This is China! BLOG

Black Like Me in China

A reporter for America’s National Public Radio recently interviewed me for a piece on the Marketplace radio program. The reporter wanted to know how I had been racially discriminated against as a black man doing business in China.

I said I hadn’t. Not even once. Not during the five years I’ve been living and working here in China. And I’ve traveled to dozens of cities in China.

Marketplace is a nightly half-hour business program that comes on during the early evening, pretty much wherever you are in the States. I’d listened to the program for nearly fifteen years before I moved to China. Never had I heard an angle for a Marketplace story quite like this. The reporter explained to me that Beyonce, the black female performer that fell off-stage during a Youtube take, was performing in China, which prompted the report. I guess she wanted to know if it was going to be safe for her to take Chinese people’s money.

I wryly informed the reporter - who was a rather pleasant fellow in conversation - that I would not participate in the interview if the exclusive angle of the report was that there was rampant racial discrimination in China and that black folks were targeted specifically.

Surprised, curious, the reporter asked me why my experience seemed so at odds with that of a couple black women he had interviewed. I explained that for one, Chinese people consider me coffee-colored, as they like to say in Chinese language, not black in the same way the word is used in the States; that is, as a broad stroke term for any exhibiting signs he has at least one percent of African blood. So, Chinese people 95 percent of the time don’t know what country I’m from, since I don’t fit their stereotype of an American: tall, blond-haired, blue eyed; nor of a basketball star – too short, not dark enough.

But it doesn’t really matter to them anyway, because on a good day I am a businessman representing millions in dollars in projects to them. So they don’t care if I’m green with antennae sticking from my bald pate. Intimate to a Chinese there is a possible business transaction and they will become your best friend - at least until the money lasts.

Next, I told him, I speak Chinese. And as most people in the world know, the vast majority of Americans are linguistically challenged; they only speak their own flat, nasal dialect of the English language. Also, Chinese people, in their blind adoration for their culture and language, figure any foreigner that can communicate with them in their own language can’t be half bad after all. A lot of their stereotypes – no matter from which country you hail – fall away.

And finally, I finished, I do believe from the experience I’ve had working in China and in other countries that nine-tenths of getting along in a foreign land with the natives is the way you present yourself. So if you have taken your emotional baggage from your home country to a foreign land, you will certainly find an audience willing to throw the baggage back at you. That is, look for discrimination, and you will find it.

So, yes, there is discrimination in China, even racial. But I do believe you either have to go looking for it in Business or manufacture it yourself during business transactions.

Chinese in their hurry hurry, convoluted world have neither the time nor the inclination for anything but the stereotypes they picked up while on the farm; and 1.2 billion of them are either still on the farm or just came off it. Chinese have neither the experience nor sensitivities that blacks around the world - especially in hurtful America - have gained through institutionalized slavery and then socialized discrimination. Nor is their much of a sense of Political Correctness in China (to wit, the public bathroom sign in Shanghai that reads: “for Crippled People”).

The bottom line in today’s China: “money talks”. Chinese are equal opportunity opportunists. If you’ve clearly got money and are interested in doing a business transaction with them, they don’t care the color of your skin or the origin of ancestry. However, if you’re a black-skinned student from Africa – clearly a poor country, every Chinese figures – then you will likely not get the time of day from them. (Though you may get clubbed over the head, as did a group of African students on Beijing’s bar street, Sanlitun, in September of this year; one of the unfortunates clubbed was the son of the Ambassador from Greneda. In an attempt to squelch African drug gangs that peddle drugs to expats in Beijing, the police went about the affair in a manner comparable to that of the French – or the Americans. In this and any other bit of profiling the Chinese attempt to do, the Chinese are more guilty of blatant stupidity than of institutionalized racism against blacks).

Chinese do have their stereotypes, specifically about black-skinned Africans (and Indians, too), and their pre-conceptions are unflattering the least. But I feel far safer and freer to be myself in China as a “black man” than in the United States, where after a couple hundred years Americans still haven’t gotten their institutional act together: I’ve been stopped twice by the police and arrested once in the States – just for being a dark speck floating in a glass of pasteurized milk; that is, in the wrong place at the wrong time, as I’ve been told.

I have neither been followed nor harassed nor arrested by police in China.

A bright fellow, the reporter responded that he would be willing to balance out the report if I’d come into the NPR studio in Shanghai for the interview. Which went swimmingly.

And now to listen for how the sound-bite expresses the most personal.

Bill Dodson
SUZHOU, China