A Question of Race (1)

While checking out CNN I saw a headline that read: "Actress shot dead outside New York bar". Thinking that it was going to be a famous star, or perhaps a "once upon a time" famous personality I clicked the link. The actress was a girl named Nicole duFresne, she was not a Hollywood star, but an actress/writer making her way through the NYC theater scene.

Only 28 years and shot dead in NYC, just outside a bar. She was with her fiancé and a couple. One of those crimes that show the stupidity of it all. A life worth a few bucks that the robbers/murders got, if at all.

I tried to re-create the moment Nicole, her fiancé and the other couple were leaving the bar; the robbers approaching them, the brief conversation demanding all their money, and the even briefer shooting. The robbers will then leave by foot, running like hell, hiding their guns in heavy coats with deep pockets while Nicole duFresne struggle to breath for the last time in this planet.

As she lied on the concrete, her fiancé would have taken her in his arms, trying to hold her head from falling backwards, yelling to please call 911 while at the same huging her close to his chest.

Trying to hold her hand still warm, he would have said to her a couple times "everything is gona be all right, all right" but seeing her eyes close and her chest flat, not taking any air, not breathing, he would have realized that things were not going to be all right. He would have picked her up in his arms, her blonde hair hanging in the air, blood stained, he would have tried hiring the closest cab on the street to go to the hospital. Everything happening so fast, all so confuse, yet so clear.

While re-creating that scene, and after seeing her picture, I could imagine her long blonde hair and her scarf stained with blood and dirt lying on the concrete. And I could see the robbers, I could see them very well. . . and then I got scared, I got really scared. Scared of myself and my mind and at the same time ashame of my thoughts. What I saw was a group of perhaps 3 to 4 man, blacks, African-Americans with big jackets, oversized pants and basketball snickers. That was in my mind.

The article doesn't mention who, how many or how the robbers look like. Doesn't mention their race, age, or type of body. Nothing, absolutely nothing about them. But still I imagine them being African-Americans; not Hispanics, or Asians not even White-Caucasians, or Native-Americans. I imagine them being African-Americans.

WHY?! That was the question that popped up in my mind. While Nicole's fiancé is asking himself the same question, mine has a different tone. Why did I imagine the robbers being black and not from other race. Furthermore, why the first description that comes to my mind is a racial one, why the color of the skin is the first reference that my mind gets? Why is still at this stage in my life, after all that I've been through, after all the different people that I've meet across the world from different nationalities, colors and beliefs, the racial stigma comes to my mind first.

That is not an easy question to ask to myself and the answer is certainly not easy. Is a very complex interconnection of beliefs, values, experiences and what comes to be our unconscious mind. I could blame the TV, that's the easiest way out of this question; or perhaps the culture where we live in, but that would be to just to "cut and run". I should be able to look inside me, deep into my education and the things that have made me who I am today; and still I should be able to not come with an answer. There's not a single and simple answer to this. Not even a long and complex one, I could barely approach this issue from various perspectives and be aware of this, be aware of the struggle that lives inside me, be aware that I am sometimes someone that I don't want to be and someone who has a set of beliefs that I don't want to belief in. That I am a set of stereotypes that are buried deep inside and that I don't fully recognize.

The secret of finding things lies in the questions that you ask yourself. Answers are not necessary and I belief is futile to try to come up with one. An answer is not going to change a feeling or an event, it may explain a little tiny angle of the question, but it will not satisfy the question that prompted it. I could read a 5000-page book on how our mind creates and stores stereotypes and therefore why that image in my mind, earlier today, of the shooting. But the questions that govern my unconscious has to be found there, deep inside my mind, a place where we still don't know how to get there, a place we barely realize exist even though it governs us.

The question of race . . . that's the question, and therefore the answer.

I dream of a day when a new Secretary of State is sworn in, and the Majority Leader of Congress doesn't have to say that she is "the first African-American woman" to be named for such position. Or when an Attorney General doesn't have to be referred as the first "Hispanic" to be nominated for that office. I dream of a day when we don't have to say that this is the 41st white-male to be president. I dream of a day when people come in no colors to the human eye, neither to our unconscious mind. When people refer to other people based on a description other than the color of our skin, or any color at all. A time like Belize's description to Roy . . .

". . . like a big city overgrown with weeds -flowering weeds-, on every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going on . . . windows missing in every orifice like broken teeth; a crippy wind and grey high skies full of ravens . . . big dance palaces full of music, dance, and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the didiers are Creole, Mulatto, Brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste, age and history finally overcome . . ."

A place in time and space, where human beings are treated and considered as such, regardless of color, race, age, national origin, religion, gender and believes.

A place in time and space without shootings, where Nicole duFresne, 28, is still with us.