Greetings in Spanish, Goodbyes in Italian
Racism has several working mechanisms. Ignorance is the simplest and probably the most common—not malice, just a complete failure of imagination about other people’s inner lives. Then there’s the version calcified from one bad experience, reinforced by the wrong group of friends until it becomes an alternative cosmology. And then there’s displaced rage, the kind that has nothing to do with the people it lands on but finds them convenient. It appears openly—in comment sections, at regional festivals, in dark streets—and covertly, in offices and at checkout counters and in every small decision that tilts toward the familiar. Every version of it is unfair, inhuman, and profoundly, almost impressively stupid.
Growing up, my circle was always a mess of languages and kitchens and reference points. Not by design—just how it shook out. Friends with roots across a dozen countries, parents who cooked things I couldn’t name at first, music arriving from directions I hadn’t anticipated. Some of my closest people have never spoken German as a first language. Some have never spoken anything else. What I’d lose without that mixture—in texture, in curiosity, in the basic pleasure of having my assumptions dismantled regularly—would be enormous. I greet people in Spanish. I say goodbye in Italian. In between I’m listening to Japanese pop music.
I came across an initiative that week, less interested in dramatic gestures against racism than in simply celebrating the pleasure of openness—the idea that it’s worth noting how much richer things get when the mix is wide. That felt right to me. Grand declarations have a short half-life. What actually works is slower: the years-long accumulation of ordinary contact, the gradual erosion of the idea that difference is threatening. Some people will get there eventually on their own. Some won’t. But the mix keeps getting richer regardless, and that—the creativity that lives inside the friction of people with different reference points sharing the same spaces—is worth raising a glass to.