“Can I Call You Black?”

<h2>She was in my business administration class at a university where I was pursuing my second bachelor’s degree, because I couldn’t find a job with the first degree I held in history from my native country of Burundi, in East Africa</h2> I had come from a country not many people in North America knew was even a country, and some called it “Burma,” whenever I said I come from Burundi. So, to correct them, I always had to mention the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, Burundi’s northern neighbor and cousin country because of their socio-demographic similarities, such as ethnic makeup (Hutu, Tutsi, and Batwa ethnic groups), the language proximity, and the fact that both countries are former German and Belgian colonies. Unfortunately, this also means they shared their history of ethnic wars in very similar ways. The Rwandan genocide during which close to a million people were killed in three months while the world was watching and deciding whether this was a genocide or not, before it could intervene, would eventually be known in most of North America because of the movie, Hotel Rwanda. Meanwhile, in Burundi, the 1993 civil war was raging and lasted more than 10 years. It is estimated that more than 300,000 people were killed in Burundi during that time, and millions were displaced. This was why I ended up becoming a war refugee in Canada. When my university classmate, a 19-year-old white girl asked me whether she could call me black, we were doing our team assignment. I could tell she had been pondering the question in her mind for a while and thinking of the right way to ask me. We discussed how to better proceed with our team assignment, and I was reading something in my textbook when I heard her say: <a href="https://medium.com/fourth-wave/can-i-call-you-black-7baacc7edfea">Read More</a>