AWARE talks about the African perspective on racism in America
Staff Writer
Though the weather kept three of the planned speakers from speaking at last night's AWARE meeting, the African perspective on American racism was explored by the group.
AWARE, the Alliance Working to Achieve Racial Equality, met in the Student Center to give UK graduate students from different countries in Africa the chance to speak about their perspectives on American racism.
The meeting was conducted by AWARE Steering Committee member Michael Razeeq, who began by talking about the misinterpretations people get from the media about topics like welfare and affirmative action.
He quoted from Farai Chideya's novel, Don't Believe the Hype.
But the concentration of the meeting lied in the experiences of UK accounting graduate student Lucienne Batoubatou who is from Gabon, a country in central Africa, and Norber Owona, a graduate student originally from Cameroon.
The two had varying stories.
Batoubatou said she had no problems when she moved to the United States because she knew what race relations were going to be like.
"I don't think the perception changed," she said.
"What I knew about the situation before I came here and what I've seen since I've been here is not any different."
She thought the extent of racism depended on which state a person was in. Batoubatou also believed television played a role in how people perceive and interact with each other.
"If you see on TV or see friends from other states, I think the attitudes change," Batoubatou said.
Owona's awareness of race relations in the United States came in stages. In the first stage noticed the violence between blacks and white people and questioned why this was occurring.
The second stage occurred when he entered graduate school and was denied a fellowship after they learned he was from a different country.
The next couple of stages he realized the different types of racism that occurred in France and the United States.
"If you have a Frenchmen behaving in a funny way, it's because he doesn't like you because you're African and he doesn't believe he's more intelligent than you," Owona said.
One story told by Razeeq involved a Mexican student attending a college in Cleveland.
The student was told not to go into the black community, but because he always rebeled against everything, he decided to explore the community anyway.
What he found was a community that he loved and got along with. Razeeq said the student felt sorry for those who followed the rules who did not get a chance to see the other side.
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