Charlize Thiron, actress. This challenge has been hurled at me far too many times for me to count. What do you call yourself? Over the twelve years I have been living in Europe, I have come to realize I have some kind of strange Karma. The kind of karma that seems to propel Africans in my direction in social situations…The Caucasian kind!!!! I am more African than you! I am an African American… you are not! My family…both the European and the African…arrived in American before the Revolution and my Native American ancestors…well… you know….
Black American seemed more precise… from an American viewpoint, anyway. Some kind of underground movement designed to confuse and contort American perceptions of something.
The ones I have met have families who have been in Africa as long as mine have been in America. Besides, if both their parents were born in Africa, they would be more African than President Barack Obama. This is a reprint of a Blog I wrote last year at the beginning of the tourist season here in the South:. The tourist season has officially begun here on the French Riviera. What always arrives with the hordes is the inevitable and harsh criticism of French driving habits. My question is why have the French, in particular, been given such a bad rap as drivers?
I have been recipient many times of French driving hospitality. What I have found is that my French friends and acquaintances have displayed skill and grace at ever turn…so to speak. How may of you who have criticized the French actually studied for the French Permis de Conduire? Want to know how I came to this conclusion? Because it is expensive, difficult and studying for it would actually result in an evolution of thinking that would cause you to realise that you had no prior knowledge of what it takes to understand of the Gallic approach to manoeuvring safely through life in France.
My philosophy is in order to criticize the French you should have been educated in France and taught by the French. How else can one understand the cultural nuances of a country which has the power to seduce millions of people through its doors, whether they be rich or poor, yellow green or blue, to a place which is probably the most complicated in all of Europe?
