The First Conversation

The number of emails Bandar and I passed back and forth reached into the double digits before we were finally able to meet face to face. His messages typically consisted of one line and gave me no hint of what he was truly like and I was ready for anything when we finally sat down and had our first conversation.

That said, I wasn't really expecting the fellow who sat down across from me. With long hair and mirrored aviator glasses, I could tell he was older than me by at least a few years. In actuality, it turns out he is 30 years old while I'm a mere 19. The age gap surprised him as much as me, and we talked briefly about how I was young for my grade. From there, the conversation was all over the map.

It took a while to get used to how Bandar spoke; he used the right words and in the right ways but with a distinctively Saudi Arabian accent. It wasn't too hard to follow him, what was harder was paying attention to how I was talking. I could tell that I lost him a couple times, either going too fast or slurring words in just the wrong way. He never asked for clarification and preferred instead to move on to another topic, which made me feel bad. The goal was never to be that annoying American who spoke so slowly as to be insulting, but I didn't want to be insensitive either. With luck, I will improve at this over time and become more comfortable in my conversations with Bandar.

Of the many topics we breezed through, I remember most distinctly our discussion about various American cities. I was talking about where I was from in Michigan and mentioned that I was from the Detroit area, because that tends to be the only city anyone recognizes from my beloved home state. Bandar did know the city and asked if it was "dangerous". I was a little confused, and he tried to clarify by mentioning the "black people" there and asked again if that made it dangerous. He had been looking into universities across the country but some of them were in dangerous areas and he was very interested in which areas where dangerous and which weren't.

The confusion lessened slightly, and I understood that he was talking about gangs, and Detroit sure does have a gang presence and a big percentage of the residents are in fact African-American. Still, I have a deep love for Detroit. The museum of art there is wonderful, and I enjoy going and hearing music at the concert hall, but it's true that these landmarks are surrounded by run down and abandoned buildings. I didn't dwell on this point and chose rather to talk about how I live an hour and a half away from the city and we moved on to other topics.

Later, though, it returned when Bandar was talking about his brother who is studying in Seattle, another "dangerous" city. I was surprised by this. As a Michigander halfway across the country, you get used to people (a) not knowing where Michigan is and confusing it with Minnesota, (b) thinking Detroit encompasses the whole of the state, and (c) assuming that upwards of twenty people are shot every day by gangs in Detroit. I'm used to these (completely inaccurate) assumptions. But I had never thought of Seattle as a dangerous city. Seattle! Do dangerous people really want to live in a place as dreary and rainy as Seattle? I suppose that I had an incredulous look on my face and so Bandar explained that there are a lot of Mexicans there, dealing drugs in the city streets.

For a while, even after Bandar and I parted ways, I couldn't help but think that these opinions were horribly racist. Not all Mexicans deal drugs in Seattle and not all African-Americans run with gangs in Detroit. Still, I didn't want to just assume that this man who I had hardly even met and only talked to for an hour was a racist. That's jumping to conclusions, so I kept turning over these thoughts in my mind. I remembered then something else Bandar had said. As the conversation was winding down, he thanked me for talking to him. In his experience, 80 percent of Americans don't talk to outsiders and I think that he was being generous with that number.

In this country, people have a tendency to associate with people like themselves. There's a number of reasons for this, and I could easily list five off the top of my head, but you and I both know it's true. Outsiders are barely acknowledged, let alone welcomed. This is true whether you're from Saudi Arabia like Bandar, an illegal immigrant from the south, or just an urban boy with the wrong skin color. So when Bandar talks about the African-Americans making Detroit dangerous or the Mexicans dealing drugs in Seattle, whose racism is showing: his or ours?

Can I blame this Saudi Arabian for picking up on stereotypes we pass around to each other? He hadn't been to either of these cities, he had just heard about them. It was uncomfortable to hear him say it but sometimes it's uncomfortable to look into a mirror. This wasn't Saudi Arabian culture staring me in the face, it was American.