Fil de pensées

Some thoughts and observations. I suppose all of this is rather touchy and please know I don't mean to offend anyone.

On Thursday, I met up with a couple of British women who live in Martinique and do some teaching part-time here. Both of them have similar stories -- met their French husbands in France and subsequently moved to Martinique, where they've lived for 20+ years and raised kids and such.

One of the women told me that awhile ago, she'd called an agency in the métropole (what people here call the mainland of France) to inquire about a job. After so many years in Martinique, her French is obviously quite good, but the person on the phone could still tell she had an accent. When she called back again and revealed she was from Martinique, the woman on the phone, assuming her accent was Martiniquais, suddenly told her there was no longer a position available. Without even seeing her face.

The population of Martinique is somewhere between 90 and 95 percent black, descended from the African slaves that were brought here to work on the sugar plantations in the heyday of colonization. There's a small minority of French people from the métropole who've come here to work, and there's also a population of white French people known as the béké, who're descendants of the original colonizers -- the plantation owners and such. To this day, the béké still control a huge percentage of the island's economy. They own most of the businesses and most of the island's wealth. The relationship between the béké and the rest of Martinique continues to be a source of conflict, but I don't think I know enough at this point to make an unbiased assessment of the situation.

The woman's story made me think of my last night in Miami just a few short weeks ago, when I went down to the bar of my hotel to watch the opening game of the World Series. There, I met a French guy, from Paris, who was in Miami on business. Somewhere over the course of our long-winded conversation, he basically admitted to me that there's an unspoken hierarchy in France, that people unwittingly judge you based on how long your family's French lineage is. He told me that even he himself is guilty of it: when he hires people for his business, he's conscious of the fact that he looks differently upon non-white candidates, and that he perceives them to be less French, even if they'd lived their whole lives in the country. And he himself has Arab origins.

It also made me think of the time one of my study-abroad classmates, an Asian girl, literally got kicked to the ground for standing up for herself against a group of guys on the streets of Bordeaux. Some Arab men across the way had started to harass her, shouting "Ching ching chong" when they saw she was Asian. "Qu'est-ce que c'est, ching ching chong?" she fired back. I'm not sure how it escalated, but somehow a kick in the leg ensued, and the blow was bad enough that she was limping around school for a few days. I suppose you could argue that it wasn't the smartest thing for a tiny Asian girl to provoke a group of guys at night like that (she was with a group, though, thankfully), but still, that kind of blatant racism was shocking to me at the time.

I also thought back to when I first arrived in France in January of last year, and the Obama inauguration was all over the news there. I remember my host mom saying to me one night that she didn't think Obama was a real American, because one of his parents wasn't American. I remember being surprised but keeping my mouth shut. By that rationale, I'm not really an American, either, because my dad wasn't born in the US. And neither would be about 75% of my friends and acquaintances.

Like you said before, Alice, it's great to be American. I know racism exists there, too, but the fact that we're a country of immigrants makes a difference in how we perceive diversity, I think. That we're a "melting pot" is part of our national identity.

The women also talked about their citizenship statues -- one of them was able to get dual citizenship, and the other was not. "So are you French now?" I asked her. She was like, "God, no! I wouldn't give that up!" Meaning, of course, her British citizenship. And I had to laugh. I know I've been extremely pessimistic about my country in the past, and still am, but all things considered, I definitely don't think I want to stop being an American...