always prescient

ginmar always has a silver tongue. she writes like i dream i could - inspired, endless, fascinating. today she posted a running commentary that alluded both to the race relations issue of the NOLA disaster and the race-religion issue of the iraq war (which, the BBC reports, the US ambassador to iraq commented informally, may be soon expanded into syria). you should read it.

An Iranian woman hugged me at work the other day. It came out of nowhere; we were just chatting, because I'd mistaken her accent for Iraqi, and she was startled when my reponse was wistful: "Really? You're from Iran?" [...] She'd evidently been expecting a different response. Perhaps it was one she'd learned to dread. After all, Iran is in the Axis of evil, isn't it? So doesn't that make Iranians evil, too?

[snip]

So this Iranian lady just up and hugged me after a few minutes. It was scary how much we agreed upon, this liberal lady from a supposedly evil country and this liberal bitch from a democracy. We talked about Persian rugs and cats, about absent friends, about terror and death and decency. I showed her the bracelet on my arm, the gift of a good man now dead, with the first verse of the Koran carved on it in Arabic. Her lips moved when she read it and her eyes got huge. That's when she hugged me.

It's easy to look at this, and think that one has done some good above the ordinary. But I don't think that being decent is anything but compulsory. She reminded me, oddly enough, of an island in the Caribbean called Martinique.

Martinique is 90% black, and yet somehow the richest people in the country are white. They're called bekes and we had an illuminating chat with one of them one day on his plantation. He disparaged black workers who wanted more than a dollar a day to work in hundred-degree heat on his sugar plantation. Their hope, one got the feeling, was too uppity for him - and expensive.

This was the trip with the Forty-Year-Old Republican Virgin. We were all white, and our host families were all black. They were wonderful. I have to wonder if that wonderful comes with being powerless. Antoinette, the lady I lived with, talked about the white managers in the bank and then praised me for being....different. She was astonished when I talked about black friends, black room mates, black boyfriends.

We went to the beach and observed something queasy: the blacks and whites did not mingle, except for us. [...] It would have been too easy to pat ourselves on the back. I think it's necessary to not do precisely that.

this isn't but a part of her essay. please take a moment to read it.