The Widening Gyre

A year or two ago I was eating dinner with a certain contingent of my extended family.  These are the (mostly conservative) southern relatives.  One cousin-once-removed opined, “Lemme tell you about Chileans: I got no use for ‘em.”  He went on to explain that while Argentinians think—or rather, know—they’re better than everyone else, Chileans think they’re better than everyone else, and they’re going to prove it to you.

I asked, “Where do Americans fit into this?”

Another relative, who’s done a lot of traveling, said “Americans don’t think anyone else exists.”

I am regularly reminded of how sadly, frighteningly true this is.  (Not the thing about Chileans.)

Democracy Now recently ran an interview with two Ugandan gay rights activists about the pending anti-homosexual bill there.  There’s something that’s been disturbing me a bit about US coverage of this bill, and the Democracy Now story was no exception.  Amy Goodman spent over half of the interview (as I remember it a couple of days later) asking her guests about the involvement of US christian right groups in promoting the atmosphere of homophobia out of which this bill has grown.  Other coverage that I’ve been exposed to has also drawn a lot of attention to connections between the US right and the legislators who have been pushing the bill.

These US groups certainly deserve to have their role exposed.  However, what disturbs me about the emphasis on their involvement is that it evokes a certain racist, colonial subtext.  There’s an implication that this horrific bill is the fault of the Americans who have promoted homophobia in Uganda.  It seems that responsibility is placed disproportionately upon the shoulders of these white “meddlers,” rather than on the Ugandans who actually drafted the bill and are promoting it using all kinds of hate speech and fear tactics.  These news stories echo an old colonialist narrative in which the natives don’t really think for themselves, but merely act on the influence of whites.  This idea was bandied about a lot when Africans were resisting European colonial rule: the blacks are like little children.  They need whites to take care of them.  They’re just confused because some socialist European meddlers gave been giving them crazy ideas.  The story I hear underneath the emphasis on US influences on the anti-gay bill is “Homophobic, fear-mongering rhetoric about the Homosexual Agenda to destroy the traditional family is all objectionable enough in the US where we’re civilized enough not to go around executing gays.  But these Americans should’ve known better than to bring it to the Dark Continent, where anything goes and the most unspeakable horrors happen on a daily basis.”

This narrative is not explicit, and I’m sure it’s not intentional.  But I’ve noticed it popping up in my mind whenever I hear one of these news stories.  And if it’s lurking in my mind, then it must have come from the culture somewhere, and it’s hard to think it doesn’t have some influence on the way the issue is being reported.

But even discounting this subtext, the way Amy Goodman and others in the US have chosen to report this bill is a deliberate effort to tell the story in terms of US politics.  Goodman is using this story as a way to attack the US right.  This attack may be well justified, but it is a transparent example of the difficulty that Americans have with seeing issues (and people) outside the US on their own terms—the tendency to make everything about the US and (United States of) Americans.  The thing that makes us talk about how many American lives were lost, rather than how many human lives were lost.

I’m glad that I know that US Christian groups have had a hand in what’s going on in Uganda.  But now I want to know what’s going on in Uganda.  Far more useful than spending 20 minutes discussing exactly how and how much these US groups have been involved would be discussing the economic, political, social, and religious realities of Uganda that allow a bill like this to be proposed and make it so likely to pass.  Or discussing what GLBTI Ugandans are planning on doing if it passes.  Or whether and how I can help keep it from passing.  Usually when I see this kind of hate-mongering, it’s being purveyed by people with power who want to cement and increase that power, to people who are in some kind of desperate situation such as poverty or, say, an AIDS pandemic.

If this bill passes it will have profoundly life changing, even life-threatening (though I believe the death sentence provisions have been removed), effects on countless LGBT Ugandans and their friends and loved ones (the bill includes punishments for people who know of and fail to report homosexuals and homosexual activity).  Can we stop thinking about how this bill is relevant to Americans and the US for a minute (I know, that’s what most of this post has been about, too) and start thinking about the people who are truly affected?

Enough about the US news media.  I have the internet:

Gay Uganda is a blog by a gay Ugandan, who (unsurprisingly) talks a lot about this bill.

A post about the bill on African Activist

An excerpt from a speech about the human rights impacts of the bill by Silvia Tamale on November 18, 2009 at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda on allAfrica.com. It has some really great analysis of what the bill means in African and Ugandan terms.

The text of the bill at Box Turtle Bulletin

There’s a lot more out there, but you have the internet too.

Pick a tarot card with a human figure or figures on it. Visualize the card with the race(s) of the figures changed. Or even get the uncolored BOTA Tarot deck, make copies, and color the people different colors. Try different combinations of skin colors. Meditate on the card with these changes, and observe how it changes your reaction.

For example, how does The Lovers strike you differently depending on whether the man is black and the woman is white or the woman is black and the man is white, or the man is Asian and the woman is black, etc.

It can be pretty disturbing, if you’re honest with yourself and haven’t done a lot of work on being mindful of your own prejudice.

You can also try switching the genders of the people in the cards to get a better sense of how gender is encoded in the imagery.

Perhaps I’ll post a personal example later.