By: Gilbert Pilayre
Invisibility
I was born in the tropics.
So naturally my skin has lots of melanin that causes it to turn very brown during the summer.
When I use the tram to commute, I sometimes find myself alone in my seat like people don’t see me at all.
It is fine with me. At least I can read my book or scroll my smartphone in peace.
Yet I find it still disturbing.
It was in Austria that people found a way at discriminating other people, people who they think are not worthy of attention unless something bothers them.
Like a friend who ate peanuts from shells and just threw them around mindlessly.
The white people perfected the way of snubbing other people whom they think doesn’t belong to the Aryan race.
This feeling burns in me like it’s a cause for justice.
But it’s not.
I have this book by Franz Fanon that case-studied the behavior of people who think they are superior as well as people who think they are inferior.
They are titled “the wretched of the earth” and “black skins, white masks” Franz Fanon was a psychiatrist.
He studied both the psychology of people who felt “superior” and those who felt otherwise.
Basically, many of the foreigners (Fremde Leute) are aliened to being judged by the color of their skin.
There was once an incident where a visiting black lawyer attended perhaps a seminar at the UN.
Ticket inspectors climbed the train and asked passengers to show their validated tickets.
When it was the lawyer’s turn, he fumbled through his coat and couldn’t find it.
Maybe he was in a hurry to find it and must have looked in other pockets of his coat.
Decent people such as lawyers won’t dare to risk themselves such humiliation, common sense would tell us that.
Despite that, the inspector took to opportunity to slur the man.
He said something like this this man from the jungle forgot his ticket.
This caused the said lawyer to demand from the inspector what he meant by what he said.
He just laughed along with his companions.
This caused me to think of the time when Jews were at the receiving end of such humiliation.
Somehow it ended their careers as lawyers or writers, even as university academics.
That incident reminds me of Viktor Frankl.
He stitched his university dissertation inside his coat, but a guard found it and punished him for that.
The guard may just be of lowly social background but saw the opportunity to raise himself above Vienna’s Director of the neurological Department of the former Rothschild Hospital.
Cruelty is often just insecurity in disguise.
In the end, the tram seat left empty beside me, and the spiteful words of a train inspector are symptoms of the same ancient ailment.
Cruelty is rarely a display of strength; it is almost always insecurity wearing a mask of power.
When people diminish others based on the color of their skin or the origin of their blood, they are not elevating themselves—they are merely fleeing from their own smallness.
As both Fanon and Frankl understood, our true task is not to absorb the hatred of those who choose to be blind, but to preserve our own humanity in the face of it.
The color of my skin is a mark of where I come from, but how I choose to hold my dignity is a testament to who I am.
