A Matter of Perspective

I don’t write much, if at all, about my work here. Honestly, my classes aren’t usually that interesting. But, today’s topic has its origin in one of my classes, so I’ll take a moment to tell you about what is it I do with the bulk of my time.

I teach English to students ranging in age from four to seventeen, in levels from basically a beginner to functionally fluent. Classes are two hours long and are English-only immersion, although honestly the bulk of “misbehavior” in my classes is students speaking Chinese. There are usually around 5-16 students per class, and my students are predominantly from wealthy families and attend one of the schools within a 30-minute commute of our center. Many of the teenage students attend Monday through Friday boarding schools. I teach eleven different classes, which is on the low side of average for our center – because we often co-teach (alternate weeks) classes, you can theoretically have up to eighteen or twenty classes.

So, last Sunday I was teaching my Sunday morning high-level class for teenagers. This class has five students, all of whom are fourteen-sixteen years old. The topic of the day was education, specifically educational systems and their differences in different countries. Sadly, this is one of the more interesting topics in that particular level’s textbook. We spent the first hour of class discussing the US and Chinese schools systems, whether or not tracking and entrance/exit exams are good things, and going over some vocabulary of areas of study. The second half of the class, according to my lesson plan, was going to be a quick reading about homework in high school, followed by a semi-formal debate about the usefulness of homework. But, right before the mid-class break, one of my students derailed the train entirely.

He asked me if I’d seen “Kony 2012.” I said yes, and the other four students said no. Then he asked if we could watch it over the break. I often let them watch videos/listen to music on the computer during this ten minute breather, so I said yes and found it on the net. I know it’s 29 minutes long, but I figured they’d lose interest by the end of break. Well, I was wrong. They watched quietly and intently for the entire time, so I let the video play through to the end. Then, I asked them for their reactions. It was both a way to get them talking (the entire purpose of my class, after all) and because I was genuinely curious. I know my own reaction to the video (as a white, middle-class, college-educated socially liberal American woman between the ages of 18-30), and I was interested to see how their reactions would be different.

Well, they hadn’t known who Kony was before watching the video. After watching the video, they said they felt motivated to do something. They agreed that he should be stopped, but didn’t feel the timetable (by the end of 2012) was realistic, especially considering the small number of committed troops. I believe they asked me how long it took us to find Osama Bin Laden with an entire army as a comparison. Then I asked them if they felt the video was speaking to them. We talked about this for quite a while, and the general consensus was no, not really.

So what I want to talk about today is why I feel the Kony 2012 video is a representative sample of modern activism that purports to speak to a worldwide community but actually displays a Western bias and unconsciously perpetuates many of the problems of the current political leadership’s attempts to address global issues. If this sounds like I’m about to write a college essay, fear not. While it would make a great topic for such a paper, I’m not going to do any research or cite any outside sources or attempt to write formally. This is my opinion, expressed hopefully logically. If you’re bored already, I won’t blaming you for leaving now and going to play Sudoku while catching up on season five of The Guild (do it! Nathan Fillion, Grant Imahara, Kevin Sorbo, Colin Ferguson, and Brent Spiner all guest star as themselves. It’s hilarious.)

Okay, first things first. Have you seen the Kony 2012 video? If you have, I’m willing to bet serious money that you watched it on Youtube. I’m willing to bet 90% of the videos you’ve watched online in the past week were on Youtube. Perhaps you heard about it on Twitter. Or read about it in a blog hosted on Blogger or Wordpress. Then you joined the Facebook community.Well, if you are living in mainland China and don’t have access to a VPN, then you haven’t done any of these things. Youtube, Google, Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress, and Facebook are all blocked in China (although you can access Google Hong Kong). Oh no! What do Chinese people do? Well, clearly, they have their own versions – Weibo is a blog/microblog platform, Youku is your source for cute cat videos, and Baidu not only searches the internet but also is your convenient source for free music downloads.

Secondly, even if these sites weren’t blocked, they are still all in English. While many people study English in China, and many are functionally fluent, not everyone is, and even if you are, you have to make a conscious effort to enter the English sphere of the internet. So any video or website that claims to speak to an international community, but is solely accessible or searchable by English speakers is actually limited to the English-speaking world. One of my favorite xkcd comics is #256, the Map of Online Communities. It’s funny (not just because Myspace is bigger than Wikipedia[it’s from 2007]), but it’s important to remember that it’s not a map of the Internet, it’s a map of the English internet. Like a map of the US that blurs out Canada and Mexico and omits the entire rest of the world, we must remember that this vast, limitless internet that we work and play in every day is just a small, monolingual slice of what’s actually out there. (Chris Harrison also has some interesting maps of internet connections using 2007 data).

There are an estimated 400 million Chinese internet users. That’s more than the population of the US and Canada combined. So it is hard to see Kony 2012, an English language video on a blocked video site, as speaking to them. The video talks about the global community while ignoring a huge part of it. But, we watched the video in class, right? So clearly it is available. We found it on a Chinese video hosting site, and someone had gone to the effort of subtitling the entire video in Chinese. It’s potentially interesting to note, however, that the subtitles were written in traditional characters, which are predominately used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese communities and not on the mainland. Still, this makes the video available to the Chinese internet community.

Kony 2012 isn’t just an internet movement, though. The video exhorts viewers to be involved in physical ways, from speaking to political leaders and sharing the video through word-of-mouth to donating money and helping hang posters and cover the (physical) world with awareness posters on the night of April 20^th.  I don’t think I’ll be seeing any posters on Saturday morning here in Guangzhou, but I’ll let you know if I do. Tellingly, the Kony2012/Invisible Children website is also blocked here. I doubt you could order an action kit and actually get it through customs. And even if you could, we’re back to the language problem.

Now, the biggest issue with the video is that it’s very US-centric. The organization is US-based and seeks American government intervention. On a personal political level, I question the idea that it’s the US’s place to go hunt down Kony. This continues the post-WWII trend of American interventions in foreign countries that seem to follow the logic that because we have the ability to do it, we should do it. Personally, I’d like to see this go through an international body (say what you will about the ineffectiveness of the UN. Maybe that’s the problem we need to fix first). This is where the video is perpetuating some of the political beliefs that are causing international friction, that are really at odds with the idea of united global activism. When things like the current unrest in Syria happen, China and the US and everyone else often divide on opinions of what should be done. We can choose to view this as political antagonism and posturing, or we can do an more nuanced reading of cultural beliefs and standards which inform major decisions. What we absolutely cannot continue to do is act as if other country’s opinions are something to note and then ignore in favor of our own decision. We are not the world’s mother. We don’t get to make decisions based on our own moral/economic/military/political superiority (semi-related note: you know why Iran wants nukes so badly? Because thanks to the UN Security Council, we have a de facto policy of only listening to people with nukes. Way to go, people tasked with protecting world peace!)

The second biggest (and related) issue is that it assumes that capturing Kony will solve the problem. Yes, just like deposing Saddam Hussein fixed Iraq and killing Bin Laden has put an end to our worries about terrorism. As much as Africa isn’t the heart of darkness that Westerns tend to see it as (just as China isn’t the corrupt Communist dangerland that it get portrayed as), Africa’s got a lot of problems. Kony is one of them, yes. As the Kony 2012 video points out, he’s abducted 30,000 children into his army through the years. And yet, that many children die each month from hunger and related problems, many of them in Africa. Catching Kony won’t solve Africa’s issues related to food, education, disease prevention, and economic opportunity.

The Kony 2012 video feeds into the same core belief held by many in my generation that if you just care hard enough – if you really, truly believe – then things will change. This is the belief that got Obama elected, and this is why so many people feel betrayed by him. We believed so hard, you see, we cared so much about change, but Obama went on to be a decent and human president, when he clearly should have walked on water and returned us to a boom economy in one fell swoop (a fell swoop, apparently, being less than three years). So this youthful activism encouraged by the Kong 2012 video tells us that if we hang enough posters and wear enough bracelets and send enough letters to our senators, then Kony will be caught and our efforts will be validated and we can all feel good about ourselves for solving the problem. In fact, the only way that group enthusiasm will capture Kony is if we all fly to Africa, link hands, and walk through the jungle in a brute-force search. I’m not saying enthusiasm and activism are worth nothing. Sometimes, though, I’d like to see some pragmatism with my idealism, you know? It means there’s a smaller opportunity for your opponents to say ‘I told you so’ when your results are human-scale, not godlike miracles.

I do quite a bit of reading in my daily online life about privilege. We experience privilege every day without being conscious of it – but if we’re going to be activists, I think we need to take a deep look at ourselves and understand the ways in which we’re privileged. This isn’t so that we can thus feel guilty (or challenge each other to the Oppression Olympics), but so that we can thus reach out to different people without unwitting condescension or offense. The Kony 2012 video assumes you have internet access, speak English, live in an uncensored society, have time and/or money to spare, and believe that first-world countries have a duty to intervene when horrible people do horrible things, regardless of where it’s happening or who it’s affecting. It assumes that good intentions will result in good actions that will help the greater good. Is that wrong? Maybe not. But it is a simple and narrow way to view the world, and one that we need to modify if our generation is really going to change the world. 

"I think self-awareness is probably the most important things towards being a champion."

Billie Jean King