This week that is about to end has been intense in several aspects. Yesterday, PLATAFORMA published a story about racism that marked me.
It’s not that I didn’t know what racism is. I know and even felt it in my skin, even though it is what many people call white.
However, from a very young age, I was accustomed, by virtue of the places where I lived, to live with diversity. I had friends of different colors and shapes. And that never led me to question anything, believe me. For me, the maxim has always been: all different, all the same, in everything from color to the choice of the football club.
I always lived well with these realities, because I always thought they were normal. I don’t even question it, on principle.
Sometimes they asked me: ‘Would you have a colored girlfriend?’ Or ‘Can you imagine having a colored child?’. In addition to the bizarre question – as if these choices were so linear – the “colored” leaves me with hives. By heart? Which color? Blue? Red? Green?
Anyway, it is these ridiculous nuances of the human being that we must combat. Racism is something that exists and is global. It’s not just white to black or yellow to white, and so on. It is also white to white and black to black. And nobody wants to talk about it.
The story I wrote and photographed, and was published yesterday here on this website and in the paper edition where the headline is a story of sentiment. A story with several stories: eight, of people who live arm in arm with racism, because they were simply born with a different color from the one that is usually, out of malice or ignorance, superior to the others.
This story marked me. Listening to the testimony of these people made me go through, for several days, something that I took for granted: the existence of diversity.
*Plataforma portuguese editor
