Last night the family and I decided to splurge at this Italian Restaurant downtown. The food was okay; eliot behaved for the most part; and Katie and I got some lively conversation in.
The catalyst behind the ‘lively’ convo was what I heard from the table behind us. As is typical in most city centers the business folk get off work, head to a local eatery, and begin the evenings dinning with a moment or two of decompression. I get this. I really do. (and here’s the qualifier that nullifies the previous statement) But when someone uses something, anything as the crux of their argument in a way that highlights exactly how much they don’t know about the subject, they need to stop.
The gentleman behind me said that as we look at the country of Africa then we will surely understand blah, blah, blah. Once corrected, he further digressed by asserting that Africa is a region. Now, i get that Africa is a region of the Earth. But his description could be likened to Napa Valley is a region of the Bay Area. It almost trivializes it.
The problem I’m posing here isn’t that he misspoke and then failed to accurately correct himself as much as trying to point out that marginalization starts in gross generalizations and propagates in our failure to acknowledge how nuanced Africa is (replace your area of interest with Africa).
We can’t possibly understand the plight of the Fur in Sudan by reading about the Tutsis in Rwanda or the Hutus in Burundi.
History is wrought by individuals who have marginalized the voices of the less powerful. This is not news. But unfortunately these voices continue to stay so because most of us deem it more appropriate to acquiesce to the point rather than initiate a didactic moment.
So, how can I listen to someone’s ’solution’ for a variegated people when all they see is black.
maybe I should write more.
Woo-hoo! Joel is back using his big words and sounding smart again!
But really, good post. When I was in Bosnia, one of the friends I made and hung out with almost the entire time was a girl named Penda from Guinea, who was studying in Scotland. She told us stories of what people asked her about Africa when she arrived in Scotland, things like “Are all the people in Africa starving?” “Why do all the people in Africa just keep killing each other?” She was sick and tired of all of the generalizations, so she started a weekly radio show where she enlightened people about Africa.
Anyway, the point of my comment is that you are right. So how do you think this could change?