Race relations

Books read since, oh, lord, I have no idea. Recently: 
House of Splendid Isolation, Edna O'Brien
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
plus a whole lot which (this is tragic) I can't recall even titles of, let alone major plot points.

Mainly I wanted to do some thinking out loud about the two books set in Nigeria. I was given the second, Americanah, for a birthday present (plus gift receipt - such a discreetly sensible but somehow uncomfortable innovation, don't you think?) and the back cover was all blurbs for her first book, Half of a Yellow Sun (which won a prize), which (the very next day) got lent to me by someone else, in a spooky coincidencey sort of way. So I thought, OK, well, on the grounds that first novels are bound to have the author's juiciest semi-autobiographical stuff in them, plus this one won a prize, plus she wrote it first, I'll give Half of a Yellow Sun a go first, and then if I like it I'll read the other one, and if I don't like it, then I'll use my gift receipt to go and buy myself a Prancersize DVD (thank you to my sister for finding Prancercize. A gem.)
Anyway,  (a) WOW am I glad I read them in the order I did (b) people are terrible, especially white people and  (c) I had no idea there was such a wide wide world of black hairstyling out there.

Half of a Yellow Sun is not the best book ever in strictly literary terms (prose a bit leaden in many places, characters unmemorable, plot consists mainly of white people being awful to black people alternating with black people being awful to other black people), but is very good as a piece of meta-journalism (fiction, but fiction set in an episode of painfully real recent history). It is a usefully lacerating reminder of the injustice in the world, just in case the more complacent among us had gotten too distracted by our teeny tiny first world problems to remember that. The whole way through the book, I was cowering in embarrassment at my own ignorance: just over a generation ago, a genocide happened that I had never even heard of as part of the Biafran War, which I had also never heard of, in a country that I would not have been able to confidently identify on a blank map of Africa (northish westish biggish would have been as good as I could have done). Many many people died in terrible horrible ways, arguably as a direct consequence of British (my people!) incompetence, arrogance, and greed, and I have spent more time watching Tim Minchin videos on YouTube than I have learning about Nigeria.

After Half of a Yellow Sun, I plowed straight into Americanah, at that point urgently needing to know the worst about what the U.S. had done to the Nigerians, prepared for another holocaust (my only faint hope was that at least one of my nationalities would turn out to have behaved reasonably well. O Canada, My Home and Native Land, At Least You Don't Drop Bombs on Developing Countries, well, not very often, anyway.)  but Americanah is thankfully a much kinder, gentler, and less memorable book: no one dies of starvation or torture, they just make wry poignant/funny observations about racism and culture shock that reinforce the message that white people are infuriatingly clueless, but black people can be pretty mean to each other as well.

The reference above to black hairstyling is not entirely trivial: at the beginning of the book, the main character goes to a salon to have her braided hair extensions done, a process that is supposed to happen monthly and which costs a bomb, and which takes 6-8 hours to do. (I can't imagine devoting 6-8 hours of my lifetime to hair maintenance, let alone monthly, but it did go a long way to explaining to me what I had always thought was the bizarre prevalence of hair salons in Oakland and the Central District in Seattle.) The main character subsequently decides to go natural, with a short Afro, which provokes a generally negative reaction from the chemical-hair-relaxing/straightening majority of her girlfriends but which is a liberating moment for her. While I have noticed (who hasn't?) that black women (in this country, at least- what Adichie refers to as NAB's, or Non-African Blacks) do frequently have seriously fancy hair compared to white women, the irony hadn't really struck me that the more 'white'-looking (straightened & styled as if it were naturally straight) a black woman's hair is, the less likely I am to assume that she is 'like me' (white, upper middle class), since the more educated upper-middle class black women I have met generally tend to favour more natural hair (i.e. Afro, braids, dreads, twists etc).

So while it would be stupid and disingenuous to claim to be indifferent to race (no one who has lived in the US can be colour-blind unless they're in a coma), here's my working hypothesis: common accent/educational level is a pretty instant leveler (for me) of racial differences, but if significant linguistic/educational differences exist, I am probably more likely to be guilty of racial stereotyping. The definitive experiment would be to hook me up to a polygraph machine, and measure my physiologic stress responses to having an argument with a black vs white university professor of medieval English literature over a grade, and then an argument late at night with a black vs white yahoo at a gas station over whose turn it was to use the pump. I _think_ there'd be no difference between stress responses induced by the black and white professors, but that there probably would be a difference in the stress responses induced by yahoos of different races.

Would be very interested in thoughts from others, especially black others, if anyone outside my immediately family is reading this ;)