Racism in Peru
This post won’t deal with the deeply ingrained racial issues Peru has between its white, mestizo, and indigenous classes. This post will only detail a couple tales of how black / African descent is portrayed in Peru.
To put things in perspective, one should understand how many blacks are in Peru. In Arequipa, there are effectively none. I must have gone a two- or three-month stretch without seeing a black face at least once. I read and hear that there are more in Lima. I recently spent a week in Lima and, while you certainly couldn’t go a month without seeing a black face, there are much fewer than I’d anticipated. In one week, we might’ve seen a couple dozen black people at the most. Chincha is the historic Afro-Peruvian community and, while I never visited, Damien did and said it’s a lovely town. But only about 25% black.
On to the stories.
Around mid-October, one of my street’s security guards asked me who I was going to vote for in the upcoming US presidential election. I told him I don’t vote, but I was cheering for Barack Obama. He said “NO!” and waved his newspaper at me. He implied that a black president would be a disgrace.
My second week in Camaná, I caught up with the group of friends who all work at Hotel San Diego. We were all talking shit in their room and getting ready to hit the beach. Somehow the subject of my being American came up. One of them said, in heavily-accented English, “Yes, but you have your fucking nigger president.”
And at the celebration of my old basketball team’s city championship, a running joke of the night was how my mom is having sex with the black Barack Obama.
While the whole world seemed to have been cheering for Obama, it certainly wasn’t the whole world.
comments
One Response to “Racism in Peru”
Leave a Reply
I’m afraid a security guard and staff hotel don’t offer a good sample for a title like Racism in Perú. But yes, there is a lot of racism there, that comes this abruptly in people with little education. Still, I never met anyone there that would say the n word that easily.