It was in the fall of 1989 and I was living in New York City. Back then I felt New York was unsafe and that a violent crime could happen anywhere in the city at any given moment. I remember someone had told me a homeless person shot a woman who refused to give him some money and I think it was on the news. During that year it was common to be harassed on the streets by homeless people and I was fearful of them.
My girlfriend and I lived on 116th and Amsterdam, which like many neighborhoods in Manhattan back then, wasn’t the safest, so we also lived with a certain level of fear. My girlfriend was a graduate student in Columbia University and I worked part-time for their sociology department as an administrative assistant. I was spending some months in New York city, wondering what to do with my life, whether I should finish my undergraduate studies there or return to Madison, Wisconsin, where I had been a student for two years.
So one night my girlfriend and I were in Midtown somewhere, on our way back home, and as we walked, a homeless man got on our way and asked us for money. He blocked our path so we stepped to one side to avoid him but he wouldn’t let us get by him. We then quickly darted to his other side but he blocked us again. I started to become desperate and my fear escalated thinking he might be carrying a concealed weapon. I hurried across the street walking as fast as I could pulling my girlfriend behind me by the hand but the man persistently stayed right in front of us, blocking our path. I became very frightened. Just as I started to feel completely powerless, and that this situation would inevitably become a tragedy, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, an old man dashed between the homeless man and us, saying something out loud that I don’t remember right now, but this action saved us. The homeless man left and we were able to go home unharmed.
Photo by V O Y T A H on Pexels.com
What the old man did was a surprise to me and whenever I have thought of what happened that day I realize the old man purposely tried to help us when he saw we were in despair. Obviously maybe nothing would have happened to us because perhaps the homeless man was just a harmless bully. But whatever the outcome would have been, it is clear that a small force can divert a much larger force, like a small tap in the right place on a man’s foot can cause him to trip and fall.
Copyright © 2012 Jorge Luis Carbajosa
El descampado 
Black and White: Everything’s Relative
August 9, 2012I learnt at an early age that everything is relative when it comes to physical features and appearance.
During my early childhood I lived in Spain and Brazil. Over there I was considered “rubio” and “louro” which both words mean blonde in Spanish and Portuguese respectively, but they also mean light skinned or fair.
When I was nine, my family moved to Denmark and I remember being told that I was not blonde. The children who accused me of this, and whom I hopelessly argued against, were of course blonde and blue eyed, like most Danes. My light brown hair, which had so often identified me as blonde, was now all of a sudden very dark and my greenish-brown Mediterranean eyes did not help my cause either.
Later on as a grown man, when I married a woman from Haiti, I remember she would sometimes tell me that there are white people in her country. But when I visited Haiti, I noticed that the people my wife was referring to as white, were what in the U.S. and Europe people would always call black. They were basically light skinned black people. No one in Europe or in the U.S. would dare call these “white” people white.
In fact, the nick name of one of my brother-in-laws is “blanc,” which means white in French, and this is because he is considered light-skinned, but as you can probably guess, he is very dark skinned, and very African looking to the lay person. It appears these people are referred to as white by my wife and others in Haiti because they can see they are lighter skinned, or that they have some European features which are uncommon to them. It seems that the word “white” in Haiti, has a similar meaning to the word “black” in the U.S. where everything that is not 100% white could be referred to as black.
What is also interesting is that some of those people my wife referred to as white, were so dark skinned that even in Latin America or in the Spanish world, they would not be called mulatos, a word that is commonly used in Spanish but is considered a pejorative by some people in the English speaking world, which means someone who is half-white and half-black, like our president, Mr. Barack Obama, and kind of like my children.
So in conclusion, it is to one’s advantage that everything is relative and that we don’t have to live inside labels that are true in one place but false in the next.
Copyright © 2012 By Jorge L. Carbajosa
Tags: black, caribbean, dark skinned, Haiti, legally black, light skinned, louro, mulato, race labels, rubio, white
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