IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 9 ENGLISH | Page 23

Race, Class and Gender

Neither race nor sex:
Just humanity
Verónica Vega
Writer
Havana Cuba

A

video in YouTube shows a white
Brazilian girl crying before the
camera held by her mother.
When she was asked about the cause of
her grief, she says she wants to "be
black, because so she would be more
beautiful." Apart from well-meaning or
captious comments, it’s obvious the
innocence with which the eyes of a
child can perceive the world. I
remember my infant son —devoid of
attention and affection of his biological
father— telling me once he wanted that
a friend of mine would be his father.
That friend is black.
Some people always tell me that I
cannot fully understand racism because
I am not black, and I cannot feel the
pain suffered by gays because I am
heterosexual. My simple answer is that I
am a female and have personally been
affected by machismo. That experience
led me to observe that this sad
phenomenon occurs because of women
who bear the burden and perpetuate the
machos’ attitudes as a conjugal partner.
They allow that men to use them and to
exhibited them as sexual item, and they
also let their sons being educated under
such rules.
I also appreciate in many homosexual
people certain extremism that does not
indicate the will to be integrated into
society, but rather to be always separate,
in a hypersensitive spotlight, because of
the suffering in the past and in the
present, as if they could not accept more

than eternal claim or need a planet just
for them. This does not help to find
ourselves again in our basic humanity,
which arises before a common tragedy
without any prerogative for any sex,
race or even species.
"Just say man and all the rights are
already said," stated the so-called
"greatest of all Cubans," although their
views on racism have been seriously
questioned in current analysis. Maybe
José Martí, lacking of the firsthand
experience about being discriminated
because of race, simplified in such
apothegm a very complex problem that
has brought and still brings too much
suffering to many people. However, the
deep truth, as revealed by the Brazilian
girl in the video, is overwhelmingly
simple.
She called for being black, and cries
with a grief that overwhelms us,
especially because we know that even
her mother cannot change the color of
her skin to please her, although she tries
to comfort her by assuring she will
allow her to be painted in black. Herein
the audiovisual material became a
double neuralgic point: it mocks a
canon rooted in almost the entire planet
for centuries and demonstrates the
fragile relativity of the values
established through a tradition fraught
with prejudice, violence and abuse, with
a scale of values where the first place is
always economic power and, therefore,
political power (Or vice versa?).

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