Reverse Ethnocentricism

(Heh, big words sound good in titles.)

[long post with too many disparate points]

Years ago, when I was in Fifth Std (fifth grade, as they say here in the US, i.e. 10 yrs old), my then-best friend Shwetha Swami and I decided we were going to write a book. Shwetha got a big, 300-page notebook and for about two weeks, we spent recess planning out our story. It was going to be a mystery-adventure book, because Shwetha was bang in the middle of her Famous Five stage, and I was into the Hardy Boys. One minor incident that happened while we were enthusiastically planning it sticks out in my mind.

Around the second or third day of the planning, we were mulling over the question of what to call our characters (who, I might add, were painstakingly modeled after the Famous Five). Shwetha wanted to call them Reena, Leela, Raju and something else, I forget what. And I was of the opinion that our book would never be a 'real' book if we didn't call them by Christian names - I think the names I wanted were Jane, Sally, Sam and Tim.

We fought over it for one recess, and the next day, Shwetha came back to me and apologised. "I asked my parents," she said. "My mother thinks you're right." So off we went, and continued planning the Adventures of the Unimaginatively Named Kids. The book never got past chapter 2, and we didn't even have a title or any semblance of a plot, so I suppose the project was doomed from the start.

The thing that gets me is that my only exposure to fiction was books by western writers - it was Enid Blyton for a long time, all the way from Noddy to the Five Find-Outers, and then it became Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon (who were rumoured to be one and the same person - anyone know if this is true?), and then it became Agatha Christie and Earle Stanley Gardner. I didn't discover R. K. Narayan and Satyajit Ray till I was 12 or 13. All the way until then, I'm sure I was under the impression that 'real' books were only written about white kids with Christian names who lived in England and USA. And you know what's telling? My friend's parents apparently thought the same, too.

And that's reverse ethnocentricism.

We Indians have it pretty good, compared to others. We're like a continent all to ourselves, even in this borderless age. Our indegenous media manages to hold its own in competition with the all-white "global mainstream" media, never mind the hue and cry about us 'apeing the west'. We still get to see Indian faces on the big screen. Others have it worse. Bulgarians, to name but one example. My roomie tells me there isn't a big movie industry there at all. Think about African nations - Nigerians and South Africans and Kenyans and the Sudanese... how many movies do they see themselves in? And when they do make it on the news, what sort of news do they usually make?

And think about this: we must have seen about a billion photographs of tsunami victims by now... dead Asian bodies scattered in the streets, hungry Asian children begging for food, brown bodies with their limbs torn off. It doesn't shock us too much, we've seen it all before. National Geographic specialises in snapping artistically wretched pictures of black and brown and yellow children. How eagerly the media covers it - western media and local, both!

And yet, when earthquakes hit San Francisco, how many bodies are we shown on the streets? When hurricanes hit Florida, killing hundreds of people, how many torn white bodies make it to the TV screens? Can you find a single picture from the Mt St Helens tragedy that shows horribly disfigured, charred white people begging on the city streets? ... Or are we supposed to believe that these things didn't happen, that in a scrubbed-white country like USA, natural disasters are clean and victimless?

Western media has been known to keep its cameras to itself when it comes to such tragedies 'out of respect to the victims' and because publishing the pictures would be 'traumatic' for the public. Because, of course, the 'public' is only ever shocked by the destruction of white people.

And you know what? Local media in our (non-white) countries seem to have adopted this nonsensical coda, too. We show piled up Indian carcasses but not Western... We don't seem to care about how much trauma these pictures might cause to our own people.

You might ask why this matters, and how it will affect us in practical terms. Well. Here's an example.

Think of the class of people who are portrayed as victims of physical assault in most movies. Yes, you got it right: women. G.I. Jane-type flicks aside, it's always women who get assaulted, raped, slashed, beaten and otherwise subjected to violence in movies. It's different with men - men who get beaten up always fight back. Most of the time, they manage to physically defeat their assaulters in the 'final battle' in the end. Not so with women, who are usually purely victims... the best they can do is run away and try to escape.

Statistically, victims of physical assault are split pretty evenly between genders. Hard to believe, isn't it? From movies, we get the impression that women are weaker, women need to be protected, women are the people who best fit the label of 'victim'. You don't think this has an effect on the way we think and behave?

Let's talk about an example of how what we see around us affects us in a big way.

African-Americans in USA are typically underachievers in school. When you rank school kids according to SAT scores and such, the highest scorers tend to be 'Asian' immigrants (I don't believe West Asians are included in this, because the term 'Asian' in America means anything east of China... which is weird). Then come the white kids, and at the bottom of the bunch, you have the black youngsters. When you look at the percentage of black people who make up the professional part of the population, the statistics speak for themselves. The disparity is huge.

Does economic status explain it? No. Asian immigrants tend to be in the same income category as black people, and even in studies that compare kids from similar income groups, African Americans bring up the rear.

Does racism explain it? Not really. Asian immigrant children tend to be teased and bullied and kept outside the school cliques too. And whatever racism might be present in the adult professional circles, there is certainly no lack of opportunity at the school level - it's compulsory for kids to go to school till age 16, and it's practically free - and so there's nothing to explain the high dropout rates among black kids.

Does genetics explain it? This would be an incredibly politically incorrect thing to say - and a lot of people may actually believe that this is the only reason why it's not being said. After all, we can accept that genes determine physical characteristics and capabilities - and we know that black people are make excellent atheletes because of their genes. We know that IQ is at least partially genetically determined. Is it impossible that black people genetically have a lower capacity to learn?

I don't have any evidence, of course, because a study to determine differences in IQ between various races will probably never be commissioned... but I'm guessing this isn't the reason for underachievement among black children, because something else explains it more than adequately.

It boils down to what we see around us, what people we identify with are telling us, who our role models are. Or in a word, culture.

Think about it (and here, I'm addressing my Indian readers): if your peers and your parents hadn't been madly driven about academic achievement, would you, of your own accord, have cared? If everybody around you was dropping out of school and getting jobs, would you have bothered to concentrate so much on studies? If your culture didn't place such a high value on learning, if your parents hadn't asked you "Where did you lose the two marks?" when you got a score of 98% on a maths paper, if it wasn't ingrained in you to think that you're a failure if you're not a doctor or an engineer (even though you know that's bull)... where would you be?

Say you were black, and you were brought up in a ghetto. People drop out of school all the time - and there's no Michelle Pfeiffer-type English teacher to imspire and rescue you. Your community's idea of a successful person is one who manages to reach the age of 18 without a police record.

Even if you are from a well-off community, not a ghetto, there simply isn't that ingrained idea that school is everything, that college is an inevitable part of your future. Even if your parents try to tell you that, you look around you, and see that there aren't many black professionals anyway - so do you really belong in that sphere of life? Should you go to go the academic route and be a fish out of water, or should you try to join your peers and try to get by on sporting ability? And then, you're constantly reminded of how white people will tend to be racist, will tend to look down on you, no matter what (whether or not this is true). No wonder your us vs. them attitude is hardened, worsened. Perhaps not even without cause.

It makes a difference. What we see around us makes a huge difference. What we are today is mostly environment, and any academic aptitude that we might have is purely incidental to our success in acads.

[/long post with too many disparate points]