How to Tell Someone to go Back to Their Shithole Country Without Being Racist
Imagine a rainy day, in a cold, summer-less northern city. It’s not even rainy, it’s just wet and cold, as if you were inside a dark cloud and it was raining below you.
It’s nothing like tropical rainy days, where it pours a waterfall. The streets turn into rivers, everything grasps itself in place to not be washed away. Then, half an hour later, it’s over. The sky opens up, the sun comes out, things begin operating again.
Northern rains come slow and stay for ages. A particular type of torture. It doesn’t wash over you, it shoots arrows at you from all directions. You don’t feel its wetness on your skin, you feel its bite on your bones.
You can’t help but imagine yourself on a warm, sandy beach and the sizzling sensation of the sun on your skin. Is that where people go when they die?
If there are people around, you feel like you have to say something, to not be seen caught in your own head. And it slips out:
“I fucking hate this weather.”
If you are a person of color, speaking a non-local language, and there are white locals around you, chances are the following is going through the minds of some, and only the most daring of them will speak out in frustration:
“Why don’t you go back to your country, then?”
Some of these daring white people may well be the kind that goes on vacation in tropical places and indeed go back to their country. Some of them romanticize impoverished lives, like selling watered down gasoline on the side of the road in Indonesia. Some might “seriously” consider not leaving because they love it so much, saying, “people are so happy here even though they have so little”. Many flirt and have sex without commitment. But, mostly, they always go back to their nest. To their country.
The mistake is thinking this is a two-way route. That if others can go back, so can you. Although the sacrifices of this journey are not the same each way. Do they know of sacrifices that aren’t choices? Do they know the difference between the choices immigrants and expats make on their journeys? What do they know about you?
It might as well be a tantrum:
“If you love the jungle so much, why don’t you marry it, huh?”
You know, though, that it was white people that made the jungle unlivable. It was white people who mapped, chopped, and sold your people’s land. It was these white people who invented your country, and you are not thankful. Because they did that to jail you in it, while they suck the life out of the jungle, and out of you.
White people often see themselves as the epitome of human civilization, even you may have too, until you realized most of them don’t know shit. Many don’t even know they are racist, because, how can the greatest people be racist? How can their investments, “developments” and charities be unwelcome?
You, in this situation, are not being racist if you say back:
“Why don’t your people stay in this shithole country and out of my ancestor’s land?”