A DAY LIKE ANOTHER
- bousso benussi thioune
- Feb 3, 2021
- 3 min read
Paranoid. Broken record.
Can't you talk about something else?
Are you sure they weren't just saying that and stuff?
Nothing can be said to you anymore!
These are words I hear every day, ever since I decided to stop keeping quiet, to raise my voice, to take space, to say what is wrong.
I have tried more than once to think of something else.
It's hard, from the moment I leave the house in the morning to when I come back at night I'm a woman.
A black woman.
Other people have a completely different perspective on me than I do and believe me I would really like to be able to say the opposite.
I am a teacher.
I get up in the morning, take the train to work, nothing special, and yet on this short 20-minutes journey there is hardly a time when I don't suffer a minor assault on my person.
A hand that slips over the buttock or thigh or breast, with the excuse that the train is too full and you have to hold on somewhere.
A look of astonishment at seeing 'someone like me' reading a book considered intellectual.
A nudge followed by a "go back to where you came from".
I'm sure my answer would disappoint them, I don't come from so far away...
And then I get to school and it's hard to walk through the door without a comment, or a "where do you think you're going Miss" look, because it's easier to see me as a high school student; you don't see many teachers of my colour around.
After a day at work, breaks spent explaining to my male colleague why he cannot tell a young girl that she can only comb her hair and that she should count herself lucky if she finds a job as a hairdresser (sexist and classist insult, congratulations); after telling my colleague that I don't particularly appreciate personal questions about the hygiene of my nappy hair, and that my child is beautiful not because she is a mixture of colours, but simply because she is a beautiful child; after hours spent silently watching pupils disrespect, belittle but also love, know and educate each other; after a whole series of events, I leave the school and we are back to square one.
At the supermarket my bag is checked not once but twice because I look like a lady who has already been caught (a black woman, of course we are all the same, one is as good as the other) the cashier abruptly calls me "you", after having reverently treated the four people in front of me (all different ages, some younger, all different from me).
I meet a foreign friend, she doesn't speak the language very well, she has beautiful auburn hair, light eyes, she looks French, damn it.
There is no benefit of the doubt.
A bewildered-looking gentleman asks us for directions, I answer him, but he doesn't listen, he looks insistently at my friend, as if it were up to her to validate my version.
I go to pick up my little girl, on the street a lady with a newborn in her arms asks me what my rates are because she really needs help and if I take care of small children then I could take hers too.
At that moment I switch off, I'm tired, a bit dizzy, I hug my baby, we go inside the house, I kiss my partner.
I'm safe at last.
You don't see these things.
My body, my colour, inexplicably open the door to people's imagination.
I am stripped of my experiences, my rights, my successes and even my mistakes.
I tell you my reality not for the sake of attention, not for the sake of victimhood, not to ruin your day.
My reality is common to many other women.
Sexism and racism affect my life on a daily basis.
And I see them.
Good if you can turn away, if you can get fed up.
It means you don't suffer it.
It means that you have the privilege of being able to ignore, even for a few hours, these problems.
I will not stop, I cannot in any way extricate myself from the reality of my being.
But that's all right.
I am here to remind you of that.
Pay attention. Take back those who offend.
Protect the ones you love.
Act.
Always act.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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