"Umuzungu!"
It's hurled at me from across the street. It's tossed from the seats of bikes and from passing car horns. It's catching up to me with the pitter-patter of school children's laughing feet. It sees me coming from an impossibly long way off. As I wade through the world, this word pools behind me in swirls of whispers and shared looks.
Umuzungu. Foreign. Umuzungu. Rich.
Umuzungu. White.
I am umuzungu.
I have not been anonymous for one day in Rwanda, and as this word attaches itself to me every morning, I am again reminded of the privilege of anonymity I enjoy in the United States. It has taken me 23 years and a journey across the world to feel "other" because of my skin color. Some people are made to feel that from birth.
But comfortable anonymity seems to be the only part of my racial privilege I left in the U.S. The rest of it slipped in silently among my dresses and scarves, and has seen fit to accompany me everywhere.
It came along when my I went to a soccer game in Huye, a town in the southern province. While hordes of Rwandan and Congolese fans were pushed back by police and threatened with nightsticks, my friends and I stood to the side-unsure of what to do and unwilling to enter the fray for fear of injury. As I looked up toward the gate a guard gave me an almost imperceptible nod, and just like that-me, my two white friends, and the three young Rwandan boys that made up our party were invited in.
The same issues of race and privilege that plague my home country have confronted me anew here in Rwanda, and I don't have all the answers about how to fix these systems. In fact, most days, I feel like I don't have any of the answers.
I have arrived only at this: I cannot change these systems on my own, but I also can't passively accept this unearned power, this privilege. I can't passively accept a world where Rwandan children can correctly assume by my skin color that I have money I can give them. I can't passively accept a world where my friends of color are daily profiled and marginalized-labeled with words like "dangerous" and "thug"- while, rather than being racially likened to the centuries of dangerous white colonists who destroyed, exploited, and enslaved this continent, I am welcomed into homes, classrooms, and congregations as a "special visitor".
I cannot passively accept this world. I am called to not passively accept this world.
So I will continue to wrestle with the privilege I packed in my suitcase, the privilege that will inevitably land on U.S. soil with me in a few short months. I will work to monitor my own actions, especially those that contribute to these systems of privilege and oppression. I will try to listen to the struggles of communities of color more than I talk about my own opinion. I will seek out stories from the voices that history and culture have silenced for so long.
And I will probably mess up...a lot.
But especially in those moments, I will pray. I will pray for mercy from those who suffer under the heel of oppression, to whose burden I too often thoughtlessly add my own weight. I will pray for mercy from a God who has demanded I "do justice", who so frequently watches me fall painfully short. I will pray for mercy for a broken world, that we may find a way to knit the torn fabric of our shared humanity-in all its many skin colors and sexualities and nationalities and religions and genders-back together in love.
