had for high
school. The examiner took her
form, read it, looked at Brigitte,
looked at the form, looked at
Brigitte and said in his southern
accent, “You’re not Black!? You’re
White!”
I’ll end with an anecdote that
happened to me at home:
One day when I was in preschool
and my sister was in kindergarten,
a family friend asked us, how many
Black children were in our class.
And we didn’t know – because we
didn’t know what it meant to be
“Black.” So it was explained to us
what it meant to be Black, and the
next day after school we could say
how many Black children were in
our class.
Twenty-five years later, I realized,
for the first time, that that was not
only the day that I learned what it
meant to be Black. It was also the
day that I learned that I was White.
Peter W. Pruyn (“prine”) is a
psychotherapist in Northampton,
Massachusetts. This piece is excerpted from
his forthcoming memoir, Up: One Man’s
Journey to Feminism.
www.awchamburg.org 9