Culture Trek

Posts Tagged ‘stereotypes’

I just read two compelling articles over at Spiked in which Western media is being taken to task for failing to report honestly and without stereotypical bias.?

In “Kenya is not the new Rwanda: Why Western observers see every political conflict in Africa as an inexplicable outburst of violence and a harbinger of ‘holocaust’” (Tuesday, 8 January 2008), Frank Furedi. Professor of Sociology at University of Kent, critiques the Western disinformation that plagues Kenyan news coverage. Tracing the underlying historical tensions of the region, Furedi challanges Western cowboy journalism that shoots from the hip:

Through today?’s promiscuous use of the term “genocide”, conflicts become transformed into morality plays about human destruction, and tend to be seen as being both incomprehensible and inevitable. Western reporters see only a sudden, inexplicable outburst of violence – a kind of murderous descent into hell – and overlook the structural causes of crises in the Third World…

…it is precisely because the stakes are so high that the last thing Kenya needs is for its problems to be transformed into a Western fantasy about “another Rwanda”. Kenya was not a beacon of democracy or a model of economic stability before the December elections. And nor is it the dramatic setting for a Rwanda-to-be after the elections. All that has happened is that one group of corrupt politicians overplayed its hand, got a little bit too greedy, and forced its opponents to react on the streets.

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I have been spending some significant time reading the Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman, asking myself some hard questions posed by its author, Wambui Mwangi. In the chilling post “I was near to die… I was dead,” this sentiment (among many) struck a chord with me:

I was watching CNN as opposed to Kenyan television channels because I wanted to see what the world was saying about us. The world is saying that Kenyans, who had been on the brink of one of the most astonishing democratic transitions witnessed in Africa, degenerated, very conveniently for the West’s stereotypes, to a “business as usual: chaos and anarchy right on schedule” version of the African story. These broadcasts are brimming with just barely-suppressed glee at being able to say that tribal violence is tearing the East African nation of Kenya apart, long regarded as an exemplary bastion of stability in the region. We have confirmed some cherished stereotypes and validated many racists worldwide.

For me too, a born and bred American, this media matter has been painfully obvious. I’m once again trapped within a moment in which I am embarrassed for my country’s myopic comprehension and ashamed of the national and cultural baggage that can weigh upon me like a sack of boulders. I admit that I am not always fully aware of the American ideology that forms my thoughts and, with a growing awareness, I feel as though my identity has been violated by stereotypical ideas never inherently mapped within my DNA. Still, I try to be conscious of the cultural confines of a perceived American superiority. It is a constant effort to combat my subconscious with a sense of humility and an obsessive focus on education, both scholastic and via analysis of my experience. In times of plain living is when the snake slithers up from the shadows and bites me in the ass, but today – today I am painfully aware.

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