“How was Africa?”

Well: this is the point where I’m expected to say something really brilliant. There’s some overarching, preferably tear-inducing point to be found in this whole thing, and, as in a good conclusion to a school paper, I’m about to remind you in a few eloquent sentences how everything I’ve said before ties together to support this idea and, if I’m really clever, how this idea would in fact change the world if only everyone read and agreed with my essay.
I wish.
Well, first of all, “a few sentences” is clearly not what’s going to happen here, as you may have gathered from any previous reading experience you have in the subterranean bowels of my blog posts. I didn’t even know that anyone else in my program in Dakar read this blog until I won the “Longest Blog Post” paper plate award at the farewell dinner. Yeah…
And maybe you all didn’t actually expect me to say something really brilliant. I could be putting an exaggerated value on my own brilliance potential, but the fact is that I did have that expectation for myself. That’s how study abroad is supposed to work: you go to a far away place to learn something that you couldn’t learn at home. And, generally, I determine that I’ve learned something by my ability to make the statement, “I have learned X,” with X representing a concise, internally consistent explanation of some abstract concept or set of concrete facts. By that definition, I don’t know that I actually learned anything during my four months in Senegal. Sure, maybe I learned what third-world poverty looks like – but I knew that before. I look at the pictures on the home page of CNN online; I read the headlines underneath them. It honestly doesn’t look much different in person. Sure, maybe I learned a lot about Senegalese culture and norms – but I could easily have known that before, too. Many other people with much more sophisticated data collection techniques have been to West Africa before me. No: what I got was the feeling. There may not be a factual difference between a photo on the internet and a person in front of me. There may not be an equation to be found in the distinction between sitting in a chair at a table in a Panera Bread in downtown Ann Arbor reading an article about Senegalese eating culture and sitting on a cloth on the floor in a dakarois living room at 5:10 a.m., trying to breathe normally in the heat, the televised glow of shifting images of Mecca the only thing to break the sticky darkness, being given a piece of scrambled egg out of your brother’s hand after you fail miserably at your attempts to cut it for yourself using a chunk of fresh baguette. But there is a difference, and, true to form, I’m chafing at my inability to cram that difference into X.
“How was Africa?”
We were warned about that question. In case you’re thinking of asking it, the answer is:
a) I was not in “Africa.” I was in Dakar, Senegal, and that is just as distinct from many other places on the continent as London is from Rome. Scratch that: the differences between Dakar and, say, Cape Town or Cairo or Mogadishu or Kinshasa are probably actually much greater. You wouldn’t say “How was Europe?” – so please desist from asking that question about a continent many times larger peopled by massive numbers of different ethnic and language groups and regionally divided for much of its history by things like war and the Sahara Desert.
b) Aside from being somewhat ignorant, that question is also obnoxious. It’s like saying “Oh yeah, it’s been a while – how was your past year?” Which, admittedly, people do say. We all know, however, that it’s obnoxious, seeing as how one’s response options are pretty much limited to: “Good.” (which is totally un-substantive and probably inaccurate) or “You’re really going to have to ask me a more specific question and be willing to talk about this for quite a while if you actually want a reply that’s halfway substantive or accurate,” (which is pretty much an obnoxious answer itself, and we really don’t need more obnoxiousness in the world). I, for the record, have given both answer types more than once, so I should probably stop criticizing other people for being annoying or inaccurate now.
We were warned about a lot of things, mostly during the course of our several-hour mandatory re-entry session during our last week in Dakar. I found the name somewhat entertaining, as it made me feel like I was on a spaceship – but that’s actually not a bad comparison. We were warned about how we’d be struck by how different things would be, how no one around us would understand, how we might feel aimless or disconnected. In actuality, not much of this has happened to me. It’s been disturbingly easy to settle right back into my normal routines. The kitchen at my house so strongly triggers my habit of moseying in wearing my bathrobe, setting the teapot to heat on the stove and sticking some instant oatmeal in the microwave that it’s often not until partway through the process that it occurs to me: I’m using a microwave. I’m putting milk into my bowl out of a carton, not a packet of powder. My legs show between the folds of my robe when I walk and no one cares – in fact, no one’s here. I’m actually the only person in this building right now. It’s quiet except for what music I choose to click in my iTunes.
It feels so normal to me to walk down the sidewalk downtown. It’s only occasionally that I realize: there is a sidewalk. There are no piles of trash, or seemingly random holes in the ground. The pavement of the road all fits together fairly continuously. None of the cars driving on it are honking at me. None of the people are staring at me, or yelling or hissing or begging. They all look like me: wearing coats, wearing shoes, white. One of my first days back I drove to the gym primarily so that I could wear a winter coat and shorts – the two articles of clothing I’ve missed the most – at the same time. It was pretty awesome.
But the point is: I haven’t changed in any way that’s changed the fact that Ann Arbor, Michigan in the U.S.A. is my baseline. No matter what I do or where I go, that will always be my home; it will always be the place where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. I spent a lot of that childhood wanting to get out of the Midwest, wanting to get to big cities, to the East Coast, to Europe, to Africa. I spent a lot of time thinking about the cool, classy, competent person I would make myself become. I think that if I learned anything from this stay in Africa, it’s that I can change a lot about myself – but not everything. I do feel very different knowing that I can figure out my own way through the hazardously unlabeled ndiaga ndiaye system of coastal Senegal, that I can walk barefoot on the sand into a enclosure of sticks and wash my hair out of a plastic cup without being too concerned, that I can navigate a train station in France at 4:50 a.m. with four bags and no English. But I also share something just as if not more fundamental with every person who grew up in Ann Arbor, who went to elementary or middle or high school with me, even those people who never left and never wanted to, those people I struggled so hard to understand. I’ve seen the world through the same glasses that they have. And I’m always going to compare everything else to that.
And I have something in common with everyone at Georgetown, too. I’m back here, in my beloved and much-craved Saxbys, complete with a chai latte, temperature control and wireless internet, and, for all that it’s a bit disorienting to have skipped the transition stage into upperclassman-hood, I feel like I belong. It’s so normal to walk up the steps in White-Gravenor or pull out my GOCard to swipe into somewhere or other. For me as for everyone who goes here, this is what college looks like, and it always will be. This is what my life looks like, and it’s completely natural.
I went to Senegal thinking that I could wipe out every part of my identity I didn’t like: white upper-middle class Midwestern female, monolingual college student with parents just as if not more educated than I’m going to be and friends just as socially privileged, academically obsessed, cardigan-wearing and Caucasian as I am. One of these very friends told me so in an e-mail right after my plane landed in Dakar, but it took me most of the semester to realize that she was right: you can add to your identity, but you can’t subtract.
I added a lot during my four months in Dakar, but I’m just as white, female and fiscally assured as I ever was, even if I may have managed to scrape my way up to bi-and-a-half-lingual. I have been affected by the same people, have the same parents and the same birthplace. Rather than getting a new identity, I experienced an entirely new dimension of what my old identity means in this world.
Being white is a privilege. Being an ethnic minority, even when you’re white, is extremely hard. Being a woman is confusing – even within the same country people treat you as a symbol of chastity, a sex object, a servant, or sometimes just a person without any fundamental difference from anyone else regardless of gender. Women in the western world are lucky. People with money and the opportunity to make more are lucky – I certainly never really appreciated the power of expendable income. It’s the security of knowing that if there’s food and water around you can buy it, that if you really need to talk to someone you can make a phone call, that if you feel threatened you can hire a cab out of there. I wanted – I expected – to come back preaching that money can’t buy happiness. Instead I learned that money can very well buy at least that baseline level of peace about your own physical wellbeing. It can buy me the food and board and tuition and caffeine to stress myself out about things that most of the world has never experienced but would probably say they want to.
I expected to come back singing Kumbaya and holding metaphorical hands with a metaphorical circle of people spanning the world, or something like that. I expected to be a global citizen, and I learned that isn’t possible. That’s scary. It’s scary to think that I’ll never be able to empathize very well with billions of people. It’s scary to think that my race, gender and class do matter – a lot.
So, I don’t really have the point I wanted to make, the nice tear-of-joy-inducing one that I can wrap into a globalized bow. But I do have a point, sort of. If you want my sloppy, unsatisfying subjective analysis of what I did to myself last August through December and what I think it means for people who aren’t me, read on:
Similar, I imagine, to many of you, I spent a lot of my childhood and even not-so-childhood being told not to judge. Sure, over the years it’s moved from “judging is baaaaad, kids,” to “try to treat other people exactly the same regardless of culture or appearance.” I was taught to try to find this zen-like state of mind free of any stereotypes or assumptions, free of any analysis that could possibly be colored by my own personality or background. That’s the best way to look at the world, I was told. And that’s what I tried to do when I got on the plane for Dakar.
As you may have gathered from the preceding sections of this blog post, it didn’t work. And maybe I’m just fundamentally incompetent in some way. Maybe all of you do have the capacity to erase every influence of your life to date, set aside the way you’ve learned to think and act so effectively that it has no effect on your thoughts or emotions. Please, if you have: show me how.
Because I’m becoming increasingly convinced that it isn’t possible to not judge or stereotype, to not look at the world subjectively. And if this is true, then it’s damaging to try to teach people to do that. I know plenty of people who think they’ve perfected the art of unbiased observation, and from my viewpoint they’re completely wrong. Those people, I think, are much more dangerous than people who are aware of the ways in which they are biased, and treat their own inevitable judgments accordingly. By going to Senegal I thought I would learn how to rise above judgment. Instead, I learned a lot about how I judge. I was confronted with the physical reality that a lot of the things I see as normal and obvious are only that way in the right setting. A lot of ideas that seemed universally obvious are so obviously products of my environment once I zoom out from that environment. There clearly should be well-labeled prices on retail items? That’s not how people do it, everywhere. There clearly should be middle school education for everyone? People don’t think so, everywhere. There clearly should be equal gender roles? Nope. There clearly should be sidewalks? Right…
And realizing that doesn’t mean I can exorcise those ideas of mine. It doesn’t mean I can claw every opinion I have about equal rights or pedestrian travel out of my brain. It does mean, though, that I can see my judgments for exactly what they are: subjective. I can realize that for other people other things seem just as obvious.
Let’s get this straight: I’m not making a case for total moral relativism, here. I’m making a case for teaching people to realize that they’re fallible and in what way rather than teaching them that they can make themselves into omniscient unbiased gods capable of crafting a worldview that’s non-relative beyond the shadow of a doubt.
I’m also making a case – and bracing myself for rocks thrown through the window of my apartment – that it’s at least worth discussing the idea that stereotypes and judgment are not categorically morally reprehensible.
In Dakar, I noticed a pattern. Senegalese men would come up to me and solicit my phone number. Eventually, I got better at dealing with this, with adopting methods to avoid or dissuade them, or, if necessary, preemptively lying to them about my name, place of residence or possession of a cell phone. I could see the situation coming further in advance and thus deal with it better. Was I stereotyping? Absolutely. I was noting that a person was approaching me with a certain facial expression, and that the person was black and male. In my previous experience, people with those characteristics in that setting had a fairly high rate of asking me out despite the most obvious signals of disinterest and occasionally attempting to follow or find me. If a white woman came up to me and asked in perfect French or English for my name, I probably wouldn’t have lied. Was I treating people differently based on no information but their physical appearance? Yup. Did it work? It did. Am I a bad person? Well… I don’t know.
But, let’s face it: we all do this, and we do it because it makes sense. If you were lost in a foreign city, who would you ask for help? I seriously doubt it would be the tattered, unkempt high-looking guy slouching at the entrance to a dark ally. Have you made any effort to know anything about this person that’s not extremely superficial? No. Is it possible he’s actually a really nice person with lots of handy knowledge about the local geography? Of course it is. But I defy you to tell me that you’d approach him for directions rather than the clean-cut family of four over there. You’ve made a snap judgment. And, statistically, you’re probably right.
I’m not advocating legalized racial profiling. I’m not suggesting that any stereotype is always right or that one should ever treat people as anything but, fundamentally, people. But the point is that, when a small amount of information is all you have, using patterns you’ve learned from the past to make choices is not always a disgusting, mean-hearted, bigoted thing to do. It’s a healthy adaptive strategy that makes complete sense. It’s something we should learn to moderate, not something we should have to pretend we don’t do in order to feel like okay human beings.
It’s something we should talk about. I didn’t expect my last blog post to be a passionate plea against PC. But I think that in a lot of ways the fact that there are just some things one can’t say in polite company and certainly in the political arena has done more harm than good. I’ve spent most of my life scared to make statements about race or gender in public. Quite frankly, the fact that I’m typing all of this stuff on my computer rather than saying it in person to most of you reading this makes it a lot easier, even now. One thing I really liked about Senegal is that people there weren’t afraid of that kind of thing. Not that I think that pointing and yelling “tubaab” is a productive way to deal with racial difference, either. But it took me a while to realize that “tubaab” isn’t always a bad word.
“It just means ‘white person’,” Aziz explained to me. “Just like other words mean black person or arab.”
There is actually a part of me that feels I’m being a bit profane just typing that. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was horrified the first time I heard someone make a joking ethnic slur in Dakar. The more I heard people talk about it casually, however, the less of a big deal it became. I was able to have honest discussions with people I barely knew about race relations, something I could never do in the United States.
The people and situations of Senegal added to my identity a good deal of boldness when talking about race and culture. In a class in November I discussed issues that face my own racial group outright in public for the first time in my entire life. Here’s a confession: after that class, I almost cried. I was so terrified that the entire class thought I was a horrible bigot that I required a lengthy skype conversation with a friend from home, a lengthy conversation over dinner with a friend in Dakar, and a lot of my classmates coming up to me later to tell me that they thought I was being reasonable before I felt secure in my lack of total moral depravity. But you know what? It was worth it. I know that I learned something from that conversation, from people who agreed with me and especially from people who didn’t. I hope that, back in U.S., I can keep doing that. Even if I slip right back into my oatmeal and cardigans, I hope that I can keep some of the honesty of the people I encountered in Senegal.
The problems I saw while I was abroad made me uncomfortable in a lot of different ways. That, of course, was part of the point of going. It also, though, made me more comfortable talking about those problems, saying, “of course I don’t know everything there is to know about this situation, but here’s my experience of it,” saying “you were taught this just as I was taught this other thing, and they’re different – that doesn’t make either of us bad people,” saying “I know not everyone thinks the same way as I do, but right now all the thought I have done about it leads me to believe that as a twenty-year old white woman I deserve respect and I’m willing to demand it.”
I, just like everyone else, deserve respect regardless of my gender or race. We all deserve the respect that is honest dialogue with each other.
I didn’t want to come back saying that a lot of the problems I encountered abroad have a lot to do with money and sex and race. I wanted to clean out my picture of the world along with my sense of myself, and this just feels dirty. The point, though, that if everyone, like me, feels a bit like they’re uttering profanities when they say things about money, sex or race then nothing’s going to be said at all. If we really want to solve all those problems, no one should treat anyone as though they’re too sensitive to hear a plain statement of someone’s experience of the world. No one should treat anyone as though they do or don’t have the right to say something just because of the color of their skin or the place in which they were born. No issue should be left to fester without being discussed, explicitly and from all sides.
There’s my bow. Clearly, if everyone read and agreed with my essay the whole world would be a better place.
Or not. Or you could disagree with me, and tell me – honestly, and without being too PC. My e-mail’s kmb96@georgetown.edu. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, I’m signing off. Thanks for reading whatever bits of my thoughts you read – I’ve probably been having more fun writing them then I ought to have had, particularly for the sake of my dearest readers’ valuable time.