Hello friends,
Hey! Here we are on another Tuesday morning.
Hope the weekend went pleasant and hmm Monday, well at least one day less from the week and one day closer to the weekend.
I reckon since we’re all reflecting during this time, we are being forced to change, the world is already in chaos, let me add some more serious reflections so that when we reach the other side of this new world that is being created we’d be more united. I really hope we can kill off racism, i.e. the racism in South Africa, racism in the Indian community around the world, xenophobia against immigrants in the world, racism of any sort be it skin colour, the country you were born in, the culture you were born in, being born rich or poor, all that is separating us…
Why is it more important now than ever?
Look at this year in history and all the questions we are being faced with from the younger generations!
Look at the circle spiralling from generation to generation!
Do you have young children? What change is called for from yourself now that our future needs?
Why?
Guess what! Your kids are going to be raised in a world that we won’t be able to recognise (for the better) and the changes happening in this world are happening very fast.
(One second. I got mosquito bites, almost five or six throughout my body. I am just concentrating on resisting the itch)
… Aum
…. Aum
… Aum
Yes, I’ve done it. I’ve resisted scratching. Having fresh mosquito bites is a massive test and when you can pass a meditation session transmuting the itch and the need to scratch, that makes you a Guru. ?
Alright, so over the weekend I was presented with this, “T. Dench Patel, you know we white people are so fed up, the finger points at us and it goes on and on about how racist we are. It makes me angry because when I went to India and not even going to India, I met Indians who are very spiritual and yet they follow the caste system. I wondered how can they say they are spiritual, yet they have strong “virtues” around the caste system? Also, brown-skinned people have racism with dark/black-skinned people.”
Dench Patel’s response along these lines, “Yes, I hear you, I don’t agree with the caste system, not at all. I have dated (irrelevant of the type of guys out there) without prejudice whoever had a mutual interest in me. I haven’t dated an Indian guy thus far (purchase the book in the link below and this one The South African: Roamer to get clarity), and if I met Jason Derulo before he met “Cheyenne” I would have dated him.”
I guess being born South African and especially during Apartheid, I never really went to school with a South African black boy or girl until I was fifteen or sixteen. By the way, I was fifteen when it became evident that Mandela was going to be our president. Weird right! In my book The South African: True Colours based on a true story I talk about this moment. We knew nothing of living in Apartheid, teachers weren’t allowed to teach anything about our current history to us. So, when we had the conversation in the paragraphs you see above, I remembered the time when a pleasant British Gujarati boy brought his Jamaican girlfriend to meet me and don’t quote me, she was almost ten years his senior. I felt honoured but there wasn’t much I could really tell about her over four or five days. I think I almost fainted when he told me that they just found out that she was pregnant.
This made the advice I tried to give best from my experience a bit complicated. I just remembered what I said when I eventually came out of my virtual faint and processed the whole thing, his parents had no idea what was going on either. I felt like the whole pressure was on me to guide his future. I believe I said a few things right though. It was somewhere along these lines, “Alright, you’re going through with this, look at the positive. You’re changing the game, I know, and I certainly see and hear the number of situations with Indian girls hiding and dating British/Jamaican etc. African boys/men. This hiding has got to stop. You two can create something really good, you two, if you do this right, you can show others in the community that it is no longer a taboo. Just imagine raising your child with nil negativity, judgement, old belief systems, just imagine raising your child with an open mind, he or she will be free, absolutely free to choose almost anything that he or she desires to manifest. He or she will be the fruit of the new and positive future?”
Hypothetically speaking, I guess if I was going to school already from the time I remember going to school with blacks, whites, coloureds, Indians and foreigners, our country didn’t have Apartheid, our education was good like the US or UK, the government would put the taxes in the right places, money was something I’d see all races having dependent on the family’s standards, I’d be hard-skinned of what society thinks (if let’s say I had the same tough love upbringing), if I fell in love with a decent black boy, knowing me, I’d disregard anyone’s views if it didn’t seem right no matter how close the person was to me. That is just who I am (the current person I am), there are not many people who think like me, there are not many people who are brave to face the “disappointment” that many families or even society would throw their way. I’d go with complete gut instinct.
Similarly, during the time when this decent British Indian boy came to Spain to have me meet his Jamaican girlfriend, I’ve noticed first-hand racism with the stares and the way some people spoke to us in Spain. I could tell the difference completely because by then I was already in my fifth or sixth year living in Spain. Over those years I have seen friction with people who seemed African and how they vocalised inequality in Spain like in one instance I witnessed some exchange of words between a person who looked like they were from African descent and a Spanish shop owner.
Would I call Spanish people brown people? This is a very good question. In my time in Spain, I’ve seen “Barrios” where only Latin American people lived, I’ve been to “Barrios” in the South of Spain where Moroccans were predominant. I’ve met people in Spain from Senegal, Spaniards (of course), there are German communities and there are British communities. Funny, coffee colour skin, i.e. “Morena” (brown skin) was something I was always getting chased on especially in the South of Spain (in a good way). I think what shocked me the most was when I arrived at my first destination in mainland Spain in the year two thousand and five in Valencia. The shock was meeting blond Spaniards.
But it so goes to say that Brazil faces this issue of racism as well. “Brazil is home to more people of African heritage than any country outside of Africa.” According to this recent article (the day before yesterday), Brazilians are re-examining whether they are actually white, black or Pardo. Currently, many people are declaring themselves as Black.
To end, I’ve referenced in quotation marks in the above paragraph from this article below dated on the 15th November 2020.
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
Thank you for the comments and support. Thank you for offering to donate if there was a donate button on here. I prefer not to take donations. You can support by purchasing my books (Paperback or Kindle), The South African: True Colours, The South African: Roamer or my children’s book Light. These books can be found on Amazon mainly and other sites in your country.
The audiobook for The South African: True Colours is available on iTunes, Apple and Audible. The South African: Roamer and Light will be released soon.
Note: Do keep referring back to this site as much as possible, as I grow, a more profound perspective may form and so I will always come back to each of these articles to re-evaluate them.
