Fair & Lovely

• I woke up on Thursday and as I reached for the knife to cut the French bread (every time I have breakfast I can just imagine the priest at my Church in New York reciting “Our Fateher” somberly in that sing-songy voice priests always use “y danos hoy nuestro pan de cada dia…”) I tipped over a tall orange spray can. Thinking it might be some bug spray I turned it over slowly only to discover to my horror that it was a can of skin bleaching spray. I demanded angrily who it belonged to, but my host mom told calmly that it was hers with no hint of guilt or shame. I figured that I shouldn’t lecture a 50 year-old woman, especially since here I am white, so I just ate buttered my bread and grit my teeth.


• Then last night Alphonse came out to me begging me “Maikel, Maikel” and after he listened to “Bad” another five times he told me he wanted to be Michael Jackson. That seems normal enough—children often want to be like famous artists and athletes, that’s why many people want them to be role models—but then he told me that he wanted to become white like Michael Jackson too. I told him Michael Jackson was an evil, crazy man, and that while he used to make great music he should be in jail now. He asked why, but how do I explain internalized racism and child molestation to a nine-year-old boy? Chimaobi, any more suggestions?


• As fucked up as all of that is though, I think the Senegalese would have to do much worse before they could even begin to compete with Dominicans for the title of “Most Self-Hating Group of Black People on the Planet.”