Month: October 2017

Today in class, we examined two articles titled “The White-Savior Industrial Complex” by Teju Cole and “The white tourist’s burden” by Rafia Zakaria which both focus on the negative consequences of voluntourism. This term refers to privileged, first world citizens gallivanting around the globe “helping” poor people in variously afflicted parts of the globe in various ways. The motivations of these helpers vary across every individual participant in every individual voluntourism program and range from altruistic to self-seeking. In Evelyn Mendez’s blog post titled “Volunteer?”, she references another article, “The Trouble with Medical “Voluntourism”” which sheds light on the damaging effects of institutions like “Doctors without Borders Alternative.” Groups like this are tasked with performing clinical surgeries such as delivering babies and pulling teeth without the proper experience and oftentimes, sanitation or equipment (Sullivan, 2017). These risky practices by incompetent students acting as unqualified practitioners of medicine often lead to more harm for patients than good (Sullivan, 2017). Mendez explains that these students are often going on these trips only to make themselves appear better on a resume to get into a better medical school for their own personal gain. However, the students themselves do not stay in the area abroad long enough to see the damage they potentially cause, but rather only long enough to feel good about the short term relief they provide. This, both the moral and selfish motivation to help people whose culture and problems the helper are not privy to, embodies the “White Savior Industrial Complex” Cole and Zakaria refer to in their articles.

What makes any institutional problem an “Industrial Complex”, whether it be the “Prison Industrial Complex” or the “Military Industrial Complex” is that the system in question is profitable as well as self-sustaining and justifiable through rhetoric. In the case of the WSIC, Americans are given a challenge or palatable enemy, like Joseph Kony or “hungry mouths, child soldiers or raped civilians” (Cole, 2012). Next, they take the moral high ground as people who are “going to ride in on a white horse and resolve it.” (Cole, 2012) So when someone like Kony is stopped or any amount of children are fed by privileged white people, they gain satisfaction not out of the resultant happiness their help lead to but by the implication that they are better people because of it.

Cole’s sequential tweets are spot on in describing how privileged whites do good deeds that have no real lasting impact not to achieve “justice” but to simply satisfy “sentimental needs” and have “a big emotional experience” (Cole, 2012). Not only are the roots of the problems often ignored, but other problems are created as a result. Cole later explains in the article that Nigerians who were protesting their corrupt government were noticeably not aided by the US government because of oil interest Yet the US government released a statement “supporting” the protesters right to protest in order to give off the image of preserving democracy and individual rights without making an actual change (Cole, 2012). A way to make actual change would be to import more expensive oil from non corrupt regimes to bolster them instead of empowering corrupt regimes simply because they produce a cheaper product. When money is on the line for privileged folks, morality is almost always tossed aside.

Meanwhile, Zakaria explains that there is a specific voluntourism program in South Africa that actually creates orphans. Because the American workers have economic backing, they resultantly “crowd out local workers” which leads parents to send their kids away to these orphan centers where they can actually afford to go to school (Zakaria, 2014). The question of whether it is better to be an educated orphan or non educated child living with their parents in poverty is irrelevant. The point that it is unjust for foreigners to be dictating the lives of native inhabitants at their own convenience for reasons independent of their plight is relevant, however. In class, Frank raised the solid point that most people participating in these programs are students on vacations which means a lot of the “help” might come seasonally. While I must be careful not to generalize all voluntourists as being unwanted and ignorant to the causes they are supposedly fighting, Zakaria explains that the participants should pay their “due diligence” by attempting to assimilate themselves with the culture as well as gain a real understanding of the native peoples’ and their plight (Zakaria, 2014). Both writers articulate the problem that many voluntourists simply go on these trips to feel good about themselves and bolster resumes as well as gain “good party stories” and “Facebook profile pictures” instead of for a more altruistic reason such as a desire to help people in need (Zakaria, 2014). These intrinsic motivations for white people to help non white people are more often than not self-serving and epitomize the WSIC.

Whilst discussing how we can connect Zulus and Medical Apartheid last week, I came across two quotes from the books that eerily seemed to connect. Continue reading “Unfortunately Ironic”

Humankind has a history of oppressing women’s bodies. Foot binding, the restrictions of gender roles, and unreasonable societal expectations of age and beauty are all timeless examples of this oppression. However, a relevant issue in the United States is reproductive rights. While there are few efforts made to encourage the development of new forms of male contraception, hundreds of provisions have been made in 2017 alone to restrict abortion access at the state level. Percival Everett’s Zulus contains many examples of injustice at the sake of the female body, with Alice Achitophel as our victim of it.

Alice Achitophel lives in a post-thermonuclear war society, where each woman is expected to be sterilized. Due to Alice’s weight (300 pounds) she believes she has no reason to have the procedure done because she probably won’t have sex. “She had thought to herself then that the people at the hospital had seen her and knew she was fat and ugly and could see from her file that she was an old maid, probably knew that she had never kept company with a man” (12). First, the readers see that this sterilization is forced and therefore not the women’s choice, which is just another example of this oppression. Secondly, Alice Achitophel believes she is unworthy of love and intimacy because of her weight, which is clearly an idea that’s been instilled by society. Her unattractiveness is not a fact, but a matter of opinion. Alice is referred to as the “fat woman” multiple times throughout the novel, suggesting that this objective description may be the only way see her.

A coworker of mine told me over the summer that she lost her health care because she made more money than usual the prior month, and that she was no longer able to pay for her birth control or many other health services. While birth control technically isn’t considered necessary, so many people want to use it that its price and accessibility are a prominent issue in modern America. While the women in Zulus aren’t given the option of contraceptives, this situation still connects to the novel in the sense that the government makes it difficult to make choices regarding one’s own body.

“…the opening body yielding the complete woman, full of the brain and emotions of her fat mother, earth mother, Alice Achitophel” (109). When Alice gives birth, she gives birth to a more attractive version of herself–a rebirth, in a sense. This new Alice is more determined and confident. This situation in nature is a contradiction to obsolete ideas of how women should behave and the expectations placed upon them. While the end of the novel is morbid because Kevin Peters and Alice pull the lever and end the world, it’s also empowering. The end reminds us that even those who are oppressed can always resist.

The social contract we, as humans born into a Lockean society, live through is inherently non-consensual. Before birth, society has already established this social contract that we do not agree to until we become cognizant of said social contract—for some, this may be in high school and for others college. The assumption I just made was also made through a privileged power structure—there are many people living in our society today that have not attended high school or have had a formal secondary where they would have come in contact with the social contract—and they may not be educated on theories by Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, or other “Enlightenment” thinkers. I put “Enlightenment” in quotes because many of those authors may not explicitly outline the non-consent in their theories—what are they actually enlightening for us? Regardless of this, we are not consenting to live under this social contract until we are old enough to understand it, and by then I think for many of us (at least for me, when I first encountered this in high school) the social contract is taught as a fact/founding principle of this country that we just accept. There is a compulsory agreeance in the non-consensual social contract. Personally, this comes across to me as propaganda—we are led to blindly elevate the social contract as the ultimate form of democracy—and have even fought wars and instilled political figures to further our own “democratic” political agenda.

In the handout from class today (October 16th) the section on Rousseau reads “[s]ome human beings come to dominate others, denying them the equality they enjoyed in the state of nature” (Mills) (emphasis is mine). This brought questions to my mind of language and power structures. Are we separated from animals (and the state of nature) by our ability to use complex language? In our current state, we cannot exist in a system outside of language, and even in theoretical arguments about such we still use language to construct them. Language and power structures/inequalities play on each other and are deeply intertwined—by nature itself, the power structures we spout everyday would then be nonconsensual as well, because we use coded language without explicitly being cognizant or agreeing to these power structures.

My point in saying this is that all of the things we are born into, socialized to believe/perform, etc.—all are non-consensual. There is compulsory masculinity and femininity, compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory ethnic and race identity, compulsory gender identity, compulsory class, etc. This is not to say that we can’t push back against this, and this is perhaps what Butler is getting at. Maybe Butler is trying to show us the inevitability of non-consent in the society we live in today, but in a more idealized society, we might not have to be born into all of this non-consent. That being said, being born in and of itself is inherently non-consensual, and language itself, the tool we use for communication, is rife with inequalities. Maybe the point is that we can’t completely free ourselves from non-consent, but we can do our best to mitigate it.

Recently during class we went over the topic of medical volunteerism, which has to do with visiting certain areas in other countries that may not have the same medical resources that there are in the United States and assisting those in need of medical help. We read an article that had to do with medical volunteerism being an issue, due to several ethical and antiseptic reasons. The program allows inexperienced high school students assist people who are in need of medical health and sometimes, that means life or death.

In the blog post, “The Trouble with Medical “Voluntourism””, we learned that there is a program called “Projects Abroad” that allows people whom are at least 16 years of age, “lack prior medical experience and don’t speak the language” to travel and receive experience that people usually get two to five years after medical school. They travel to counties of lower income and developing countries such as, Tanzania, Ghana, Cambodia, India, Nepal, the Philippines, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras. This program “touts itself as a “Doctors without Borders Alternative.”” The purpose of high school students taking advantage of this opportunity is so that they can begin gathering experience to put on to their resume, so that by the time they apply to medical school they can have a higher chance of getting in.

These students are way more focused on themselves rather than what the opportunity entitles them to do. They take this opportunity as a chance to make themselves look better and prepare for medical school to serve as doctor in the United States. It seems like many students say that they’re doing it for a good cause but in reality it’s to get the experience that they need in order be a top choice for their desired medical school.

There are also ethical and antiseptic issues that take a role when it comes to partaking in this event. According to the blog post, The Trouble with Medical “Voluntourism, the same program, “Projects Abroad” allows students to deliver babies, remove teeth, and even do “unnecessary episiotomies and pulling breech babies”. These all can be dangerous because if you aren’t using the right equipment, cleaning the area of that person’s body with the right items or doing things correctly, that situation can become life or death.

I personally believe that these people shouldn’t allow high school students to take this “opportunity”. No matter how good it looks on their resume for medical school, they are dealing with fragile conditions that others are going through and using it to make themselves look better.

Bringing it back to our conversation regarding race and its origins, we talked about how exactly the idea of race came to be. After a detailed discussion and the viewing of a film in class (in which the name of it I am unsure of), it became clear that the idea of racism is just that- an idea. This idea could not have started with just one person, because if only one person believed in it then it never would have become as prominent in our society as it did. Therefore, racism is a collective idea that is fueled by those who continue to feed into it.  Continue reading “Feeling vs Seeing Race”

While reading Chapter A of Zulus by Percival Everett, I questioned why Alice Achitophel didn’t yell for help when the dirty man was violating her, yet did yell for help in Chapter N when the hungry man was attacking her. I was curious to why Alice allows the first man to act on her, when she knows the ramifications of being pregnant. After my initial reading of Chapter A, I believed that Alice was too weak to yell for help and feared that if she did yell for help and was found, all the blame would be placed on her for not becoming sterilized. However, after reading Chapter N, my initial thoughts on why Alice Achitophel did not call for help changed. Continue reading “Yelling for Help”

Recently, fellow student and long-time friend of mine, Sunita Singh, wrote a beautiful blog post on the need for communication between the medical establishment and those utilizing traditional recipes as a cure for ailments. As with most of her work, the blog was stunning and I highly recommend you read it before continuing with my post. Reading Sunita’s post, I find myself wondering to what extent is respecting one’s own cultural tradition a priority in the context of medical care. In particular, I am drawn to one claim she makes: “Medical techniques differ around the world based on the cultures they originate from. No technique is superior to another.” (Integrating Medical Cultures, Singh) Understand, of course, that I would never condone discrimination, bigotry, or hostility towards a patient for having cultural beliefs different from my own. Such actions are abhorrent and should be punished accordingly. However, not all traditional medicine was created equally and I feel it is important to distinguish the possible beneficial from the deadly. Continue reading “Killing with Kindness, a response to Integrating Medical Cultures”

Novels with a Dystopian Society are all the rage now, ranging from The Giver by Lois Lowry to The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and so many more from the English High School days. The core of these books include a life set in the future where the government is in charge of every facet of life, and restrictions surround the citizens. In this instance, the book we are currently reading in class, Zulus, it reminds me of these two dystopian society books that I have read in the past. For each protagonist in each of these novels, they’re lives are dictated by order of the government, and what they are to do with their lives; Jonas and his job of taking the planets memories, Katniss and needing to fight for her life for entertainment, and Alice Achitophel and her fertility in a non-fertile world.

Nowadays, you can’t read a book without it being about a dystopian society, or a corrupt government type that needs to be taken out for the Greater Good. Dystopian societies has always been contrasted with Utopian societies to figure out which one is the better. A utopia is a place where you can only dream of how wonderful it is.  A dystopia is a where the illusion of perfection is forced onto its subjects, there are different types of dystopias, but for this post, we will focus on the bureaucratic control. (Dystopia). In The Giver, the world has been ravaged by war and disease, so a small community bands together to create a world of ‘sameness’ for everyone should be equal and the same. Once a child hits their tweens, they are given an assignment of what their future job is to be. One child, who is different from the others in looks and thoughts, is given the very special job of being the keeper of the memories of the community. Since he has those memories of how society was before this regimen of ‘sameness’, and he found out how his community keeps their subjects submissive, he runs away to another place where he can be free to live as they once had. There is so much more to The Giver than this, but for this blogs sake, we will focus on Jonas and his difference from the others in his society (Giver).

For the connection to Zulus, Alice Achitophel is the last fertile person in the non-fertile world, so she is special and she knows it. Jonas is special for he looks like no one else in his community, and he is destined for the position of having the communities’ memories given to him. Of course, Alice wasn’t destined to be the last fertile person, she only had a bout of rebellious attitude and didn’t go to her sterilization and Jonas was picked. Then again, both Jonas and Alice realized it was better to go back to the life that everybody used to have before being forced into the society they live in now. Jonas left his community in the hopes that since he is not there to receive the memories of the past, that everyone will soon remember how it was, and Alice leaving the city to go to rebel country in the hopes that she will be welcomed and reveled due to her condition.

For the Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen is just trying to get by one day at a time, but she puts herself in danger of being killed to save the life of her younger sister, who is drafted to go into the Hunger Games, an entertainment venue for rich people to watch the poor and despot fight for their lives and kill others. Of course with every book that has to do with corrupt government, there has to be a rebellion, and Katniss is just the girl chosen to be the symbol of the rebellion, The Mockingjay, Katniss Everdeen the Girl on Fire! For Katniss’ society, there is a corrupt ruler, but the cause she is fighting for is also corrupt in its own way, so really there is no true winner.

The Hunger Games connects more to Zulus for me, as Katniss has played on either side of the fence in her story. She has played the capitol’s game to try and keep the ones she loves alive, but when they pushed too far and tried to kill her again, she joined the other side. Once on the other side however, she found that the rebels leader wasn’t all sunshine and morals as she turned out to be. However, once shown Katniss quickly rectifies the situation in her own way, killing the leader and going on with the rest of her life in a meadow. Alice realizes that even though the city she came from held out no favors for her, the rebel life was not her friend either. In any instance the rebels treated her worse than in the city life, for in the city Alice had more freedom while with the rebels she was literally shoved into a tiny room and left to fend for herself. Neither the rebels or the government life are bad guys, but for Alice both options don’t emit welcoming feelings from Alice. Although there are no obvious comparisons between Katniss and Alice, their situations are somewhat similar, due to the constant danger both of them face.

After reading Serhiy’s blog post about how children’s mind are often molded based on their environment’s and the people they are surrounded by,  I felt like I needed to reflect upon my own life, and revisit my own childhood.

I grew up in a community where just about everyone blended in with one another. Light skin, brown, blue, green eyes, blonde, brown, red hair. And then there was me. Tan skin, dark eyes, jet black hair, and a name that makes everyone have the same strange, puzzled look on their face, and makes people pause, say “how do you spell that?” and “oh, that’s so pretty!”  I stuck out like a sore thumb, as cliche as it may sound. On top of that, I was the nerdy, shy kid with glasses. However, I was not very familiar with racism throughout my schooling, because it didn’t really impacted me. As I’m typing this, I’m realizing how strange this sounds to me. All throughout school, my community treated me as an equal in all aspects. Not only had racism not impacted me, but I was never bullied or taunted for being that shy kid with the glasses. If anything, I tended to ostracize myself. I knew from a very young age that I had an appearance that set me apart from most, which definitely took a big hit to my self-esteem. I felt as though I needed to change to look more like them, and less like me. However the more I taunted and ostracized myself with my differences, the more my community embraced me and treated me the same as the rest.

 

But, back to Serhiy’s point. Unlike me, our heroine, Alice Achitophel, in the novel Zulus by Percival Everett, is constantly haunted by her physical differences. She is reminded that she is fat by everyone around her, and it is a heavy load to bear.  Clearly, racist tendencies aren’t written into our brains when we are born. We are taught to discriminate. But how do we fix it? Many of us are reminded through school and parents to treat other equally and to “treat people the way you would like to be treated.” But regardless of preaching this mantra, we start to see subtle evidence suggesting otherwise on TV shows, in music, and through the news starting at a young age.

 

I read an article recently from the New York times (to which I will post the link to at the end), that suggests that children begin to notice differences between groups and people and the different ways people are treated as early as five years old. Writer Jennifer Harvey states that parents and community members who rely on the “generic messages” of treating everyone equal simply are not doing enough. Harvey says this message is dangerous and that parents must acknowledge discrimination and the fact that is happens. They must point out racism and discrimination to their children when it does happen and have a discussion as to why it happens and why it is wrong.

 

What do you guys think? How can we eliminate discrimination? Can we eliminate it? Do you think Harvey’s method is effective?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/opinion/are-we-raising-racists.html