my two cents

I'm watching President Obama on The View. He just said that yes, there are still differences in society, but the important thing is for us to treat each other right, and try to see life through other people's eyes.

The problem with that? That we can not think our ways into someone else's experience. We have to learn about the lives of others in order to understand them.

I tell my students over and over again that understanding is not an attitude, but that it has to be based in knowledge. Students may come into an Ethnic Studies class thinking that they have the right attitude, but when they leave they say that "never knew what it was like before".

We live in a society where one version of the world (predominantly white, heterosexual, and male) is held up as an all-encompassing truth. What we need to learn are three things:

1. White, heterosexual, and male people think that they know what the world is like, because their own image, and attitudes that support it, is reflected back at them wherever they turn.

2. There are pockets of knowledge among other groups that rarely rise to the surface of our collective culture. If they do, those images are often produced by the dominant culture, for dominant culture consumption.

3. We need to learn to be sensitive to the experiences of individuals in both dominant groups and underrepresented groups, through conversation.

you tell me

This is a two month old little girl. I've borrowed the photo from the front page of the November 16, 2009, online edition of the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. The headline says that a billion people in the world suffer from hunger. And then there is this pull quote from a UN expert: "There is no lack of food, it's a matter of social inequality."

It seemed to me that a mainstream American paper wouldn't use those words, 'social inequality', so to compare I looked up a similar story in the New York Times. It was the only story on global hunger that had a picture. Here is the photo they used:

And here is the quote from their UN expert: “The way we manage the global agriculture and food security system doesn’t work,” said Kostas G. Stamoulis, a senior economist at the organization. “There is this paradox of increasing global food production, even in developing countries, yet there is hunger.”

There you have it. The Swedes call it social inequality. To the Americans, it's a 'paradox'.

When I was a kid there were posters with photos of starving children on them on the walls of the school cafeteria.

No really, there was.

If I didn't know it before, I learned at the age of 7 that I was privileged. And they told me that with privilege comes responsibility. Where does it say that the readers of the New York Times couldn't handle the same truth?