7 topics over 7 days: Race
7 topics over the next 7 days.
I'm sharing my thoughts on 7 topics this week stemming from a conversation with some friends who say I'm too obtuse. So, I'll write a little something of my thoughts on these topics:
Government, Gender, Religion, Race, Marriage, Sex, and Culture
If you want to do the same... Just reply to this status update or share it with your answers and then tag a few people whom you'd want to see it and hopefully share their thoughts
Day 4: Race
No true Scotsman Fallacy
You don’t sound African.
I’d heard this a few times from when I first hit the soil in the land of the free and home of the brave. It always puzzled me what I was meant to sound like. Especially because I’d heard it uttered in order from a white gentleman at immigration and his partner who appeared to be of Samoan descent. Then from the Cameroonian man that helped me with my bags into a cab driven by a black man from South Carolina who was fascinated that people, from East Africa didn’t all look like his Somalian friend.
I’d heard this a few times from when I first hit the soil in the land of the free and home of the brave. It always puzzled me what I was meant to sound like. Especially because I’d heard it uttered in order from a white gentleman at immigration and his partner who appeared to be of Samoan descent. Then from the Cameroonian man that helped me with my bags into a cab driven by a black man from South Carolina who was fascinated that people, from East Africa didn’t all look like his Somalian friend.
You don’t sound African was again said to me during orientation in class by my neighbor. A nice lady who at one point exclaimed surprise that “Hey, you bought and learned how to use phone already? My neighbor muttered under his breath “That’s racist, damn!”. I wondered if it was. The lady was after all black.
Social constructs are funny things. We speak of them as if they’re not real. Like they’re made up things that cause us harm. But at the root of every social construct is a way of thinking abut some aspect of reality. What I mean is race is a way for us to describe how one group of people look different to another group of people. We happen to have chosen skin color and a few accompanying attributes that arise from the environments in which our ancestors lived.
Because we group ourselves this way, we start to develop ways of thinking that are assigned to each group. Values are developed based on the regions we are from and the skills and attitudes necessary for survival. Over time, these values, these approaches become “what that race is good at. “
A portrait is painted of what people from certain places are like just because we’ve interacted with some people from that area. Or because we consume media that shows us outliers (I think this is my biggest lesson of the last 3 years. The media feeds our fear and sensationalism instinct. I don’t think it’s nefarious. It’s just business. No one wants to see “Normal”. We want the thrilling or the worrisome. The problem is, without enough exposure or comparisons, we can ascribe to others a story which is abnormal and think it normal) This mindset is an evolutionary aide. It allows us to see snakes and know that snake like things can be venomous. We create categories for the world. Categories aren’t bad per say, because without them, well we wouldn’t have a language. We wouldn’t be able to discuss ideas. Where they’re harmful is when they’re over extended.
Think about the fact that you are Ugandan (or whatever nationality). What makes you Ugandan? What essential property? You were either born in the country, are descended from people who were born here or became a naturalized citizen. Everything else is up for grabs. But often we can see people saying someone’s not acting Ugandan. Sort of saying, “They don’t behave as I expect a Ugandan to behave. “. Similar to race, being in America was interesting because people of African descent tended to give me the head nod, to give me the knowing “You know “. Then they’d find out I’m African and suddenly something shifted. It was as if I were a facsimile of a black person. This generated a lot of conversation. What does it mean to be black? Can someone lose their blackness by acting differently? Can Africans say the word Nigga with the same vigor as a person whose ancestors were called that?
My interest here though is not to interrogate those offshoots but the real root of these things-identity. And how we are so intertwined with this social construct of race to the point that we have subjugated, hated, killed and destroyed one another based off of it. We get our identities from the groups we belong to. Are we the average, or the outlier? Do we feel we belong or not? We talk of a post racial world but really what I think we mean is one in which different doesn’t mean less than or greater than. It just means we look different, may have a few different experiences, but we are more alike than we are different.
Someone saying “You don’t sound African” shouldn’t cause pause for concern. Do they mean I’m too sophisticated? Do they mean my accent? Why do they think this? Is this ignorance any greater than the one I have about people from Japan speaking with heavy Japanese accents? Is it because Africans never dominated the Japanese so there isn’t that historical shadow to contend with that I can more boldly express my wonder than say a white person towards me? I think these questions should at least be asked before we react. It’s easy to react in anger. But before that, I think to important to pause and not shut out an opportunity for two people to learn about each other. Then we can know there no such thing as a True African , no true European. It’s a fallacy.
Us and them
This is how we often frame the world. There’re people like us and then there’s people like them. We do this in sports, in gender relations, in tribal discussion etc. The sense of purpose we feel from belonging extends to us needing to be better than their group. It’s good competition when it’s just kept in proportion, but this instinct is so strong, it’s basically been a key part for conflicts throughout history.
Race is the latest line drawn in the sand on this. But I find it odd that we don’t discuss as much the one thing that truly separates how people live. Income.
If you were to take Hans Roslings analogy of taking every home in the world and lining them up from the ones owned and lived in by the poorest and the wealthiest, you’d see that along income levels, people tend to live in the same way. Taking into effect the 4 income levels of the world…Level 1 being the poorest, level 2 lower middle income, level 3 higher middle income and level 4 the high income, we see that all manner of races, creeds, ethnicities, countries are represented. People at the similar income level tend to have similar lives. The us has some of them.
Ps... The 4 income levels is a development framework replacing the developing and developed world binary stance. On level 1 income per person in a day in dollars is up to $2: at level 2, between $2 and $8; at level 3, between $8 and $32 , and at level 4 , above $32 per day. The world is divvied up in terms of population at 1 billion on level 1, 3 billion at level 2, 2 billion at level 3 and 1 billion at level 4. If you do the math and locate yourself along these levels, chances are your lifestyle, your attitudes and the way you live is more similar to a person of a different race, religion or creed at the same level, purchasing parity taken into consideration.
No one race is entirely at level 1 or level 4. I say all this to say the narrative that can creep up around people being so fundamentally different misses this uncomfortable truth that we’re talking about economics. Once given the ability to choose how to spend more disposable income, people tend to make similar choices irrespective of several factors. Everything tends to change with income. We should be talking more about class, power and income than we should about race.
Fixed vs Growth Mindset
I often ask people if change is possible. More specifically if people change. Their answer often reveals to me their mindset. On whether things essentially remain fixed or if they change. During my father’s life time, many impossible things have happened. My father is 68 years old. He was born in the 50’s. He was born in a protectorate of the British empire. He saw the union jack fall and the Uganda flag rise. He saw this country take shape. Become socialist. Take on market liberalism. Go to war. Have continued peace. In one lifetime, the norms and values and what it meant to be Ugandan changed. He changed. The views he held in the 60’s are different now that he is in his 60’s.
So too should our ideas of our race, our tribe our heritage. These things are a reminder of where we came from but not a fixed destiny for who we shall be. We can choose who we want to be . What does this have to do with race? A lot of the racial discussion is an untangling of historical biases. WE all know prejudice based on race is unethical and wrong. But given a history where one race more recently subjugated another, it’s easy to take the moral high ground and take liberties with practicing prejudices of our own. After all, we don’t have the historical power. But there in lies the issue, when the shift comes. When systems are destroyed, these attitudes can remain. We must not entertain them. We must not traffic in the harmful racial perspectives we find offensive when practiced on us simply because right now, the power is tilted one way. It won’t be for long. Change is inevitable. So too should out mindsets be set on change and discarding old ways of thinking. Or we might find ourselves thinking like it’s the 1960’s when we’re in our 60’s
Fin
Thanks for reading. Kindly take the time to check out Hans Rosling’s powerful book, “Factfulness-Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world- and why things are better than you think. “
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