We sometimes believe that racism only occurs in America. Last week, I read an interesting story on the BBC demonstrating that racism was alive and well. In Lima, Peru.
The Cafe del Mar restaurant was closed, temporarily for 60 days, and fined about US $70,000. The reason? There were complaints from several customers, who happened to have darker skin, that they were denied entry into the restaurant. Ironically, it was only in 2004 that the Peruvian government legislated laws to combat discrimination.
“For many human rights campaigners the closure is an important step in combating Peru’s racial and economic discrimination.
Wilfredo Ardito is one of them: ‘This is a symbolic sanction. It is the first time happily that this practice in this terrible act of racial selection of the customer has been closed and we consider that this is the first step. Racism is something permanent in our society but it’s terrible that even a place open to the public is practicing this kind of situation,’ he said.” (1)
After he wrote, “The Narrative,” Frederick Douglass spent two years in Great Britain. He had an interesting experience during his voyage.
“I became myself painfully alive to the liability which surrounded me, and which might at any moment scatter all my proud hopes and return me to a doom worse than death. It was thus I was led to seek a refuge in monarchical England from the dangers of republican slavery. A rude, uncultivated fugitive slave, I was driven to that country to which American young gentlemen go to increase their stock of knowledge, to seek pleasure, and to have their rough democratic manners softened by contact with English aristocratic refinement.
The insult was keenly felt by my white friends, but to me such insults were so frequent and expected that it was of no great consequence whether I went in the cabin or in the steerage. Moreover, I felt that if I could not go in the first cabin, first cabin passengers could come in the second cabin, and in this thought I was not mistaken, as I soon found myself an object of more general interest than I wished to be, and, so far from being degraded by being placed in the second cabin, that part of the ship became the scene of as much pleasure and refinement as the cabin itself. The Hutchinson family from New Hampshire–the sweet singers of anti-slavery and the “good time coming”–were fellow-passengers, and often came to my rude forecastle-deck and sang their sweetest songs, making the place eloquent with music and alive with spirited conversation. They not only visited me, but invited me to visit them, and in two or three days after leaving Boston one part of the ship was about as free to me as another. My visits there, however, were but seldom. I preferred to live within my privileges and keep upon my own premises. This course was quite as much in accord with good policy as with my own feelings. The effect was that with the majority of the passengers all color distinctions were flung to the winds, and I found myself treated with every mark of respect from the beginning to the end of the voyage, except in one single instance, and in that I came near being mobbed for complying with an invitation given me by the passengers and the captain of the Cambria to deliver a lecture on slavery.
There were several young men, passengers from Georgia and New Orleans, and they were pleased to regard my lecture as an insult offered to them, and swore I should not speak. They went so far as to threaten to throw me overboard, and but for the firmness of Captain Judkins they would probably, under the inspiration of slavery and brandy, have attempted to put their threats into execution. I have no space to describe this scene, although its tragic and comic features are well worth describing. An end was put to the mélee by the captain’s call to the ship’s company to put the salt-water mobocrats in irons, at which determined order the gentlemen of the lash scampered, and for the remainder of the voyage conducted themselves very decorously.
This incident of the voyage brought me within two days after landing at Liverpool before the British public. The gentlemen so promptly withheld in their attempted violence toward me flew to the press to justify their conduct and to denounce me as a worthless and insolent negro. This course was even less wise than the conduct it was intended to sustain, for, besides awakening something like a national interest in me, and securing me an audience, it brought out counter statements and threw upon themselves the blame which they had sought to fasten upon me and upon the gallant captain of the ship.”
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: Chapter VI, Impressions Abroad.
Reference
(1) “Racist” Peru Restaurant Closed, BBC Online, 08 July 2007.
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