Travel columns are supposed to be fun reads, but sometimes there's a fly in the marmite. Some readers are uncomfortable with my travel adventures.
Betty Rawlings of Penn Hills wrote in recently asking why do I, as a black man, "insist on writing about Ireland, England and all those other lily-white places?"
This is not the first time questions about my travel destinations have come up. Lots of African-Americans say that any travel one of us makes outside the U.S. should include Africa or a predominantly black country such as Jamaica.
Well Mrs. Rawlings, you're right: There are few black folks in Europe. But there's no shortage of lessons in ethnic strife and prejudice.
We tend to believe that we're the only persecuted minority. Because few of us read about the struggles of other ethnic groups, we end up with a self-obsessed sense of how bad we've had it. But during a trip to almost any foreign country, you'll learn that just about everybody has a struggle somewhere in their history.
After visiting sites of the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, as I did earlier this year, I came away realizing that, hey, maybe we didn't have it so bad after all.
Case in point: In April, my wife and I stayed at a remote fishing lodge in Leenane, County Mayo, a place so desolate it makes Braddock's business district look like Times Square. Delphi Lodge itself was straight from a Gothic mystery, full of 19th century splendor, candle-lit libraries and expensive Scotch.
Our impression changed when one of the locals gave us a little history. It turns out the lodge had once served as a sporting retreat for the Marquis of Sligo, a wealthy nobleman who owned more game, fish and land than the combined holdings of the 10,000 or so other residents of the county.
Starving and unable to feed their children, several hundred locals marched 10 miles from nearby Louisburg to the lodge in March 1847. The Marquis enjoyed comfortable surroundings and daily buffets while thousands of poor Irish starved in the countryside around him. Still, he turned down the group's request for food and shelter.
The locals debate the number of people who perished in the snowstorm during the march back to Louisburg, but the story was enough to keep us awake half the night. Here were people starved to death and left out in a winter storm, and it had nothing to do with skin color, race or any of the other reasons we discriminate against each other here in the U.S.
During the next two weeks, we heard more stories of unbelievable cruelty and witnessed a level of hatred between people — people who most Americans, black or white, couldn't tell apart — for their religious or political beliefs.
Nearly everyone we met in Ireland knew someone whose life was damaged by sectarian violence, which made us realize that, while racism at home is far from erased, other people have suffered, too.
So, Mrs. Rawlings, there might not be many of "our people" in Europe and I might make it to Africa eventually, but sometimes it takes looking beyond your back yard to get a decent view of things.
