Nijitsu - Director

With only a week left until the 2008 Presidential Elections, they’ve been on my mind a lot lately. As a liberal youth, my vote went straight to Barack Obama, the young black political phenom from Chicago. Throughout the electoral campaign, people have criticized Obama for being emotionally inaccessible to the ‘Joe Six Packs’ of America. Instead, these people believe that a presidential candidate should be someone who you’d like to sit down with and have a couple of beers with on your porch or someone who you’d be comfortable inviting over for family dinner. Disturbingly, many Americans probably have never had a black person over for dinner. It is not necessarily racism, but a harsh cultural divide between differing ethnicities in our country.

Sitting in the courtyard at my Senegalese friend Vince’s house, drinking tea and speaking in both French and Wolof, I was completely comfortable and relaxed. I drank my shot-glass sized cup of tea quickly in short sips, slurping each time as I had been taught during orientation and burning my tongue in the process. I looked around me and it was just me and maybe nine other guys—all of whom were black. I quickly came to realize that had I been in a similar situation—at least on the surface—in the United States, I would have felt very different.

I honestly can’t think of a time in the US when it was just me and a group of black people except for maybe some time spent with Randy’s family and his family friends. To be among a group of young black guys who read copies of Vibe magazine imported from the US and love basketball and hip-hop and to have nothing in between us is something I’ve never experienced in the past. These guys are my best guy friends here and without forcing anything, we get along really well. In the United States, where blacks are the minority, a situation where I’d be with only black people is much more unlikely due to sheer numbers, but also I just don’t think I’d naturally find myself in such a situation.

I’m not sure if I will have more black friends when I get back to the US, but it’s made the cultural divide in my life between blacks and whites much more evident.