Beyond Pigment

We are undergoing a process of healing racial discrimination in many parts of the world and in this process many people are feeling attacked and held responsible for crimes and injustices that they and their ancestors have never participated in.

I would like to share my personal encounter with this issue.

About ten years ago in New Jersey, I was hanging out with a group of people that enjoyed Native American art and culture. Through the events and conversations, I picked up on a grudge towards the ‘white man’ feeling guilty for the injustice done in America to its original inhabitants. Later that year I visited my family in Slovakia and while chatting with my brother, who often listens to my unresolved issues, I expressed my frustration and guilt in connection with the ‘imperial nature of the white man’. During our conversation, he pointed out that I had pinned a behavior of certain people from a part of the world that I was not connected to culturally or genetically on an entire race. He said I appeared to be prejudiced against my own race. He reminded me that the Slavic tribes (people from Central and Eastern Europe) had undergone many raids and attacks of other tribes and nations such as Mongols, Turks, Romans, Germanic tribes, and even faced oppression of Eastern Slavs. Many were subjects to not only slavery but massacres (Western Elbe Slavic Tribes) while they themselves had not made attempts to conquer any other culture. He said we belonged to one of the least invasive and most peace-loving cultures.

The following parallel story that my brother shared with me has made a lasting imprint in my mind:

Diving Falcon and Bača Hužva

Bača – read Bachah, meaning: head shepherd 

Hužvaread Huzhvah, meaning: tough, resilient

Diving Falcon was sitting in front of his teepee thinking about hunting buffalo while Bača Hužva, on another continent, stretched before his cabin pondering whether it was time to move the sheep to a different pasture.
The son of Diving Falcon, Black Cloud, with a frown on his face covered with cider, squatted over a stone sharpening his arrowhead made from a hoop of a whisky barrel. His father agreed that he should join a war raid against the Crows. With a bit of luck he just might steal a horse. He had no idea that the year was being marked 1848 by the count of the white man. Americans just won a war with Mexico and took over the southern lands. They were killing Natives as well as Mexicans. Half mad gangs of migrants were rushing to California in the wave of the gold fever. They would soon find gold in the Black Mountains. By then Black Cloud would own his own rifle which he would hold tight on the way to meet his honorable death. He would die with a song on his lips and his ancestors would one day read about him in the words of the English language. Meanwhile, Bača Hužva’s son was likewise sitting by a stone. He has just returned from a meeting of Slavic nations broken up by Austrian police. After the speech of Ludevít Velislav Štúr he helped build barricades in preparation of the upcoming battle. He was cleaning the barrel of his shotgun while humming a song called “Lighting over Tatra Mountain.” Soon he would meet up with his loyal clan brothers on a warpath for independence of the Slovak nation from the serfdom of Austrian-Hungarian Empire. They would meet in Moravia. He would sleep at the barn of a friend. Later that night he would be visited by a farmer’s daughter who took a liking to him while handing him a cup of water. The next day a bullet would rip up part of his shoulder blade. He would die with a song on his lips unaware of the child conceived during the passionate encounter. His little brother would one day get to attend the first Slovak Gymnasium in Revuca before the Hungarian officials ordered it closed and where Hungarian would to be mandated as a school language. The teacher would hit his hands with a wicker stick for speaking to his friend in Slovak, his native tongue. Around the same time, American authorities would cut  the hair of the little son of Black Cloud before dragging him off to a boarding school. He would be forced to bite soap when speaking the ‘dirty’ language of the Sioux. The teacher would hit him on the back of his neck while drilling into his little head that English was the language of culture and ‘barbarian’ and ‘pagan’ languages were unclean. He would call him by a new strange name. The youngest son of Bača Hužva would be forced to speak in Hungarian to any officials that he came in contact with. He would enlist as a volunteer in the Czecho-Slovak Legions to continue the fight of his uncle.

Let us resist labeling and boxing one another and instead, let us bridge the races and cultures and unite in respect.

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