Black eyes and lemonade

I think most, if not all, children dream of setting up their own lemonade stand right outside their home. It was certainly a dream which belonged to my childhood, one which apparently also found its way into my son's. Last week I finally put this dream to rest. I spotted a bag full of lemons in the kitchen and true to the saying, decided that if life dealt me lemons, I'd make lemonade. We set up the stand in our parapet and spent Saturday afternoon asking passersby if they wanted to buy our lemonade. I half expected the Malta Environment and Planning Authority to show up and ask for my licence but that never happened.

A small number of people showed up and I thank all of you who did. There was one particular customer who stood out from the rest. What happened was that I had gone inside for a lemonade refill and left my son to man the stall alone. On returning, I found him in the middle of a lemonade deal with a black guy who was handing over the money just as I walked back out.

Now, I'm not sure whether he made such an impression because he was the only black guy who bought our lemonade that day, or because he gave my son all his loose change and didn't want any of it back. But for some reason, that sale was definitely the high point of my day. I found the whole transaction very touching. There was a generosity of spirit - my son handing over the lemonade and this man simultaneously handing over an abundance of coins, insisting that he wasn't going to bother counting them because he wanted my son to keep all of the money. (There was enough money for at least three or four glasses of lemonade). Later that evening, when I was relaying the incident to my partner, describing it in minute detail, my son corrected me on one point: "No Ma, he was brown, not black."

Research has shown that it's far easier to get an accurate picture about subjects like racism from children rather than adults, because adults tend to give socially appropriate answers, rather than answers that reflect their personal beliefs. In fact, whenever racism comes up, I find that it is one of those subjects which people find hard to come to terms with. It's one of those things that people just don't like to own up to. It's a bit like breaking wind in public. However hard you try to control yourself, there are always going to be those moments when you can't. And it's the same with racism.

If you asked me whether I was racist, I would give you an emphatic and outright 'no'. I base this on a number of reasons, not least of these, a four-month stay in Denver Colorado, as an exchange student, where I roomed with a girl from Ghana. She was as black as the Ace of Spades, apart from being strikingly beautiful, intelligent, great fun and ultra cool and classy. She was one of a handful of people I feel privileged to have met and befriended in my lifetime and we are still very close. If I were to go back and do it all over again, I would pick her as my roommate, over anybody else.

But I still don't think that sharing a room with a black girl automatically makes me non-racist. In the same way that having a crush on Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, or liking Whoopi Goldberg or Oprah Winfrey wouldn't either. People can be selectively racist. In fact, whenever the conversation steers toward racism (and we are living at a time when it frequently does), I have a standard test I like to throw at people. I always ask them to imagine they have just boarded a bus with only two empty seats available, one near a black man, the other near a white. I then ask which seat they would be likely to gravitate toward. And I try to imagine which seat I would be more attracted to.

Again, that in itself doesn't necessarily mean anything. I would have reservations sitting next to someone fat (for obvious lack of space reasons). I would likewise not sit down next to someone who smelled or who looked dirty, or whose hair was greasy and lank. But all things being equal, then who would I choose to sit near? I seriously can't answer that question because with me, there are too many ifs, buts and maybes. I draw the line at smells. If one person smells nicer, I will sit next to that person. That works well for me.

And yet when I sat down to write this article I immediately singled out 'one black guy'. I was going to delete the 'black' part and just leave it at 'guy' but I deliberately chose not to, because I think it was significant. When we talk about the white people we may have met in the course of our day, we usually refer to them as men and women, but when we are talking about black people we often choose to remember to specify the colour.

I was at a conference the other day and there was one particular intervention about how one man's crime does not reflect an entire nation and therefore reporting crimes with reference to specific nationalities is not on, because you are ultimately stigmatising an entire nation because of one man's crime. Now buying lemonade is not a crime and thus to mention that a black guy bought some lemonade would seem to be none other than an observation. And yet I suppose, the act of singling out does create differences. And that is what racism does.

Racism is an ugly word. Although it is a belief in one's superiority over another, it actually points to a huge inferiority in the person who believes he is somehow superior. We are not born racist. Children, it would seem, see people in the same way they see pencil colours. To my son, I am pink, someone else may look yellow to him and other people look brown. It is something we pick up as we go along and in the same way that we learn it we can unlearn it. If I were to be honest (and I'm about to be), I was taken aback when I saw the lemonade guy handing over the cash. He would have been the last person I'd have expected to see at the stand that day. I was flummoxed and my reaction embarrassed me. There's actually a verb that describes it better than that, but it's not Sunday Times worthy. So I'll leave it at that.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com