We Tried The White Countryside But Racism Made Us Come Back

asadifardini (21)in #news • 4 years ago

My husband is white and I am black. When I got pregnant, we decided to move to the countryside. We wanted a house with a garden and rent out there was much cheaper. We found a beautiful farmhouse right out of a Town & Country magazine, about 20 kilometers outside Geneva, Switzerland. It wasn’t far from where the singer and the Genesis band drummer Phil Collins lived.

The farmhouse was rustic and spacious, with a cozy feel to it. There were numerous hiking trails in the vicinity, and I could already see myself rolling in the hay and living the exciting outdoor life I had always craved. We moved in during my first trimester as I looked forward to a fit pregnancy full of lots of fresh air and walks in the Swiss countryside. I was completely unprepared for how things would turn out.

I should have noticed that despite our house being in the center of the village, surrounded by many other dwellings, no one acknowledged our presence or came out to say “hello” when we arrived. There were passerby’s for sure, but whenever I tried to make eye contact, they looked away. I put it all up to the fact that we were new and that they needed time to adjust. After a month of being systemically avoided and ignored, I began to realize that there was something wrong.

One evening, my husband and I decided to grab a pizza at the local pizzeria. We figured it would be an opportunity to meet some of our neighbors and eventually make some friends. We entered the noisy restaurant and the entire room fell silent as everyone interrupted whatever they were doing to stare at us. Some seemed surprised and even shocked to see us. Their mouths hung open in bewilderment. There were no amicable looks sent our way. I immediately felt uneasy and apprehensive, and as we walked towards the bar area, I whispered to Oscar:

“Why don’t we order the pizzas to go instead?”
My husband nodded his approval and placed our order with the waitress.
I felt all the eyes in the room on my back like treacherous daggers, digging in, inflicting inconsolable pain. We calmly took seats to wait for the pizzas but my fight or flight reflexes were fully on alert.
That evening, as we hurriedly walked home in the cool spring air, I felt an immense amount of sadness. Clearly, the people in the village disliked us. We were new, and maybe they didn’t like strangers, but what I had witnessed during those few minutes in the pizzeria, was their hatred. It was the type steeped only in deep racism and hatred of blackness.
We had only lived there for a month and weren’t ready to move out just so soon so we decided to stick it out. We decided that we would try and win over the villagers. For months, we tried to socialize with the community: we engaged with the mailman when he came around, we attempted to speak to our neighbors, the shopkeepers, and the farmers in the fields but we were ignored or made to feel unwelcome whenever we did. It was a very lonely time for us.

4 years ago in #news by asadifardini (21)

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We Tried The White Countryside But Racism Made Us Come Back

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