As Plain as Black & White

Well, I took an extended holiday in literal and physical senses. In the literal sense, I had no desire to blog about anything for about three weeks. To you loyal readers of mine who have been yearning for a blog post from me, have no fear, I'm back on the keyboard. 

In the physical sense, I spent time with my uncle and family in Frankfurt before heading over the border to Hungary to check out Budapest. Now, trust me, I could dedicate a solid three or four blog posts to the beauty and wonder of the historic Hungarian city but that would spoil the interesting phenomenon that I need to touch on now. And trust me, it will be rewarding so please stay tuned. This post will be so long, so detailed, so wonderful that it will make up for my lack of posting. For your convenience I'll break it up into the block form of an essay so that you can easily take a break, check Facebook, eat something, grab a beer, and come back for the next part. 

Es war einmal das Leben...

I. Introduction

For any of you who know me outside of the virtual world, there's one thing that you notice pretty quickly about me, it's something that no matter what I can't avoid divulging to people and of course it's something that defines me as a person. 

I'm black. 

Nooo Way! 

Yeah, I know, shocking, as monumental and ground changing as a "Bruce Wayne is Batman" reveal. But hey, I can't reveal every one of my secrets at once so for now, that's all you get. Patience is a virtue. Now before I digress and this blog post devolves into a stream of consciousness rant about nothing (See: The Blog Post About Nothing) I'll get to the point that I wanted to address. Here I am just casually chilling in the train station after my Eurotrip successfully ended, preparing to grind up for this last couple of weeks of school back home in Münster. I got to the train station a bit early, but it was no biggie, I had already had a brilliant plan in motion: find somewhere to sit, listen to music and read for the project I have to present in a couple of weeks. It was going to be a brilliant and thorough dissecting of "The Duchess of Malfi" so that I could meet with my partner with insight and genius to provide her. 

II. Rising Action

Like some brilliant person (Allen Saunders) at some point in time (1957) said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." So I sat down in a vacant chair, not at all turned away from the vulgar smell of urine and body odor of the homeless man a couple seats beside me. I quickly placed my headphones over my ears and zoned out. Offering a smile to the lady to my right and a friendly nod to Stinky on my left. Then something fairly expected happened, a homeless man came up to me, asked me kindly to hand him the empty water bottle behind him. Of course I obliged. You see, in Germany most plastic bottles have a deposit placed on them, this deposit is included in the price of the bottle (kind of like a tax) and it usually ranges from 0.08 to 0.25 euro (as of 2:48 PM German time this has been edited thanks the wonderful sleuthing skills of my German homie Robo!) . It's a simple incentive to encourage recycling and it seems to work, especially when the homeless see it as a way to earn a couple euros for diligently preserving the world. 

My seemingly unconscious act spurred Stinky on my left to go on a rant about homelessness in Germany and all the opportunities to life a sustainable life without walking from trash can to trash can hoping that someone threw a plastic bottle away (cue the "one man's trash is another man's treasure" analogy RIGHT now.) At this point I zoned out, my headphones blurring the sounds of the German language to the point that they transformed themselves into indiscernible white noise drowned out by the hard bass pumps of Big Boi's Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors. I maybe got through a song and a half before I saw Stinky's eyes fixate on me and as great and brilliant I am at lip reading German, I missed every piece of white noise he directed my way. Confidently, cautiously (in case he was asking for money) and curiously, I removed my headphones and said a simple word with such confidence you might have thought I was a native German, bitte? 

III. Climax

The lady next to me kindly repeated his question. "How many children do Africans have?" 

What? 

My brain acted as quickly as it could and I said simply, "I don't know, what do you think?" she answered with a timely three or four (compared to what she said was a 1.2 for Germany), simply because of the familial responsibilities they are expected to uphold. This lady was old, but that answer was so 1900s. I smiled gently, getting ready to respond before she corrected herself and said "Well of course that's different for different people" The conversation moved quickly into the realm of immigration and all other things but at this point their words were drowning back into white noise. 

I stayed and chatted for another fifteen minutes, they were nice people, well intentioned I believe, but I think I'd had enough of Stinky. Kindly I said my goodbyes and left. 

I barely was away from this first exposure, this first assumption that I knew something about African family childbirth rates because of my skin color before I was approached by a man of my complexion. He smiled gently, shook my hand and asked me if I spoke English. For future reference, Clifford, put on your thickest possible German accent scream something at them, and look at the person like they're crazy. The man, from Nigeria, told me his Spiel, (Cliffsnotes version:  he's from Nigeria, lived in Italy for a couple of years and is now looking for work in Germany.) He asked me to raise money for him, because:

 "I am black and I know the struggles of Africans" 

IV. Falling Action

True Life: I'm Black in Germany

This was like a sick joke. Was I on some kind of reality TV show? How does one possibly respond to this? Well I have a practice: if you ask me for money, after telling me a story about your fleeing to Italy, constantly reiterating that you must be a good person because your Italian citizen passport is only given to "good people" I'm probably not going to give you the money you ask for. And by probably I mean you have a better chance finding a water fountain in Germany (See: Water, Water,Everywhere)

Train, gotta catch it. Bye. 

V. Conclusion 

Now I understand the innocence and naivety of assuming that a dark skinned brother, in Germany, could be from Africa but I cannot express how foreign the feeling is. People here don't know what I am. I have always taken for granted that I am easily identifiable as an African American. Perhaps it's a very silly assumption to have but I have always thought I carried myself in a manner that screamed American. This thought process has since been eschewed, stripped, discredited, in my time in Germany. So many times I have been approached by Africans and spoken to in the mother language of Ghana, so many times have I been asked questions about Africa that I am not qualified to answer. 

It's an interesting enough phenomenon though, the treatment I receive in Germany because of my skin color. No negativity, I've yet to experience anything I'd consider offensive or anything of the sort but it's definitely something that I keep note of on a daily basis. It's something that usually occurs in the most innocent of manners, like the one before, asking if I know something about African fertility habits, or asking a brother for help simply because he's a brother, but it seems to be a wholly different beast. I know I'm a foreigner and I know there are plenty of other foreigners that I encounter every day and that I'm not the only one who's identifiable as a foreigner but it's so different being approached under the assumption that I'm something or that I have a certain understanding of the world. 

Maybe it's the same in the US but I have never thought about it in such a manner, I've never been mistakenly identified as something else than what I self-identified with and now that it happens so frequently it's really made me interested to discover how exactly others think about the issue and what false lenses with which we examine people.

Now i understand the vast majority of Germany is of a lighter complexion than myself and it would be "logical" to assume I'm from a continent that doesn't lay across a massive body of water, but please, before being so upfront, just ask me a simple question and the answer may be shocking for you.