ROLAND VERITY: Shades of Brown

Blue: You may be working in France for a month or a year and moving back there for a little while and I'm just wondering -- that even though you're an American with Sudanese background, and completely fluent in French -- what you think about living and working in France and looking like an Arabic person?

Verity: You just hit the nail on the head. It's not a matter of what I am. It's what people think I am. All over Europe, I get mistaken as a Moroccan or an Egyptian or basically anything North African or Middle Eastern, which these days is something people aren't really into. But in most parts of the world, I have to say, especially in the U.S., brown people are looked down upon, much more so than I ever noticed before. When I'm abroad and I open my mouth and that American accent comes out, something I just can't shake, (then you see) people don't like Americans, either. So I have to deal with it regardless, as an Arab or an American, no matter where I am.

Blue: I remember talking to you one time about traveling outside of Atlanta, and traveling outside Montreal, by car and I was joking around with you about just jumping into a car to hit the road, and you said something that stopped me in my tracks: that a brown person quote unquote might feel hesitant even about traveling in rural North America, where you might encounter some sort of red neck element?

Varity_SR_matchbx_660_bw.jpg Verity: That’s an interesting question. I haven't thought about it much because I haven't done much traveling here (in the USA) or in Canada over the last let's say, six years, but my reasons for not doing so were not attached to September 11. Were I to travel in this rural America now, I think I would feel ostracized more but I don't think it would keep me from going. What I hesitate to do, and this is kind of sad, is go by myself. Actually, let me remind you of an instance when we were in Beirut together, a year ago, and we were supposed to be meeting at Cafe Prague in the middle of Hamra. Even in Beirut, racism is rife and there I'm an Arab! I arrived about 10 minutes before you, sat down at the table and was very quickly told that I wasn't allowed to sit there, and had to go sit at the bar despite the fact I had a friend coming. As soon as you showed up, this white American guy, they started to treat me very differently. It was like, 'Oh, you're with him? Okay. We can be nicer to you now.' So they were very rude, very cold, but it wasn't something that surprised me. What surprised me is how quickly they changed when they realized that I was a friend of Mr. Blue.

Blue: But you were well-dressed, looking like a bastion of society, and I was wandering around in pink pajamas with blue crocs and ripped off shirt sleeves, so normally it would be me that would be the object of some discrimination in a nice café like the Prague –

Verity: Had you been in the U.S., absolutely, or even in Western Europe, But in Beirut, you were cool, different. Me, I was first of all brown.

Blue: And I remember McQueen, walking around in Marseilles, which is just the epicenter of racism, of skins forced apart, and a gang of kids were hanging out, and he heard them speaking in Arabic about how they would jump him and take his money, and just when they were getting to their feet, with a few moments to spare, he said to them in Arabic: “Why you talking about me like that, you motherfuckers!” And they were laughing and calling him brother, slapping his hands, hugging, and he told me, “Dude, in another two minutes, I would have probably been sitting here with a broken jaw.” And that to me is a very French story.

Verity: Yeah, I remember. But, what, he's Arab, so now you're not gonna jump the guy? There are alliances but they can be thin. In London there's a big East African community. Sometimes Sudan falls under North Africa, sometimes under East Africa. Bottom line is I got jumped by five Somali kids after I had had about a 10-minute discussion with them. One of them started mouthing off, the other ones sided with him and we got off the bus and I had five Somali kids all over me.

Blue: Once they realized that you had Sudanese blood?

Verity: Not even. They knew I had Sudanese blood from the beginning. It started out, yes, we were all East African or we're all from the Horn, but then very quickly, that didn't make a difference anymore. So the alliances are there but they're not as strong as you might think they are.

Blue: Do you get a lot of sort of aggro from the TSA in airports or the police in the Imperial City? Do you get a feeling from Americans that you are a threat going back to September 2001, of being somebody who will blow up the ground they’re standing on or the job they’re working on? Do you get that sensation from people?

Verity: Absolutely. I say absolutely without hesitation. Some people will tell you it’s just in your head. But if you feel it, you feel it.

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Roland Verity is an underground poet with a foot in the Imperial City and a foot in Islam. Like most poets, he has a day job, and his is a serious one. He's a public health official who works 18-hour days on behalf of wounded refugees, setting up hospital facilities in areas of conflict. He has worked in Sierra Leone, Palestine, Jordan, Sudan, and went to high school and college in the USA and London. A cosmopolitanaut, he regularly encounters both forward and reverse racism, although he manages to keep his artistic expression remarkably free from bitterness.

You can see Verity acting in a small video produced by Blue and Sandie Black for BadTV, a spoof of the final scenes from "There Will Be Blood," wherein the participants are Obama and Hillary, with Obama played by Varity. The piece is called "there Will Be Delegates."

Hilariously, the piece was picked up by CNN the same day it was posted onto Youtube, and excerpted repeatedly on the silly American news cycle. Roland and Sandie make their appearances about a minute into the vid.