Saturday 16 February 2008

Pic of the day: Hopefully if all children play The Sims 2, they will get used to thinking of skin color as purely cosmetic, the way the sims do. We're not there yet, but we're getting there, I think. (Screenshot from The Sims 2, of course.)

Short: Black politicians

It was a short career for Norway's first dark-skinned member of government, Manuela Ramin-Osmundsen. But not because of her color. I would almost say "of course not", given that Norwegians are very politically correct in these matters. Too much so, actually, but I'll be back to that in a moment.

The reason Ramin-Osmundsen had to leave her minister post was her maneuvers to get a good old friend into an important job. As the job was up for renewal, the man who had held it for the last four years was fully qualified, but was replaced by Ramin-Osmundsen's good friend. The nepotism was not the worst problem, though. The real problem was that Ramin-Osmundsen lied about it. And when details leaked out in the press, she admitted only what was already known, and continued to lie about the rest until it too came to light. She even told a witness that it would be "in everyone's best interest" to not let the truth be known. After this, there was no way she could continue.

There is obviously no connection between her skin color and her behavior. In fact, it is doubtful that there is any connection between her background abroad and her behavior, though this cannot be entirely excluded: She hails from Martinique, a Carribean island with a somewhat different branch of Western culture than ours. She has a French university education and has lived in Norway starting 1991, and is married here for some time.

But the really interesting part is that her skin color was not used in her defense. I believe the American expression for this is "playing the race card." In Norway, outright racism is taboo and mainly found among louts and drunks. It carries a heavy social stigma. On the other hand, we are experts on soft racism: To not hold foreigners to our own high standards. We don't say this out loud, like "we can't expect black people to be as good as us", but there are various vague and indirect ways of excusing them. There was however little or nothing of this in the mainstream press and broadcasting this time, and this bodes well for the nation.

I hope to see more of this in the future. Not more mistakes by people of color, but more of them being held to the same standards as us palefaces. And I hope Americans will do the same, despite the heavy shackles of the past that still weigh on the souls of not only the black but the white people as well. After all, color is all in the mind. To group people by skin color is no more sane than to group them by height or blood type or the length of their fingers.