A Short History of Racism

While staying at my grandmother’s house in England this past week, I managed to find, after an exhaustive search, an old obscure children’s book called Epaminondas and His Mama’s Umbrella. I had been greatly looking forward to reading this literary treasure ever since my brother gave it a glowing report following his own visit to my grandmother a couple of years earlier. Nor does the book’s renown stop with him. Even such a discerning information source as Wikipedia has a stub article about old Epaminondas, which observes that the work contains “some racist overtones and stereotypes.”

Now, perhaps I’m being overly sensitive, but to me this statement seems only slightly more understated than pointing out that Mein Kampf is tinged with hints of anti-Semitism. The fact is that Epaminondas and His Mama’s Umbrella is dazzlingly, spectacularly racist. The story centers a black boy called Epaminondas, whose grandiose name is offset by his mighty and ponderous stupidity. All day long Epaminondas goes around misunderstanding simple instructions, eating grass, and prancing around in straw hat, while his mother offers such kind encouragement as “Laws a massy me, you am a stupid coon!” (italics original; all grammatical errors made by the black cast are helpfully highlighted for the edification of the reading audience). It hardly needs mention that Epaminondas has a pair of fire-engine-red lips that take up three quarters of the space on his gawking face, or that the adjective “black” is carefully inserted in front of almost every body-related noun in the story (to wit: “Epaminondas waved his black hand to his black mama, then turned on his black heel and started off, but immediately tripped over a piece of old cornbread and fell right on his black face, while Black Mama screamed racial epithets in his black ear from the bottom of her black throat.”) I can just imagine a smug British child of the 1950s chortling away at this display of stark idiocy. I know exactly what he would look like, too, for when I checked the title page, I found there printed proudly the name of my own father. “He loved that book,” my grandmother confirmed when I delightedly showed her my discovery. “It was right up there with Little Black Sambo, Little Black Quibba, and Little Black Queesha.”

All this is hardly shocking; indeed, if you have parents about the same age as mine, I’d wager that they read the same horrible books when they were young enough to find the idea of a child misplacing an umbrella hilarious. Rather, I’d like to turn this all around to my one unflinching purpose: criticizing Swiss society. Because in this country, you see, such themes are not only the embarrassing relics of an older generation. When Deborah was in primary school, her teachers organized such activities as the group game “Who’s Afraid of the Black Man?”, in which scrubbed Alpine children fled from a classmate in the role of a hungry Native bent on devouring them. After she came home, she could turn the tables by feasting on chocolates called Mohrenchöpfli – “Little African’s Heads” – as indeed kids can to this day. So too can they play “Black Peter,” the Swiss version of the classic Anglo-Saxon card game “Old Maid,” which, let’s be candid, is itself hardly a showcase for enlightened liberal values. But even if our version does pack in the patriarchy, it at least refrains from recreating apartheid in game form, as players rack up pairs of nice white people while desperately trying to exclude poor old Black Peter from the society. And while North American kids are doubtless just as heartless and prejudiced as their Swiss counterparts, they can at least be proud of the fact relatively few of them dress up as “Negerli” for Halloween.

I could go on with this moralistic finger-pointing, and indeed I will do just that, but now I will speak from my own personal experience. Last June, during the height of World Cup frenzy, I went to a bar in St. Gallen with Deborah and her dad to watch the Switzerland-Togo match. Now, I should say quite frankly that up until this point, I had always gotten about as much enjoyment from watching the players on a soccer field as I had from watching the grass. But viewing the game in a run-down Swiss drinking hole proved to be a novel and interesting experience, if only because everyone watching the game got so into it, and by into it I mean appallingly racist. Every time a Togolese player made a foul, took a fall, or touched the ball with his foot, curses would fly like missiles from the assembled multitude, usually pairing some or other dark-coloured substance with some or other part of the human body. Most of what was hissed and screamed against the unfortunate opposition can’t be repeated here, but there was one memorable incident that was comparatively so benign that it seemed almost charitable. During a lull in the hard drinking following Switzerland's 2-0 victory, a faint strain of reggae reached us from the radio of a passing car. Out onto the street jumped Deborah’s father, a spry and jovial patriot, where he screamed at the driver of the car to “turn off that fucking Togomusik!” Prudently, the traitor obeyed.