Negotiating Privilege

• The day at the market and other recent experiences with my host family have brought up what in my opinion is the most difficult aspect of traveling (yes worse than the insects, weather, infections, homesickness, etc.) which is negotiating privilege. I don’t want to sound like I am sitting here complaining about why these “darkies” must be here being so damn poor and interrupting my extended “Spring Break” in Senegal. I realize that the Senegalese are poor because we in the United States are rich. The “developed” nations have “developed” at the expense of the “developing” or “underdeveloped” nations. In simple terms, we are rich cause we stole their shit. I realize that I pay the whitey price of getting “harassed” by beggars and vendors in order to get the whitey benefits of having enough money to be able to come all the way over here and chill. Still even with that theoretical understand it is still no easier to negotiate the reality. For example, I knew that it was only a matter of time before people I met starting asking me to lend them money. I think it is hard to have a consistent policy to always lend the money or to never lend the money; I take a case-by-case approach to it. So when my French teacher asked me for US$60 I had to tell give him a flat no (shit, even in New York, I really got to love you before I lend you $60) but when my host mother came to me for $6 for cooking oil I gave it to her (shit I was hungry). But it is never easy. Last week, one of my host sister asked for $10 (in general I try to think of any loan as a gift, and don’t expect repayment, so I only give away amounts that won’t “hurt” me) and I gave it to her, but then two hours later the other one came asking for the same amount and I had to tell her no (shit, tampoco abusen).
• The other problem is that not all whiteys are created equal. While I do have more money than the vast majority of Senegalese I don’t have the same amount of money as many other tourists who come to Senegal. That in itself is not a problem except that many folks here—and to their credit, in many other poor countries also—don’t understand that not all whiteys are the same. For example, my French teacher—probably in an attempt to get me to follow the example—told me how a English volunteer paid $50 a day to live downtown and invited him to live with him during his stay in Senegal, and later sent him a used laptop and money for a new scooter. Now this guy also owns condos in New York and London while I own what? my laptop? Yeah. I remember reading than in colonial Haiti there was a distinction between the “grand blancs” or Great Whites and the “petit blancs” or Small Whites, I think I am going to have to create my own racial category here as a “tres petit blanc.”