My trip to Cape Town, South Africa three years ago coincided with an annual festival in the gorgeous South Atlantic city whereby citizens of mixed race -- the so-called “colored” community -- parade and party in the streets for several days.
Passersby are likely to have more than one sighting of colorfully uniformed men in straw hats, with banjos, strolling the city, happily strumming and singing.
It is an arresting sight for the uninitiated, but, overall, a pleasant one -- that is, until you find out they call themselves “coons.”
“What?” we American visitors asked. You could tell from our tones of voice and our expressions that each of us felt alarm, outrage, disgust, sadness, shame or all of them in stages.
The men demurred when we talked to them about the history of “coon” and people of color -- which, by the way, is identical in Cape Town -- but there was no sign that they were prepared to give it a second thought once we were gone. They were having fun and, it was quite clear, they were proud to be minstrels.
One might see how, under those circumstances, Cape Town’s whites might think all is well with the coloreds and that derogatory terms are no big deal after all. It is not much of a leap from there to the notion that derogatory thoughts and deeds must be alright too.
Yet, millions and millions of colored and black South Africans are still in the gutters of South Africa’s socio-economic landscape, trying to drag themselves up in a society where most whites can count on a life of wealth and privilege.
We can only rejoice that they feel so good at least once a year. We can only wish they would stop giving off the impression that they don’t mind being called “coon” or find it humorous, endearing or whatever other lousy rationale they use, not unlike our specious embrace of “nigger.”
Blacks in this country have experienced the same dynamic episodically ever since the Jamestown landing. By grinning and bearing it, we have led people who don’t bother to think too long or deep about us in the first place to think that we aren’t really bothered by a particular offense.
NAACP Set to Address Key Issues at This Week's Confab
Members of the nation's oldest civil rights organization are expected to approve a new leader and tackle a long list of issues, such as the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act and upcoming appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court, as it meets this week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
In the antebellum South, many slaveowners were shocked when their chattel took up the Emancipation Proclamation and left the plantation. They thought their nigras were happy there.
In my first job, I worked with an old woman who drove into the capital city every day from her redneck town where, she once announced, “Our colored people are treated good.”
It is, apparently and alas, an international condition.
In Aruba recently, the mother of one of the black guards falsely accused and detained in the disappearance and apparent murder of a white teenager from Georgia, said racial prejudice made it easy for authorities to arrest her son, scare him and sully his name even without a whit of evidence.
Several whites on the idyllic island rebuffed the woman’s claims. There is no racial discrimination in Aruba, they insisted; the black people there are contented.
Now in Mexico, it is not enough that President Vicente Fox has shown his hand with insults against black Americans -- for which he later offered a mealy mouthed, semi-apology -- but the controversy has given new life to Memin Pinguin, a burlesque comic book character with black skin and grotesquely exaggerated features, specifically, the thick lips and bucked eyes of Jim Crow’s coon.
According to officials, the character’s revived popularity is testament to the country’s racial tolerance. Sho’ nuff?
Fox and others in Mexico claim there is no racial discrimination there, that the country doesn’t tolerate it. Indeed, just two years ago, Fox signed a comprehensive new civil rights law that created a National Council to Prevent Discrimination, 300 strong.
But once again, assumption has shut out inquiry. It seems that none of the defenders has bothered to actually check in with the relatively small but tightly knit black Mexican population. When Hugh Dellios of the Chicago Tribune did, he found that they do know the sting of discrimination south of the border. A black cattle farmer who leads a black pride group called Black Mexico told the reporter “they just don’t see us.”
Funny how that sure doesn’t ever seem to stop them from sizing us up though, now does it?
