"My nose made me look poor"

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Centuries of global white supremacy has left many white people in denial and most white and non-white people psychically damaged. As if we needed more evidence on the non-white side Channel 4 in London has been running a weekly series on race. I called a friend in London via Skype and was able to view the last 10 minutes of the most recent installment titled Bleach, Nip, Tuck: The White Beauty Myth.

The segment featured and attractive but confused Afro-British girl who went through extraordinary lengths to get a "Caucasian" nose. As she explained it, "My nose made me look poor." The segment concluded with the Afro-British sister confidently moving about an upper class part of the city with her new nose. This was painful for me to watch...

Speaking of noses, I am reminded of the "Tutsi nose myth" invented by the Belgians who declared that the Tutsi's had "Hamitic features" and were of Caucasian stock.

"The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had a ‘nobler’, more ‘naturally’ aristocratic dimensions than the ‘coarse’ and ‘bestial’ Hutus. On the ‘nasal index’ for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose."— Philip Gourevitch (We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda)

Overtime this myth, created and promoted by Europeans, became a reality for the Tutsi overlords and their Hutu subordinates. I recall the story of a Tutsi woman who got caught up in one of the countless massacres during the Rwandan genocide. She worried that the assailants would notice her "tutsi nose":

Murekatete and her grandmother slept in that office for days, with hundreds of their neighbors. Every night, a gang assembled outside with torches and machetes, shouting threats and taunts. An uncle paid a Hutu to sneak the girl and her grandmother out in an ambulance one night. Soon after, Hutus stormed the office and killed everyone there.

The ambulance driver took them to a safe house in Nyabisindu, further south, farther from her family, where they stayed for a week. The host's neighbors found out he was hiding the pair. "Seven or eight of them came to the house," Murekatete recalled. "There was blood on their clubs and machetes." This is the moment she remembers most vividly. "I was wearing a scarf, which I used to cover my face. I was shaking. I kept pleading to God. I kept trying to flatten my nose, my Tutsi nose." She is not sure whether it was God who saved her, but her patron convinced the men to go away. [Source]

Grim remainder of Rwandan clashes

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