Yesterday I wrote about the beauty of seeing people sort contradiction into nuance, using the example of speaking Spanish as someone who appears to be Asian.
Today I wonder if I was being a bit too charitable - whether my writing excused soft forms of racial bias.
But I write according to my experiences of the day, so no regrets. So today I write from the other perspective, framing my piece yesterday in a more cynical light.
Today I was on the receiving end of three micro aggressions, all from locals. The second instance occurred as I entered the chocolate museum in Astorga (free chocolate!). Some students saw me and said konnichiwa with looks that came off as jeering. I honestly thought it would be funny to reply “I’m not Japanese” in Spanish, so I did and it shook them a bit.
Clearly an information overload. Asian guy speaking Spanish! The students looked at each other in shock and repeated what I had just said amongst themselves.
I wish I was exaggerating. I’m not exaggerating. And I thought it was pretty funny, to be honest.
As I was walking back to my hostel an hour later, I saw some elementary school aged kids snickering and pointing at me. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when they ching chong’d me.
Classic.
This one bothered me more than I wanted it to (clearly just ignorance) because it felt like the type of thing someone would have heard 50 years ago - which is maybe ignorant of me (I grew up in a very Asian community).
I wanted to talk about something else today, but occasion calls! Excuse the slightly frustrated tone. This post will just be an honest take on race on the Camino, as I’ve experienced it.
Three prongs: diversity within the pilgrim population, artwork on the Camino, and micro aggressions from the outside in.
Diversity within the pilgrim population
The Camino has no doubt been as incredible as it has been for me because it was much more diverse than I expected it to be. I have met people from Brazil, Spain, US, Canada, Mexico, England, Ireland, Germany, Hungary, Kurdistan, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and probably many more that I’m forgetting. I think I forgot that religion is as global as it is, but even then many folks are not even religious! The language barriers presented a challenge at first, but the inconvenience is far outweighed by the diversity of culture and perspective.
Yet, I have not seen a single black person walking the Camino. Maybe this is an oversight because this isn’t the first thing I think of when I meet a new person, but I truly can’t remember one instance.
It’s a little shocking to me. Maybe there’s something I don’t know about Black Catholicism, but a few quick searches confirm that it isn’t nonexistent. And even if it were, most pilgrims are not Catholic!
Not only is this the case, but I have never heard this reality discussed with the exception of one time in passing on day three, even though the diversity of the Camino is one of the main topics of conversation I have experienced.
Artwork
I’ve written on art as a reflection of the self, but this is hard when the skin color of the people depicted in artwork is always white, and the only time it isn’t white is in submissive relationship with a white subject.
Here’s the only example I found of artwork on the Camino with a nonwhite human subject (or maybe object is the better word):
I really don’t understand this piece because it seems to depict that the two POC are bowing down to the white pilgrim? Like what did the white pilgrim do to make your experience holy? I actually took this picture with a grimace knowing it would be useful to show someday when I wrote something related to race on the Camino, and here we are.
It’s maybe an intentional coincidence that the kids who spoke to me in Japanese did the same gesture as the Japanese appearing woman in this piece is making.
The only other piece I found with nonwhite subjects was a picture of some blue aliens. So not human. I’ll be charitable and not unpack that further.
I tried to think of reasonable rationalization for this phenomenon - maybe the artwork was made a long time ago? When the good majority of pilgrims were white (I don’t even know if this is true)? But then I realized that is really not my job.
So here I am, writing about it. Not my job either but I love this experience enough to feel that it is.
Micro aggressions
Last summer I lived in a town that is more than 95% white. I called a POC friend who had lived there a few summers before for advice, and also talked to my parents (they lived in the South for a bit). I was told to prepare for micro aggressions.
In three weeks on the Camino I have experienced 3x more micro aggressions from locals than I did in two months last summer.
I am willing to bet there is a lot of complexity for the towns strewn across the Camino that are heavily dependent on tourism revenue from pilgrims, for folks with cars who have to deal with steams of walkers, etc. And for the most part there has been the utmost love - exclamations of Buen Camino as I walk across the road, all smiles!
But of course there is more than one side to this story. I told you yesterday about my Asian appearance, followed by my Spanish speaking. I told you that I find it beautiful when the sequential presentation of these characteristics asks of locals to grapple with the nuance of who I am, and to that end I refer to the pleasant conversations that follow - the unbridled joy of realizing someone who doesn’t look like you speaks your tongue. It’s wholesome and there are viral videos on Youtube of people just going around shocking others with their language.
This description, however, frames away the reality that many times I have only been treated better when I’ve shown I can speak Spanish, implying my appearance does not suffice respect. And no I am not going to mince my words here - it might be hard to discern fake customer service respect from real human respect until you see someone switch between the two when they hear fluent Spanish.
Of course this is problematic and I don’t need to overkill this, but obviously no one should have to deserve your respect - it should be the default.
A more general note
I am of the impression that my upbringing and education in America has empowered me to think of race much more centrally than many of the locals - and there’s no faulting here. America is more diverse racially speaking, and I don’t even need to assume good intent as a practice when dealing with micro aggression because I know for a fact that many of them come from ignorance instead of malice.
But that doesn’t make them useless to point out, and it doesn’t excuse them either.
The Camino becomes more and more diverse all the time. South Korea is fast becoming one of the most common nationalities on this pilgrimage, so these rationalizations will become less and less reasonable as time goes on.
Furthermore, the most popular nationality by far is Spain. That is to say, there is so much that connects those in the country with Asian nationalities (as one example, to cater this analysis to my perspective) - the shared understanding of religious and/or spiritual liberation that makes religion global, or maybe even just basic respect for the physical task of walking across an entire country?
I am not saying all this to shame on the folks whose gestures inspired this post (I mean two of the examples were from kids). I am saying this in the hope that the very specific shared understanding of sacrifice and submission and resilience that binds folks together can and should overcome difference in ethnicity.
So there you have it! If you’ve been keeping up with these pieces (I know daily is a lot) you know that I have really loved my time, and this is not contradicted by the things I write about today. But my experience is complicated as all good experiences are, and I wanted to shave off a tiny piece of that nuance to share with all of you.