The Line Ran Through Me

Jules-Scot Schotsborg

Prelude — 4:30 in the Morning

It was 4:30 in the morning when I woke, wide awake, ready to write. I had gone to bed with a thought pressing on my chest, as it has for years. By dawn it was clear: this was the moment to begin.

The thought was this: the lines that separated “us” from “them” always ran straight through me.

Not around me. Not past me. Through me. I am Creole, from Suriname. Gay. Highly sensitive. Restless. I have lived in Rotterdam, New York, Cologne, Barcelona, Valencia, Kuala Lumpur, Paramaribo. I have been the only Black man in a room, the only gay man at a family table, the only non-Muslim in a neighborhood, the only one who wouldn’t stay inside the circle. Every line humans draw — by religion, race, sexuality, nation, class — I have stood on the wrong side of at least one of them. Often several at once.

This is not an essay about divide and conquer as a political strategy. History has already written that book, in many languages, in blood. This is an essay about what it feels like to be the division itself. And what I have learned — slowly, painfully, sometimes beautifully — about choosing something else.

I — My Mother’s Table

At my mother’s table, the first border was religion. It didn’t matter that the food was shared, that our home was known as open. The lines were already etched, invisible but sharp.

Jesus, in the pictures on our wall, didn’t look Dutch to me. He looked more like the men I would later meet in the streets of Istanbul or Cairo — dark hair, olive skin, heat in his eyes. But in our house, the map of belonging began with scripture. Christianity and Judaism were the roots, my mother believed. Islam was something else. Not spoken of in anger, not banned from our door, but marked nonetheless.

This was the 1960s Netherlands. Turks and Moroccans were arriving as guest workers, Indonesians were already here, and we prided ourselves on tolerance. But tolerance has always been a polite mask for distance. “You are welcome,” we said, while quietly adding: “Over there.” I saw it in the way neighbors talked, in the way churchgoers measured each other’s faith, in the way Catholics and Protestants lived in parallel universes even though they shared the same streets. Pillars, we called them: verzuiling. Whole worlds built side by side, never intersecting.

For me, the division was never abstract. I was the division. Gay, carrying voices in my head that no one around me seemed to hear.

And then there was Suriname, my birthplace, to which my thoughts returned constantly even when my body was in Rotterdam. A rainbow nation, we called it — Creole, Hindustani, Javanese, Maroon, Indigenous, Chinese. We printed that rainbow on posters and sang it in anthems. But I already knew another rainbow, the queer rainbow, and I saw immediately how fragile both could be. Rainbows are not permanent. They appear only when the light and the water conspire at the right angle, and vanish the moment conditions shift. Our unity, like our rainbows, was conditional.

II — The Door on Van Speykstraat

I was eighteen when I learned what it meant to be “the other” — and how it could turn from wound to doorway.

It was in Rotterdam, on the Van Speykstraat. A hole-in-the-wall gay bar. You had to ring the bell. A little panel slid open, just a pair of eyes looking you over. The first five times I ran away. Too afraid of what I might find inside. Too afraid of myself.

The sixth time, the doorman — Erik, dark-haired, green-eyed, maybe Spanish blood in him — opened the door fast and said: “Now you’re coming in.” And I did. Because his kindness left me no room to run.

What I didn’t know is that every time the bell rang, everyone inside heard it. Which meant that when I finally stepped in, the whole room turned to look. Imagine me: young, unsure, Black in a room full of white faces. My shock must have been written across my eyes, because they all smiled. Not in mockery. In welcome.

For the first time, I felt the strangeness of being the only dark-skinned man in a room — not as exclusion, but as something closer to honor. Not because they wanted to erase my difference, but because they had already decided that difference was not a reason for a closed door. That paradox hit me like lightning.

That night I understood something I had only half-known at my mother’s table: the line that ran through me could also become an entrance. Being other could be wound, yes. But it could also be power. My mother taught me something connected to this: people often single you out not because of who you are, but because of their own fractures. And if you stay open, stay curious, they can’t help but be drawn in.

Walking into that bar in Rotterdam was the beginning of my gay life. It was also the beginning of understanding that divide and conquer could be flipped — if you dared to enter the room.

III — The Tools I Learned to Recognize

The Dutch in Suriname perfected division with ethnic political parties — VHP for Hindustanis, NPS for Creoles, KTPI for Javanese, ABOP for Maroons. “Representation,” they called it. But what it meant in practice was that every vote was counted by color first, conviction second. The plantation was simply carried into parliament. I grew up inside this system. I could feel it shaping the air in rooms before anyone opened their mouth.

Years later, traveling and reading, I would recognize the same toolkit elsewhere. The British in India, separating Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs into different electorates, turning neighbors into political rivals by administrative decree. The Ottomans with their millet system: each religious community governing itself under the Sultan, never permitted to unite as citizens. In Lebanon, the French embedded sectarian quotas so deeply into the constitution that the country still cannot govern itself without them. The names change. The mechanism doesn’t.

And always, religion as the sharpest instrument. The church promising salvation to colonized peoples while extracting their land. Islam spread by empire as much as by revelation. No tradition is innocent. Every faith has been recruited, at some point, to bless one group’s dominance and sanctify another’s exclusion.

The toolkit hasn’t gone away. It’s been updated. Today it is electoral districts drawn with surgical precision, schools divided by income that track almost perfectly with race, algorithms that feed us only what confirms our tribe. Leaders who speak not of citizens but of “real Americans” or “true Dutchmen” or “authentic Hindustanis.” Division doesn’t need armies anymore. It has apps.

I know this toolkit not from textbooks. I have felt each of its instruments on my skin. The line it draws has always run straight through me.

IV — The Salon

My answer, when I finally had one, was not a theory. It was a table.

I built a salon. In the back, a large wooden table — wood for earth, for grounding — with mismatched chairs painted in every color. Coffee in the morning, wine in the evening. Everyone who walked through the door was greeted personally. I hugged them, kissed them. It wasn’t performance. Being highly sensitive, I had to feel people before I could style them. Touch told me the truth that conversation sometimes hid. If I couldn’t feel you, I couldn’t see you. And if I couldn’t see you, I couldn’t make you beautiful.

The salon was called Scott International for a reason. By then I had lived and worked across several countries, and I knew in my bones that people were the same everywhere. They eat, sleep, love, cry, enjoy. Maybe the food changes, maybe the language, but the human need is constant.

I sometimes threw a topic on that table like a pebble in water, and watched the ripples. Clients laughed, argued, circled back. But I always knew: the smiles on the surface and the unease underneath were both real. Old walls live deep inside people. I didn’t pretend otherwise. I just refused to build new ones.

In my private corner, where I styled hair one-on-one, I opened myself completely. I told them everything — my joys, my pain, my stories raw and unfiltered. It shocked some of them. They teased me: “Scott, you bitch, couldn’t you keep that for a personal talk?” I always answered: “No. I don’t believe in a world divided. And it starts here. Right here. Around this table. Around this chair.”

The salon was my proof that unity is not a destination. It is a practice. And like any practice, it requires a space deliberately designed for it. You don’t accidentally end up at a table with someone different from you. You build the table. You paint the chairs. You open the door.

V — What This Has Cost, and What It Has Taught

We like to think divide and conquer is a strategy for rulers. But all of us pay the bill. And it is steep.

I know the personal cost best, because I have carried it in my body. The look. You know the one. The look you get when you are the one who doesn’t belong. I got it as a gay man in Suriname, where the rainbow of togetherness dissolved the moment it touched sexuality. I got it in Dutch churches, where being religious and being queer were treated as a contradiction in terms. That look is the quiet currency of division. It says: you are here, but not of us. And you pay it every day, in energy, in the armor you strap on just to walk through the world.

Then there is the waste. When groups are boxed in, talent gets locked out. Brilliant people who never apply to certain spaces because of their name, their face, their sexuality. Queer kids who grow up in silence, hiding their gifts because they learned early that difference equals danger. Division is an economic policy, whether we name it that or not.

And there is the fragility. When crisis hits — pandemic, flood, economic collapse — a fragmented society struggles to act together. I saw it in Suriname, where ethnic politics made every budget a hostage negotiation. I saw it in the Netherlands during COVID, where trust fractured along familiar cultural lines. Each group defends its own, coordinates only reluctantly, and the crisis deepens for everyone.

But here is what I have also learned: you can design the alternative. I learned it at my table, not in a lecture hall. Mismatched chairs that all seat human bodies equally. A door that opens to everyone. A topic thrown into the center that nobody owns. These are not metaphors. They are engineering. And I know they work because I watched it happen, chair by chair, conversation by conversation, over years.

The same logic scales. Give people a shared problem that requires many hands — fix the leaking roof, build the clinic, hold back the flood — and the tribe becomes secondary to the task. Schools can mix. Housing can integrate. Electoral rules can punish parties that appeal only to one ethnic base and reward those that build across lines. Make cooperation structurally cheaper than competition, and people will cooperate. Make division profitable, and they will divide. None of this happens without political courage. But all of it has been tried somewhere.

Truth-telling matters too. Every empire rewrites history to justify its lines. The colonizers rewrote Suriname. Churches rewrote sexuality. States rewrote their wars. If we want to disarm division, we must refuse the single narrative. Teach the messy histories. Let memory be a quarrel rather than a decree.

And at the smallest scale: one person can decide. I decided at eighteen, stepping through a door in Rotterdam, that being the line didn’t mean I had to enforce it. It meant I could dissolve it. One room at a time. One table at a time. One hand extended at a time.

Epilogue — A Provocation

I sit here, writing about the lines humans draw in flesh and in law, and then I look up from the page and remember: I am not writing this alone. I am writing with a machine trained on everything we have ever said to each other — every slur, every sermon, every border decree. It carries our lines because we taught them.

And I realize: the machine is not the question. I am. What will I teach the next room I enter? What will I hand down to the person sitting across from me at the table?

The line that ran through me was not my choice. What I did with it was.

A rainbow is not a promise. It is geometry. Light and water, bent by angle.

Beautiful. Fleeting. Real — if we choose to look.