Best Be Careful about being Colorful

By Nicholas Asheshov —

Like the rest of us I have been coming across the phrase “woman of color” describing, well, I’m not sure any more what I am supposed to call them. Black was replaced a couple of decades ago by African American. But this one is a Brazilian journalist in Angola writing in an English-language Washington political publication. I have not seen or heard “man of color” but maybe that’s because here in Urubamba we don’t get around much. We do get tourists of color from time to time even with their children of color.

Come on! I’m not saying there is not a problem to be faced, even if the solution is in this case to my ear, inelegant, nudging into sanctimonious.

“Woman of color” may not last long but the changes in nomenclature that have taken place in my lifetime have usually been to the good and the motives invariably well-meaning if not always successful.

In England in the 1950s, not long after the war, snotty schoolboys like me were brought up to refer to foreigners by words, terms that were soon, thank goodness, to become unpardonable. Today I cannot bring myself even to type them out. Take the more or less harmless ‘Frog,’ The English are fond of the French these days and the bowler-hatted, umbrella-carrying “Major Thompson” was a pleasant caricature of les anglais. But my daughter, who has lived in France for years, would be upset, and rightly so, were I to use the word casually. We used to call the Germans ‘Huns’ and ‘Boschs’ during and after the war but thanks to time, my children, my nephews, I no longer consider the Germans as anything but decent, hardworking etc. Not to change the subject, in those days Jews had unpardonable epithets. But today you still cannot easily say “She is a Jew”: you have to say “She is Jewish.” Not sure why, but there it is. Dickens and Trollope had no problem in characterising Jews in a way that is unacceptable, even illegal today.

We used, in those thankfully long ago days, to call gays ‘queers’ or ‘homos.’ The change to gay has been a huge success, a real change in attitude and knowledge to the huge benefit of gays, to their friends and relations. Above all, it has been a massive lesson to the rest of us, people like me, puncturing gross ignorance, arrogance and bullying unkindness.

Even more people have been loosened, often freed, to the benefit of everyone, not a single exception, by the new tide, still rising as it needs to, in the prospects for women. What a change! In the 1970s there was a pathetically low number of women at Oxbridge, one in ten. A handful only of women were MPs. The only women in Whitehall were typists. Shame, shame. Today I believe Oxbridge is more or less fifty/fifty to everyone’s benefit. There are still thick glass ceilings but they are becoming thinner and smaller. The coming generation, bless them, will get rid of them even in Lima and elsewhere in South America where there is still a ways to go.

Back to color. I lived in Johannesburg for a time in the sixties. Park benches were labelled “Whites Only” or Blacks Only.” In Afrikaans, too: ‘Nur Schwarz’ or ‘Nur Blanke.’ Colored was a precise term to cover Malays and Hindus: you will remember Ghandi spent several years in South Africa, decoarated as a stretcher-bearer during the Boer War. Mixed race meant some combination of Black and White but it meant Black and you were not allowed to forget it. I remember doing a story for the AP about how immigration officials had refused entry to a Greek who had spent the weeks aboard ship from the Piraeus soaking up the tropic sun. The immigration people at Durban labelled him Black and would not let him land. My “The Case Of The Sun-tanned Settler” was reprinted a thousand times worldwide. Japanese, ‘Japs’ as they were called by the Jo’burg Afrikaaners and English, many of whom had fought against them in the War, were officially labelled “Honorary Whites.” This meant they could go to white restaurants, stay in white hotels where they would be served by black waiters. By the time I was there, Nelson Mandela had been locked onto Robbin Island for what was to be 27 years as a communist, small ‘c’ like thief, murderer. The Brit, Canadian, Australian, American governments paid lip service to modest disapproval of the white anti-Communist South Africa government. Pathetic.

It was the Americans, with the Civil Rights, who made, Mandela aside, big efforts despite white supremacists and Trump. In England, the dishonest Mrs May set up a throw-them-back system under which Caribbeans ‘of color’ were sent back to Barbados, Jamaica after a lifetime in England. Similar to the Dreamers in the United States. The English, today under the sick humbug B. Johnson, are as we speak throwing up  barriers to keep foreigners of color out. This is being called a “points system.’ If you are a medic or nurse of color, OK, send them to Leeds, or Birmingham. If you are a refugee of color, put her straight back on the boat to France, let the Europeans deal with it.

But that’s the Tory government, traditionally twisted, back-hoeing us out of Europe while four million English children in the north —white, black, khaki— don’t get breakfast and are below the United Nations poverty line.
But England is, despite today’s Whitehall bullies, a much kinder place than it was in the 1950s when expensively-educated louts like me felt entitled, indeed bounden, to speak depreciatingly of foreigners, or northerners, including men and women of color.

Class superiority and inferiority is a big part of it in Peru, as well as in Europe and North America. I used to think calling everyone ‘tu’ was democratic. Rubbish, of course. Today, thanks to following, at long last, the example of my wife, who is from a modest family in a modest jungle clearing in Central America, today I am learning to call anyone over the age of three ‘Usted’, unless they are friends who will rightly call me ‘tu.’ A bus driver, the lady serving my coffee, a young policeman, the nightwatchman are Usted, no exceptions. ‘Tu’ is at best discourteous, ignorant and worse. You cannot, will not, ever go wrong with Usted.

Here is a Russian Christmas joke with a suitable touch of seasonable color.
Ivan and Natasha, this is back in the Soviet days, are crossing Red Square. Natasha says to Ivan, “It is snowing.”
Ivan holds out his hand and says, “But darling, this is rain!”
“Don’t be a twerp,” Natasha says, “This is Snow!”
Ivan says, “Aha, what luck. Here comes Rudi, the Party’s top meteorologist. Comrade Rudi, is this snow or is it rain, please?”
Rudi growls, “It is rain, you dolt,” and walks on.
Ivan smirks as they walk on.
Natasha says, “I still say it’s Snow!”
Exasperated, Ivan stops, puts his hands on Natasha’s shoulders and says:
Rudolph the red knows rain, dear!”

I know I am supposed to say “Happy Holidays” but, come on! “Happy New Year and meanwhile Merry Christmas.