Foreign ghosts: Chinese-Black relations

Sylvia Yu:

When I asked my Chinese teacher and several friends what they think of black people, almost all of them say the same thing, "They're scary, they smell, they're loud … they're different from us."

My teacher Li Juan is a 20-something educated woman with a generous spirit. She's the kind that can't hurt a fly. But when I press her to tell me what she really thinks of Africans, she shakes her head in mild disgust and says she's afraid of them.

One Chinese journalist told me that she believes black men have an abnormally high sex drive. Her friends believe that one can get AIDS from sleeping with black men.

It seems pretty difficult for a black person to live in China. My friend’s African friends know it could take a long time to get home from a social outing. That’s because many taxis speed up, instead of slowing down whenever they see black people.

That happens regularly to Jean-Marc Agnero, a Beijing resident from the Ivory Coast. "If I'm standing by a white person, a taxi driver will pass me by and stop in front of the white guy," he says.

I asked a middle aged Chinese driver about this and he explained, "Black people are poor and the men are usually really big and intimidating looking. So that's why taxi drivers don't like to pick them up. Sometimes they don't pay."

Agnero is an articulate and thoughtful 20-year-old, fluent in English and French. The son of two diplomats has been living in Beijing for the last 7 years and feels bothered that the Chinese are becoming more openly racist towards blacks. "When I first got here the Chinese were impressed to see black people. We're new to them," he says, "they used to touch my hair and skin. Some of them touched my skin to check if it was dirty."

Agnero has also been charged almost double what his Caucasian friends pay for entry fees to clubs. "We have a responsibility in this," he says. "Sometimes I hear black people fight on the streets and everywhere. Some black people have bad attitudes, but we are not all the same. It's going to take a long time for the Chinese people's attitudes to change."

Canadians Sally and Alvin (not their real names) can vouch for the difficulties, and subtle and sometimes not so subtle discrimination. The married couple have lived in different parts of China working as English teachers.

Not too long ago, they were applying for teaching jobs in a smaller city when the person in charge of hiring offered Sally a job, but she profusely apologized and said she couldn't hire Alvin even though she wanted to. The reason? Sally is Caucasian, and her husband is from the Dominican Republic.

The parents would pull their kids out of class because they don't want a black teacher, the woman said. In the smaller cities and in Beijing Alvin had a hard time finding work. He eventually started working at a cafe.

The Middle Kingdom mentality