Correction

Oct. 4th 2007

Hello people,

I just received a furious email from a friend, ranting about the backwardness of Greece in terms of tolerance, and while I admire her justified indignation, I just wanted to set something straight, as I realize I gave a rather one-sided picture when I told you about my mixed-couple friends.

First of all, not everyone in Greece thinks like the "peripteras" [guy from the "periptero", remember?]. There are a lot of open-minded people here, but they tend to be found in the more artistic/cultivated spheres. At the risk of sounding socially biased, I would say that a "peripteras" is not usually one of them.

And even among those who don't get it, there is not what I call "active racism". In other words, no one will insult minorities (be they gay, black or anything else), and most importantly, there are no acts of violence against minorities - unlike in France, Germany, England, and even the US, which are supposedly more "tolerant" countries yet have regular occurences of beatings, murders, and/or arson against foreigners and their property.

Instead, there is what I call "racism of ignorance" - in other words, Greeks have only recently been exposed to more minorities in their country.
It is only in recent years that they have started seeing a regular influx of Africans, Asians, etc. into their society. As a result, they know close to nothing about them, (except maybe their aunt's cleaning lady, sadly) and there is this sort of "They don't bother us, but let's stay in our respective groups"- attitude which I most definitely intend to contribute to change!

There is also, even among educated people, a lack of understanding that some comments which they perceive as completely natural or some questions they perceive as completely innocent are in fact very offensive. My favourite example? A few years ago, a friend of mine asked my half-Filipina friend if her mother's eyes were "like this", while he grabbed the edge of his eyelids and drew them into a slit.

See, he liked my friend. Thought she was great, in fact. He didn't mean to offend her, but since she looks more latina than Asian, I guess he wanted to make sure he got it right, (or more likely whether I had gotten it right)... He certainly never thought she might be offended by such a question and could not understand my rage when I started screaming that this was unacceptable. To him, it was a perfectly legitimate question, with absolutely no harm intended. He felt I was way overreacting.

I have also noticed that a lot of it has to do with culture and language rather than race. For example, in recent years there have been 1 or 2 Black actors/presenters on TV. But they were born and raised in Greece, and therefore have no accent. As a result, they seem to be completely integrated into Greek society. Now, of course, I don't know these people personally, so I have no idea whether they encounter a different, more subtle kind of racism every day, but my guess is that most of the time, just having the same cultural background as native Greeks (in fact, they ARE native Greeks) gives them more legitimacy in some people's mind than me.

After all, I was born abroad, have lived abroad most of my life, and the slightest foreign accent can be detected when I speak certain words - or at least the few grammatical mistakes I make betray my foreign origins, as some acquaintances were quick to point out. Even a close friend of mine said to me that I wasn't really Greek, certainly not like her, who was born and raised there. See? If your own friends have that kind of attitude, what hope is there from the rest of society?

But I'm working on it, fear not.

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SOME FEEDBACK ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER:

Cory M:
Well, I'm certainly happy that there is no serious racism in Greece, alone among the countries of the world. Must be very nice.