There are a few things I think people should know about me, I'm Ethiopian, obsessive and too opinionated for my own good. At my school, University of Texas at Dallas, I'm in the Habesha Student Union which includes students of Ethiopian and Eritrean heritage. In our last meeting we learned and discussed a lot about the Ethiopian and Eritrean identity. I suggested that because of our linguistic and cultural uniformity we are one people. The fact of the matter is, Eritrea was a colony of Italy that they carved from Northern Ethiopia in 1890, their state language is Tigrinya, my very Ethiopian family's mother tongue, and this division has not served either country well. Ethiopia then became a land locked country barred from the economic promises of many types of trade. And this hits home for me personally because not only do many members of my extended family identify as Eritrean but we have lost many family members in the Eritrean war that, in my view, was completely avoidable. Not to mention the ongoing conflict. That being said, my aim was to present my side in the most respectful way I knew how.
And what I thought was a harmless comment about us as Habesha people being one in the same spurred a visceral, enraged reaction from an Eritrean girl. I feared that I spoiled a great resource for friendship and networking and for the following days all I could do is obsess: obsess about the idea of someone hating me, obsess about the idea that I was no longer as much of an empath as I thought.
I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. I know everyone makes mistakes but I feel like because of my impulsivity, lack of social skills at times and stubbornness I have made more than the average person. But this time I am determined to learn from it, gain some perspective and better myself.
There are a few things I learned from this particular incident . One is that we are so much more than race, ethnicity and nationality. Her overreaction was, in my view, partly due to the notion that all or most of your identity comes from race, ethnicity or nationality. Even me who is endlessly fascinated by race and identity thinks of myself as passionate, kind, emotional, complex, and ambitious first and Ethiopian second. And it may seem naive or idealistic but I wish everyone in the world could see it that way. I wish someone could see themselves as a free spirit before identifying as a Tutsie or a Hutu, or as a hard working, ambitious go-getter before identifying as an Arab, or a dedicated community leader before identifying as a Hungarian. I really feel like that would go along way towards bridging the empathy gap.
Something else was made very clear, when someone is secure in who they are there is nothing anyone can say that would shake that. In Beyonce's Lemonade she quotes from a poem that reads "My Grandma said nothing real can be threatened." If someone were to tell me that Ethiopians were never really a free, uncolonized country, or Ethiopians aren't really Black, or it isn't a real identity, I would never react that way because I'm secure in who I am, and there is nothing any naysayer could tell me that would threaten that.
I'm also a huge people pleaser by nature so when I saw how upset she was I instantly begun apologizing. I told her I truly never meant to be hurtful. She responded " You couldn't hurt me, you're nobody, all you ever do is stir things up."
Now, wether I'm a nobody or somebody or something in between is irrelevant, but it got me thinking people who stir things up, especially when you look at history, are many things but they certainly are not "nobodies". In fact people like Ghandi, Malcolm X or Susan B. Anthony were what you would call a somebody precisely because they dared to stir things up, because they dared to question the present order of things.
Which brings me to the next lesson I learned/had reinforced for me after this incident, question everything. Read, research, discuss, try to connect the dots in ways that maybe the status quo doesn't want you to. People who question things like economic structures, or religion, or racial identities don't have explosive reactions to different perspectives the way people who passively accept everything they're told do.
The last lesson I learned from this is to develop the wisdom of discernment. As a headstrong, liberal, opinionated, feminist type I was never willing to back down and it hasn't always worked out well for me. I should have understood that declaring this opinion on such a sensitive subject would evoke a strong reaction but I felt compelled to speak my mind anyways. And sometimes the wise thing is to do is to simply surrender to the fact that you can't always change people's minds.
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