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It wasn’t until I started traveling internationally that I came up with this notion of Black girl privilege. I was in Egypt when the people there, trying to guess my ethnicity, said I was everything from Sudanese to Brazilian. It occurred to me then, that I could have been from several places in the world…like a lot of places.
That lesson was reaffirmed for me when in Cuba. This group of obnoxious and drunk White, American men were trying to talk to, flirt with my sister. And since we could have easily been Cuban, my sister, with her limited Spanish, pretended she didn’t speak English. She told the boys she had a boyfriend and that everyone in our group had boyfriends and that was the end of the discussion.
I thought it was a brilliant plan; and perfectly executed but turns out, my sister was not the first or only person to think of using a perceived language barrier to avoid communication with an obnoxious, White man.
This time that woman was of Japanese descent and the obnoxious White man was y’all president Donald Trump.
During the G20 summit, Trump was seated next to Akie Abe, the first lady of Japan. During that time, Abe and Trump must not have exchanged any words because during an interview with The New York Times, Trump said that it was “hard” sitting next to Abe. While he thought she as a “terrific woman,” the fact that she “doesn’t speak English” made the meeting difficult.
“Like, nothing, right? Like zero?” The Times reporter asked.
“Like, not hello,” Trump said.
But honey, Abe speaks English alright. She speaks it so well, that in 2014, she delivered a keynote address at the Ford Foundation, in…you guessed it, English.
Now that I think about it, I don’t even know if Abe was pretending not to speak English. She probably just made an conscious choice not to speak to him at all, in any language. And after the way Donald Trump has treated other world leaders, specifically refusing to shake Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of the Germany’s hand, I would say she was well justified.
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