September 26, 2018 Nineties Movies In the Nineties, Race Didn’t Exist By Nafkote Tamirat From the poster for Gattaca (1997) In the summer of 1997, when I had just turned eleven, my mother decided my sister and I knew nothing and that it was up to her to fix it. We took a train to Washington, D.C., left our bags at an uncle’s house, and began a five-day odyssey through what felt like all of the museums that could possibly exist in the world. I was given a composition notebook, with instructions to take notes. I’ve retained little from our frenzied speed walking through places like the U.S. Mint, the Washington Monument, the Air and Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the Arlington National Cemetery, except for what I wrote in the capitalized block letters I’d adopted as my handwriting of the season. The single incident I’ve committed to memory took place in the Museum of American History, at an exhibition on Jim Crow. I was gazing up at large artistic renderings of black people sitting in the backs of buses, not being permitted entrance to swimming pools, drinking from water fountains below the word colored, when a white boy, younger than I was, and his father, drew closer. The father was earnestly explaining how long, long ago, those people couldn’t sit in the same part of the bus as these people. I was struck by how he never said “white” or “black”: in my family, when you mentioned a new acquaintance or friend, the first question was always “White, black, or Ethiopian?” and then judgments were made accordingly. Read More
June 18, 2018 Nineties Movies In the Nineties, No One Cared About Getting a Job By Nafkote Tamirat Still from Pulp Fiction. “So what then, day jobs?” “Not in this life.” “What then?” —Pulp Fiction When I was a child and Americans asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them, “Famous.” This was enough to elicit laughter from the interrogating adult before they moved on to the next would-be astronaut or dancer in the room. Ethiopians never asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up because they already knew: a lawyer. Everyone in my family told everyone else in my family, Nafkote is going to be a lawyer. I heard it so many times that I believed it. Later, when either Americans or Ethiopians asked me what I was going to be, I’d repeat, “Lawyer,” and everyone (including me) would feel enormously satisfied. In my third year of university, a teacher accused me of plagiarism. The allegations were untrue (every member of the executive committee agreed that the paper in question was so awful that only an idiot would think it worth copying), and I was declared innocent and allowed to continue my studies. Despite my name being cleared, I was given an F, I guess in case I got any funny ideas. “Can I still go to law school?” I asked my college dean. His doubt was tangible, as were his good intentions. “The important thing is, if you really want to be a lawyer, no one can stop you.” For the first time, I understood two things: 1. I did not actually want to be a lawyer, and 2. if I did not want to be a lawyer, I had to find something else to be. Read More