Blinded By My White

I'm used to mzungu. It's the single most frequently uttered word in my presence. Matatu drivers shout it as they pass. School kids scream it like the word "recess" as they run to the fence. Motorcyclists slow on the road for a fist-bump, saying it with a half-smile. Women with buckets on their heads speak it under their breath as I jog by, the way I might notify Sarah that I just saw a giraffe loping through Pike Place Market. It's jarring to so readily be identified first and foremost by my foreignness -- by my whiteness -- every time I step out the door. And it's not that it isn't understandable or even, in plenty of cases, endearing. But it's an otherness that is so entirely unshakable that hot and tired, waiting for a matatu to depart, it is hard not to fight the urge to permanently rearrange the man's nose whose high-pitched How are you? mockery has begun to feel like clockwork, hoping that I can relieve him of the inconvenience of having to pinch his face the next time he wants to make fun of white people. It is a rallying cry of schoolchildren; a factual observation of pedestrians and motorists; and the vocabulary of overt racism for a select few. Unlike the "Run, whiteboy run!" yells I would elicit heading down a dirt road in Jamaica, mzungu's meaning is more ambiguous; the term itself doesn't so much mean one thing or another as its usage and the speaker's intent seem to define the word. So it was with almost no sense of registered shock when a little girl in a red-and-white polka dot bathing suit, waist-deep on the steps of a kiddie pool, began tracing my every step with her eyes. Only slightly more surprising was that her singular focus detracted from her careful balance, landing her face down in the water. Now, thrashing her arms and legs out of the reach of the pool bottom, she appeared unable to lift her head. Or at least she hadn't figured that part out before I scooped her up by the armpit. Mzungu. Craning necks. Widely used. Nearly fatal.