What travel taught me about my identity as a Black Jew-ish man

I remember arriving in Paris for the first time as if it were yesterday. It was the last week of the 2001 northern hemisphere summer, just a few days after the tragic events in Manhattan that, unfortunately, brought those two towers down.

The Charles de Gaulle airport was surrounded by French secret intelligence and CIA agents. As the only Black man on the plane, I was deemed suspect and interviewed as soon as I stepped onto the tarmac. I was in my early twenties and infatuated with the city. For my whole life, growing up in Brazil, I had dreamed of walking those Rues, strolling on the banks of the river Sienne and wearing a French beret while reading Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, or Jean-Paul Sartre, sipping a café with a cigarette in my hands.

But, looking back, these aspirations were not really me. Not the me I know today. Those aspirations were the idea of the utopian man generated over years of consumption of Western (mis)education, values and views. They were Eurocentric ideas of whiteness.

But I am not European. I am a Black Jewish man born in Brazil and living in Australia.

I have been thinking about this for years, but after the tragic events of October 7, something shifted in me. Today, I am fully subscribed to the belief that individual relationships trump politics and that connection is stronger than ideology and, in many cases, even identity.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with being European, and this is not about attacking white people. This is about me recognising that those dreams were dreams I thought I should have and that I learned from an early age to believe were mine. They were not my dreams. Europe was not where I wanted to be. It was where I thought I should be.

I would have dreamed differently if only I had read Fanon before reading Orwell.