Post Racial
/I took my 95 year old father to the doctor’s this morning. It’s a fairly regular outing these days. The reception people all know him well and greet him familiarly; everyone loves my pa. He’s the archetypal gentleman straight out of a Cartland novel, a remnant from a bygone era where cravats and walking canes with ivory lion heads were de rigueur. He possesses an arsenal of clichéd one liners that women love: “I recognise the face, but I can’t pick the nose.” ; “Keep your chin up, both of them.”
He’s a real charmer with the smile of an angel and the twinkling eyes indicating demonic possession; just the kind of man women adore. He is harmless though and a good hearted man. So it was a quandary when the doctor suggested we visit a geriatric specialist to determine dad’s mental health. I was squirming in my seat wondering how to broach the subject. It was a difficult one and one I’ve encountered before.
“Um, I wonder if I might ask you to send us to a man…?” How to approach the rest of my request…?
“Mmmm? Yes. Unfortunately, so to speak, all the specialists tend to be Indian.”
I was surprised. “Oh,” I muttered. “It’s just that, well he tends to be a bit… well racist…” I ended lamely.
(A bit racist? What the fuck is that?) I realised the absurdity of my statement.
“Yes, I know what you mean. Most of that generation tend to be. But much of the medical profession is well, Indian, Asian or African- especially in the public system.”
Great. The last time we’d visited a doctor we’d gone into the room and sat down.
“Goodmorning. How are you today?” The doctor asked, a rich, Oxford accent; can’t get much more English than that, can you?
Dad turns to look at me. “I don’t understand a word he’s saying.”
Dr An was Asian. So immediately dad assumed that his language would for some reason be totally indecipherable. And don’t get me started on Dr Rawangsavara-Seti from Cape Town. At least he didn’t mention that she was black in a loud voice, as though she’d no idea of the fact.
One of our carers told me of an elderly women he cared for who when they visited department stores, would ask the shop assistant for a mirror and when it was supplied would say, “Now, I want to see a white Australian girl in it. Not some Asian.”
It’s embarrassing, it’s outrageous and it’s sadly so Australian, particularly I know, with the older generation. They may have realised they need to keep racist rants to themselves but like Maggie Smith in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, they mutter horrific opinions just under their breath- but of course due to their deafness, it’s loud enough for all to hear.
I have always admired Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner where although bleak, the world was a multicultural paradigm where speech has been fused with a mixture of words from many languages. The world is becoming an amalgam of humans communicating in new ways and without a dominant language.
Language is a social process and heavily influences and shapes culture. To a great degree it determines one’s very thoughts. Language denotes identity. It is power. Many indigenous societies around the world rue the fact that conquering nations forced them to adopt the conquering language and that, more than anything is blamed for destroying their culture and identity.
Another part of our identity is how we look. I remember an Italian woman I once worked with called Rosemarie. She was beautiful. She was the only woman I knew who’d actually had an “Impulse Ad” happen to her; a man grabbed a bunch of flowers off a stall in Martin Place and raced after her to present it while gushing about her beauty. She had the face of an angel, the smile of a saint and the manner of a gentle doe- everyone loved her. But anyway, the point of the story is that when she was on a visit to Italy, she was standing on the steps of Il Duomo in Florence when an old man she didn’t know, approached her.
“I can tell you from which village your mother came, and from which village your father came,” he said. “Just from looking at you.”
And he was right. Her heritage was there, written all over her face and in her physique. Our ancestry is something that is hardwired into our genes and comes out in the most obvious and sometimes the most obscure ways. We often look like where we came from or certainly look like our family of origin. Often we have an atavistic, timeless face, like that of a child I saw on a plane from Johannesburg. It was the face of an Incan carving from thousands of years ago, but there it was in the features of a five year old going to London.
In this global economy, where war is rife, borders are crumbling and shifting, the population is on the move more than ever before and for myriad reasons. We can no longer look at someone or even talk to someone and determine from where they originally came. Perhaps the only thing in the future we can do to determine upbringing is we can listen for accents as that is at least regional.
Language may change and it does – for all the griping about how bastardised the American English is, one thing is certain; it’s actually more faithful to Old English than modern British English. Language morphs and adopts new words and phraseology. It evolves with each new generation and now, with each new cultural input. That process will probably only accelerate.
While some of it is tragic and the Aryan ideal of “pure blood and pure culture” is dead, it is in most ways a good thing. Nazism is abhorrent. The attempt by Indigenous cultures to maintain their cultural heritage however, is understandable and desirable. But I think in the long run it will inevitably fail.
I believe that the human race is bound for a new beginning; a radical revolution that will one day find us as ‘post racial’ as Eva Wiseman wrote about this morning in the Guardian. Our facial features will be a fascinating mixture of races and heritage, our language a blend and our value systems an evolving paradigm seeking to adapt to the post racials; the new humanity.
Che che for listening. Ciao for now.