Lies, Damn Lies, and Cultural Stereotypes

And with that title, I’m gonna make a few.

People in Russia are dishonest, xenophobic, and racist—or so one might think after my Saturday. I began the day nervously gulping down muesli, the yogurt and raisins making me jitter with sugar high, staring at phone numbers of realty agencies. I have to make these calls, I told myself—I had put it off too long already. I managed to wait until after I had licked my bowl of the unnaturally purple “drinkable yogurt” and gathered any and everything I might need for the ordeal: Palm, computer, house and cell phone, two pens, and a pad of paper with my leading sentences chicken-scratched out in. The call did end up being unpleasant, but in an unexpected way.

I dialed on the house phone, waiting for Lyudmila of Rentaroom Realty to pick up. As soon as she did, I relaxed: I was the customer, after all, and she seemed eager enough to help me pay them for an apartment. After asking my name, however, she apparently lost all notion of being polite.

“Excuse me, ZEEK, but are you black?”

I hadn’t understood, and I asked her to please repeat what she had said. The next time, I got it, and I assured her, in a voice that I hope betrayed my anger, that I was not. She said okay; that Americans came in different shapes and sizes; but that she could continue, now, knowing that I was white. After getting other essential information, she made inquiries into the two places I was interested in and quickly called me back to tell me that one owner hadn’t picked up and that the other insisted on renting only to Russians.

I’ve been here before, so I know about the racism, but that was the first time that it had been threatened to be directed toward me. I was shocked that a realty agent would ask such a question of a potential client—wouldn’t she at least wait until we met, then judge whether or not anyone would rent to me? I suppose it just saved her time to ask me directly (before, by the way, she asked me my age, ideal price range, area preference, and how many rooms I wanted).

I hung up not really in the mood to make any more calls, so I went to a beautiful market on the west (rich) side of Moscow, called Dobromilovsky Rynok, only to get VERY ripped off by an awfully nice Azerbaijani man. At least he was just in it for the money, though, right? Would another foreigner have anything against me? I went home not feeling great—the picture-perfect grapes I had bought tasted less than the price warranted—only to find my (gay, black) roommate sitting on his bed looking gloomy. I asked him how the internet café was, and he told me that he never made it there—he had forgotten his metro card, so he just went to the grocery store, where he bought four large bags worth of groceries, started to leave, was roughly grabbed by a security guard, brought to a back room, and accused of shoplifting. An enormous, nasty woman, he told me, flung curses at him, gesturing crazily to a video-camera shot of him picking up some cheese, putting it down, and walking away. Luckily, Chris half-wailed, the security guard and policeman, who were subsequently ordered by the glowing red woman to pat him down, were rather nice, and quickly recognized that he was not to blame. He nonetheless had to sit for more than an hour while she told him that he ought to be ashamed of himself. By the time they let him go, he said that his burgers were thawing and his ice cream half-melted.

The point is that while I’ve enjoyed my time here a great deal—rainbows of produce and character-filled side streets do it for me—days like yesterday make me wonder why I came back. I don’t yet know what I want this blog to be, but I thought it important to describe that day—and not, like I joke uncomfortably in the beginning, to make stereotypes, but to note a few unpleasant streaks of behavior that exist in this culture. I haven’t witnessed first-hand anywhere the kinds of racism and xenophobia that still seem entrenched here. I guess it’s probably good to see for myself that it still exists and needs attention, but it's not easy to deal with. Here’s to hoping that ethnic Russians address these demons soon.