Racial Profiling

I have never been a person who particularly cares that much about someone’s colour. But then again, Colorado is not a particularly colourful state; especially not in the very rich, white and particularly Jewish neighbourhood of Greenwood Village. I then moved to Belfast and to even ask if Belfast has colour would literally make you laugh out loud. So it’s been a very different shock to come to a society where the colour of your skin means everything. You start to act like the locals and adapt such an attitude. While apartheid might be over, it doesn’t mean that people have stopped judging based on your colour. I have since become known as the white girl, everyone from strangers on the street to my friends (half of whom are white…but apparently I, literally, am the whitest person they know). I found myself thinking today watching a man in my neighbourhood walking home from work that he looked like a nice man. He was wearing trousers and a shirt with an obnoxious backpack, and he was white. And I realised I made the assumption that the man was ‘nice’ because he was white. I was appalled. I was also a bit sickened at myself to make a half-joke/half-assumption that men wearing diamond studs and sunglasses in a hummer were drug dealers. They were black. However, the hummer was in a township where the average income is practically nothing, so who knows? My friends make jokes about the colour of their skin, but this is a serious matter that means so much to so many people here.