ON RACIAL DIFFERENCES (December 18, 2007)

After quite a long time, today I went to Benjamin’s for lunch. Hand-made pasta with white truffles and rocket salad. Scrumptious. Even more so with Benjamin’s own Teran, it goes without saying. The music was deadly, though. For the first time in my favorite Motovun restaurant, I listened to a whole selection of American gospel songs. A female lead, audibly fat, accompanied by an equally fat female church choir from Harlem, as I learned later from Milica, Benjamin’s wife. Deadly, absolutely deadly. While I was munching along, I could not but think of the gospel music recorded some eighty years ago, when Africans were still Africans in America. Bracing. Uplifting. Spellbinding. Which only goes to show that it takes even Africans about four or five generations to lose it. And completely. So much for racial differences, too.