Strange Bodies
We are all racist. This is often denied, but it is true that the human brain has an expert facility in evaluating situations, objects and especially people swiftly and effectively. To do this it focuses on a few key features. For humans, one of the key features is skin colour, so our brain uses that to put people into broad categories before it goes on to look at other aspects of their appearance. In this way we can quickly distinguish people we know from strangers, and also group new people we encounter into broad categories, with associated expectations or prejudices. This happens whether we like it or not, which is why I say we are all racist. We can struggle against this automatic reaction, but not always successfully.
​
My wife and I lived in Ghana for a year, working as volunteers with a group of lost-cost private schools. We lived in an area to the west of Accra where we were the only white people for many miles, and we worked in an office with all-black staff. There were a lot of young men in the office, and we soon discovered that it was very hard for us to tell them apart. Our brains were putting them all into the category of ‘young black men’ and then failing to focus effectively on their secondary distinguishing features.
​
I had an experience of the same thing working in the opposite direction. The first time I was introduced to our next door neighbour, Elizabeth, she thought I was James, whom she had met earlier. James is shorter than me and has a lot of dark hair, whereas my hair is very sparse and grey. However, Elizabeth had put us both into the category of ‘old white guys’ and therefore got us confused.
​
As time went on our brains adapted to the new environment and we got a lot better at telling the young men at the office from one another. Our brains obviously trained themselves to ignore skin colour and focus on other characteristics (height, hair style, shape of the face etc.) which were more useful. Black became the norm for skin colour.
​
At weekends we often went to the nearby beach at Kokrobitey. ‘Nearby’ was relative in this case, as it was only near in terms of miles, not in effort to get there. We had to walk for half an hour down the dirt road which led up to our flat and along to the junction with the main coast road. There we picked up a ‘tro-tro’, a beat-up local minibus, which took us a few miles up the road to the junction with the road to Kokrobitey. Next we piled into a shared taxi with three other people, which took us on a jolting ride on a dirt road to Kokrobitey village. From there we walked a few hundred yards down to the actual beach.
​
Kokrobitey beach is a multi-use area. It has fishing boats drawn up and fishermen mending nets. It has locals playing football and stalls selling handbags, snacks, souvenirs and secondhand clothes. But the beach is also popular with young Europeans who are volunteering in schools and hospitals around Accra, and who sun themselves on the sand in bikinis and trunks.
The sight of all this white skin came as a shock every time we turned up, and it always took a little while to get used to it. Black was the norm, so who were these weird people with the strange bodies? Then we would realise that our skin was like that too, and we were seeing them as the locals saw us. For a fleeting moment we could grasp how strange we must be to all those amongst whom we lived and worked.
​
As the great Scots poet Rabbie Burns said: “O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.”
​
(The background painting is 'Beach Boys', in acrylic, based on boys playing in the surf on Kokrobitey beach, Ghana)
​