Final Project Part II - A Different Perspective on Race

One of the more fascinating aspects of visiting Latvia is observing how my relatives and people there, in general, view race. They have quite a different perspective than we do. The first thing my family and I notice – right when you get off the plane – is the degree to which everyone looks the same. There isn’t a black, Asian, or Latino face in sight except in the more touristy areas in the heart of the capital city, Riga. Everybody is lily white.

The same for the news media, television, and magazines – white people only. Moreover, white in the same way: fair-haired, blue-eyed, with dainty features and the little Latvian piggy nose (much like mine, my mum’s and my brother’s, and ALL of our Latvian friends). Even though my dad is of English/Scottish ancestry he’s rather dark and has an enormous bumpy triangular nose. He really sticks out (funny cause he would never stick out in the U.S.) and the one time he came with us people kept asking if he was Arab (most often Lebanese for some reason) – they just can’t place him.

This sameness leaves you with a very strange feeling – I’ve laughed about it with my brother and my mum more than once. And it actually starts to get to you after a while. It’s the same sort of feeling I get when I go skiing – which I took up recently. Everyone at a Vermont ski lodge is white – no exceptions – and seems very wealthy (except me and my girlfriend).

This bothers me a great deal when I go. I feel creepy, like I’m doing something exclusionary and I don’t like to eat or hang out in the base lodge for long because of it (also cause it’s expensive so I bring my own lunch). Something black people were banned from doing until recently. I justify my guilt by thinking African-Americans probably weren’t banned outright and there absence is likely due more to racism in general: ghetto-ization made it such that they didn’t live in ski-states and didn’t have the excess (lots of! – why I only go a few times a winter) income to buy equipment and lift tickets.

But to get back to Latvia – you really do feel like you’re in a weirdo Twilight Zone alternate universe. I’ve never thought about how diverse the place I live in really is. But being in a country where the opposite is true brings this home in a way I wouldn’t have the opportunity to experience otherwise.

I actually do live in an extremely diverse working class neighborhood – relatively speaking, anyway. I’m writing this on my front porch, for example, and I can currently hear Portugese being spoken down below me in the street (moms yelling at their kids on scooters), plus someone singing Spanish and playing the guitar. There’s also quite a few Chinese and Indian families – I’d say my neighborhood is about half or a little under 50% white (mainly holdovers from the Irish families who dominated the area until 30 or so years ago).

I feel most at home in a place like this, perhaps because the neighborhood where I grew up is more or less the same way. And so the sense of sameness in Latvia is quite palpable to me – oppressive even. I feel relieved when I come back to Logan and see the customs line full of people from every corner of the Globe – mainly Latino and Caribbean families. And I feel momentarily proud to live in a place that for all its problems is comparatively fair and just and has enough good opportunities that people are clamoring and risking their lives to get in. Of course, exploitative U.S. dominance of the economies of North and South America has created a situation in which America is the best place to live (in terms of material wealth).

One night last year, after leaving my aunt’s house, I was tooling around a little village (a”city” by their standards) called Jelgava in our rental car. When I’m not visiting family, which is pretty much from the moment I get up until (their) bedtime, or friends from the U.S. that have gone back permanently, I go out and talk to anyone I can get my hands on. This is quite easy because Latvians are extremely friendly and open in a charming naïve kind of way.

They would never assume a stranger would mean them any harm - as I would if randomly approached in the U.S. Plus they feel extremely proud to see that a young person from the States speaks their language and cares about them because they have a pretty big chip on their shoulders about having lived in a backwards prison-state for so long. They’re embarrassed by this and deathly afraid of being thought of as primitive, so they love to see someone take an interest. Often I’ll wind up staying in a bar or getting invited back to someone’s house where I’ll drink and talk (the national past time – the slang word for endless bull sessions is “tuseties”) well into the next morning. This drives my mother nuts, but what can you do? – I’m only there for so long.

Anyways, I was in Jelgava cause I’d never seen it, but also, in part, to dip my hand in the Lielupe River. I have a sentimental thing for wanting to have touched each of Latvia’s 6 main rivers, whose lengths, widths, and contributions to 1930’s trading were drilled into our heads during Geography class back in Latvian school. So I go do the river thing and I’m creeping through the empty, dark back streets of town looking at old buildings, when I see two drunk girls stumbling my way. I roll down my window and strike up a conversation and the next thing you know we’re in the local bar dinking it up.

But it’s closing so they convince me to take them to the capital city Riga about an hour a way. Even though the aunt we were staying with at the time is in the opposite direction, I agreed cause the girls were very funny and chatty and using a lot of slang. I figured the drive would give me some time to catch up on the latest idioms – which I love cause the Latvian we speak at home is pretty stagnant in this way.

In fact, sometimes people will tease me and say I talk like someone from the 1940’s. So I like to get current. Mainly this means learning the latest in Russian swear words – Latvian having practically none. One of the biggest Latvians insults is “ej bekot” or “go mushrooming” (an extremely popular activity – it’s perfectly acceptable to call out from work when it’s Senu laiks or “mushrooming season”. When you need to get angry most people will do it in Russian (my mom in English).

Anyways, the girls had actually hardly been to Riga (pretty typical for country folk) and were thrilled at the prospect of going. So to impress them, I arranged to meet up with some friends at an ultra-trendy underground nightclub. I’ve sort of been taken in by this group of avante-guard artist types in Riga (we met up one night the previous summer and found we shared the same tastes in Latvian literature – particularly this author who is sort of the Latvian Kerouac) and they’ve showed me all the cool-guy places to go.

We had quite a good little group going in Riga and we were getting rowdy drinking Absinthe (very popular) when the two country girls froze. Their eyes bugging out, they became fixated on something behind me. Curious, I turned to see a group of young black men walk through the bar and thinking nothing of it (it was high tourist season) I kept talking. But the girls were so antsy they couldn’t concentrate on the conversation anymore.

Finally, the braver, more talkative one of the pair says – “listen, we’re very sorry. And I’m sure you’ll think we’re being awfully silly. But you get to live in America where they have everything. We, on the other hand, have never seen a black person in our lives. You’ll have to excuse us…” And with that they jumped up and went to track down the black guys. I watched them out of the corner of my eye to see what they’d do and at first they kind of milled around behind the poor black men giggling and staring.

Finally they worked up the nerve to start a conversation. Which was very funny cause, while they talked, the girls would use every opportunity to get touchy-feely – punctuating a sentence or a laugh with a tap on the one the men’s elbows or shoulders. You could tell they just wanted desperately to see what black skin looked and felt like up close. My artiste friends, meanwhile, tried to play the whole thing off cool – like they were so cosmopolitan they had been there, done that. But their eyes told a different story – they kept staring at the group of black men when they thought I wasn’t looking.

Later on I talked to the black guys just to see what their story was (Jamaican students studying in England who’d come to celebrate finishing exams) and as we chatted, they were besieged by Latvian girls flirting and asking them to dance. The guys were pretty freaked out by the whole thing but also amused by their instant popularity.

After this incident, I became curious about Latvian’s take on black people and would try to work the subject in when I went out on my nightly rounds. Although I can’t say the people I met represent all Latvians’ take on race, by any means, I was refreshed to find that no one had any negative associations (or any associations for that matter) with black people whatsoever.

Not even the “good” stereotypes like black people are good dancers, or natural musicians and athletes. Most people were simply fascinated by them, wanted to know everything I could tell them, and seemed somewhat jealous that I lived in a place where it was common to see African-Americans everywhere.

Some Latvians are vaguely aware of American slavery, as it was one of the only things you’d learn about the greedy capitalist U.S. pigs in the old Soviet school system. But these people seemed to almost identify with the position of African-Americans as 2nd class citizens – viewing their own mistreatment by Soviet Russians as analogous – just another big empire beating up on the little guy.

When I was in the ultra-rural farm country where another aunt lives, I met a young Latvian soldier who said his unit in Iraq felt closer to black Americans than the white U.S. soldiers. Not only did the black soldiers understand proper cooking (Latvians, who have a hearty farm-food based diet are convinced American cuisine is loaded with dangerous chemicals and poisonous – which is why I gain 10 pounds through my aunts force-feeding when I visit), he said he and his men felt like they were in a similar position to the black soldiers and would discuss this with them frequently.

Similar in that they were both fighting someone else’s war which they didn’t agree with and would bring them no benefit. Latvia’s involvement in Iraq, as small as it is, is extremely unpopular with average person. No one can understand why the government’s decided to send their soldiers to a country no one knew existed before the U.S. invasion.

Another interesting take on African-Americans can be found among those Latvians who’ve recently immigrated to the U.S. Since the 1990’s there has been another wave, although they don’t interact with American-Latvians as much as you’d think.

Most live in the same neighborhoods as recent Russian immigrants to the States and tend to feel more at home there. For the first time their coming into contact and living with African-Americans as neighbors. While they’re view of black people is more biased than the neutral ignorance of their European cousins, it is still relatively benign.

For men, especially, black women are seen as eminently sexually desirable above all other peoples. The ultimate sign that you’ve “arrived” or made it in this country (learned the language and acquired some kind of job) is getting a black wife or girlfriend. I’ve seen quite a few mixed marriages lately. It works sort of along the same lines as white male’s “fetish” for the mysterious Asian woman who know how to “please her man” like no other – as seen in the video we watched in class last week.

Maybe he’s not the best example because he’s kind of a criminal (part of a little gang that travels the country returning discounted Banana Republic clothes to other locations at full price) but a friend of mine from New York has a recently arrived cousin who explained the whole thing to me. We were hanging out in his (the cousin’s) apartment in Brooklyn and he was drooling over some black girls in a music video.

I asked his about his take on black women and he said that he’d never forget his first night in America and how he couldn’t keep his eyes off the gorgeous black “keninienes” (“Queens”) as drove down Flatbush Avenue (he pronounces it Flyetbyush”). Black women he explained were the most beautiful to him because they were so different – he couldn’t have been more bored with the angular straight-haired blondes back at home. He’s currently trying to convince his girlfriend, who’s have black half Latino, to get married – but she won’t until he gets am honest job.

These experiences with observing non-Americans’ takes on race are especially fascinating to me because these particular Europeans have such a different historical position and background than we do. None of them had ever participated in a society where social identity was constructed on race. They come from a country cut off completely from the social upheavals (segregation, Civil Rights, the feminist movement, the rise of consumer media and pop culture) of the second half of the 20th century.

As such, they have not inherited many of the stereotypes that drive the social dynamic of much of the developed world. But that doesn’t mean they are not keenly aware of race. In the absence of our myths, they’ve developed their own. It is as impossible for them to not see skin color first, when encountering a stranger, as it is for me. How their attitudes on race will have shifted in the next twenties years will be a good measure of how equitable their newly developing free society has become. And as they come increasingly under the influence of U.S. culture, values, and business culture – their future attitudes may be a good measure of our own country’s social progress.