‘You’re going where? Are there even any black people there?’ – Black People
Where I’m from, when it comes to travelling to unfamiliar places, I’ve heard this line my entire life. For black Caribbean people, our travelling tendencies (for the most part) align with our history of settled (or forced) migration. We take yearly trips to the U.S, Canada and Western Europe, but try telling a brother you’re on your way to Russia! and, after asking the inevitable, watch the conversation veer towards the dangers of undertaking such an enterprise.
“…Korea? I heard they’re racist, you know”. “I watched this one documentary about Estonia…and Bruv!”
A Simple Equation?
The equation, I’ve found, is pretty simple, and goes a little something like this:
C – B = D
(Country minus Black people equals Danger).
It’s hardly surprising when you think about it. Given the interpretation of ‘our’ history, the popular black narrative is, to a now saturated degree, a story of injustice, a story intimately shaped and defined by our vulnerability in spaces dominated by white people.
And as far as stories go, haven’t we heard them all? Remove the history of slavery, apartheid, and more recently, police brutality, and still we’re left with enough anecdotes to fill a small library. An uncle of mine went to live in Singapore as a graduate and was unable to find accommodation owing to his blackness. Another uncle, working in Germany back in the ’80s, tells a story of a black man getting his head decapitated for daring to take what was considered a ‘German’s job’. And my aunty, in what I saw as an effort to warn my brother off going to live in the country, claimed that black people in Dubai (good Christian ones, I imagine) were getting brutally murdered (overzealous jihadis, I imagine) for the sin of holding hands.
Whilst these stories belong on the front pages of the Daily Mail, it’s not the actual truth of them that matter here. It’s that they exist and have gained enough traction for us to conclude that countries lacking in black people are inevitably racist and that we are in significant danger because of it.
Angst and Reassurance
A couple of years ago I considered booking a flight to Hungary, admittedly knowing very little about the country. The only thing I felt certain of was that it’d be made up of mostly white Eastern European people who would have nothing better to do than objectify and denigrate my black skin. I wasn’t scared per se, but I’d be a liar to say I had not considered to what degree I’d be stared at, looked down upon and treated differently.
With these feelings in mind, I needed to do some research.
As I had no black family or friends who had visited the country, I decided to consult YouTube (should have been my first port of call, tbf), and stumbled upon a host of videos made by black people who had visited or lived in the country.
Though these videos offered reassurance, I found myself waiting for the dreaded ‘but’. And once it came…it came! You know how it goes – one negative, racist report is often enough to outweigh a thousand friendly reviews. But fuck it, I thought insensibly, apart from my head, what did I have to lose? Booking Confirmed.
Junior’s Theory
And glad I did. Thankfully none of my worst fears materialised (truth be told, my actual worst fears only extended to strange looks and bad vibes. Oh, the privileged millennial in me! Imagine if these fears actually did materalise… with my level of resilience I’d need a weeks therapy and spa break to recover).
What I actually experienced in the Hungarian people was a complete disregard for my presence. No special address seemed to be paid to my blackness which, to be honest, I wasn’t sure how to take. People were neither overly welcoming nor dismissively hostile.
My brother has a theory. That countries with a lack of historical integration encounter and manage race in a ‘less racist’ way than those which are highly diverse. This is to say that countries such as Hungary or Lithuania have undergone less racialisation than in countries such as Brazil or the U.S, primarily for the fact that they haven’t had to.
We all learn racism, become conscientious of it (hopefully) and try to unlearn it (hopefully). But not all racisms are the same. What the British were told about the West and East Indian community’s in the 40s, 50s and 60s would have been far different from what the Finnish were told, if indeed they were told anything at all. My brothers point is that because these countries have had to encounter less difference, less effort has been expended on their part to accommodate or discriminate.
Go anyway
My experiences are in no way instructive here. I am of course conscious that a weekend’s experience cannot give a fair representation of a country or it’s respective culture. This is not a promotion to seek out spaces with few black people. Nor is it a suggestion that going to Iceland as a black man will somehow be a nirvana. Yet I can’t help but think that the ways we subconsciously restrict ourselves does our life experience an injustice. If part of travelling is about learning and exploration, then surely the concerns of whether people from your background will be present should not be a/the determining factor.
Travelling to – what have always been to me – unconventional countries, has taught me that many of the implicit suggestions beneath Are There Any Black People There? simply aren’t true. There are black people everywhere, and any fears of racism that we have cannot be determined solely by their relative presence, or relative absence.
Margin Page
Margins Page is a play on its very words. Stories of black people in Britain, both past and present, have often been relegated to the margins of the British canon. This platform attempts to reconfigure this position, serving as a page to help develop, curate and promote black British literature.
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