…that one other positive thing about the regime change in Libya is that there will now be new Fulbright FLTAs from that country from now on. The year 2009/10 was the first time that anyone from Afghanistan was admitted into the FLTA program in a long time. A new day will hopefully lead to more understanding and better relation with these parts of the world.
Browsing the archives for the Observations category.
I have come across this pernicious argument more than a few times now, and lately from Donald Trump and the “Hercules” actor Kevin Sorbo who appeared on Fox News yesterday to make the same point. The argument goes this way, that those who complain about Tea Party racism should direct their anger at what is the real racism: the fact that over 95% of black people voted for President Obama in 2008.
Sigh.
And there I was thinking that I live in a country that speaks English as its first language.
Sigh.
So here it goes, the real problem with that really pernicious argument: racism is defined as “the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination.” I’ll break it down: racism is deciding that someone should NOT get something that everyone has access to, just because of the colour of their skin.
So, here again is a reason why it is less likely that it is racist that Obama was voted overwhelmingly into the White House by an overwhelming black vote: by the time he was voted as president, he was the first person of his race ever to get that close to a position that had been dominated for hundreds of years by people of a certain race.
I’ll make another analogy. Imagine these scenarios.
A: There is a school somewhere in the world which for four hundred years had admitted only people of a certain height/hair colour/dentition etc, and then one day, people who have for that period of time had been excluded from that process found a candidate that qualified as an outsider and was overwhelmingly supported – along with other support from the people who hitherto had that privilege. The student shorter than the average height requirement/hair colour/dentition is finally admitted, and everyone is happy.
B: There is a school somewhere in the world in which only one shorter/different-hair-coloured/wrongly-dentitioned student was recently admitted after about four hundred years. He is about to be removed by an overwhelming majority of the “establishment” regular people for no other reason that made sense, or had been applied for other “regular” people up until then.
Now, here is my conclusion. There is absolutely no evidence from the above to show that there is racism in any of the two scenarios A and B. Perhaps.
But…
It is MUCH LESS LIKELY racist that an underdog is collectively SUPPORTED to get equal opportunity, than that an underdog is collectively DENIED access to equal opportunity. And this is where Sean Hannity, Hercules, Donald Trump, and all the others got it wrong.
And here is one more thing. There is a clear difference between racial and racist politics. It is racial politics to vote for someone on the basis of their skin colour, but not necessarily racist. It is however clearly racist (as well as racial) to try to remove someone from a position because of their skin colour. The difference is the harm inherent in only one of them.
And here is one more thing I found on a Youtube comment: “black (and other minority) people, until 2008, have voted 100% for white candidates.” How racist is that?
Have I told you something personal lately? No. Alright, here is one: I got a new office space. Not really a new office, but a set of new furniture that makes my space in our language laboratory look like a serious, distinguished spot.
Like I quipped on Facebook a few days ago, this new set of furniture seriously seeks to make me forget that I am, in fact, a student. On the bright side, here’s to more pensive moments within my new space, to reading and to writing.
I have finally settled with the reality that international email scam will always have a Nigeria name tagged to it, whether or not it has a Nigerian face notwithstanding. My skin has finally got thick enough. I don’t know how it happened, and it did take a long while, but yesterday while Jon Stewart was making fun of Sarah Palin’s decision to take all the money from donors through her SarahPAC for as long as possible all the while knowing that she wasn’t going to to run for office, and then compared her to “the Nigerian Prince” scam category, I strangely found myself laughing. So, that’s it folks, scam jokes with “Nigeria” in its punchline have come to stay. Git with it!
A crush once told me that her mother warned her to beware of Nigerian men, before politely qualifying it with more information about how the warning wasn’t different from the warning the woman also gave regarding other men from her own country. Don’t worry, she’s not American, but that hardly changes a fact: there is a perception out there that makes for good comedy, or malice, that whenever there is an international scam involving emails, there is a Nigerian somewhere close to it. This, to be fair, is rooted in some fact. Between 1985 and 1999, Nigeria was ruled by some of the most corrupt, most morally bankrupt, must brutal military dictators who rendered extinct a thriving middle class. Along with their looting of the country’s coffers, they also rendered to waste the hitherto reputable social conscience, and ethics. A nation that thrived on hard work and equal opportunity turned to one of vanity and hopelessness, and a futile chase of wealth by all means at the expense of dignity replaced the ethics that once made the country the hope of the continent.
By the late 90s, majority of young (and at the beginning, mostly educated) citizens embraced the new opportunities that the internet brought, and to put it to the use best suited for the loneliness and hopelessness that the situation provided on the ground in the country: for crime. Thinking about it now, I doubt that crime was the real intention of the first people to take advantage of the powers of internet communication. I imagine someone mistakenly discovering that from his apartment building in Lagos, he can have a real romantic relationship with someone as far away in the world as Chicago, or Adelaide, or Brisbane. And then, another one discovered an idea that e-relationship could become a profitable venture. I do not claim to know how this began. I can only guess. I was nineteen years old in 2000 when I entered the University of Ibadan as an undergraduate and I had used email for the first time only one year earlier.
So naive was I of this scamming phenomenon that had, by then, become quite lucrative (that every internet cafe had at least one person using the computers there to send scam mails to unsuspecting people around the world) that when I first came into contact with a sender, I thought that my life was at risk. I worked for a few months between January and September of that year in an internet cafe where emails were still first written on paper, then typed onto the computer, and then sent massively. It was like fax, or telegrams. Only a few people had personal email addresses, and those who did still had to have their emails typed out on the computer in the cafe before they logged on to the internet to send them. My job was to get those typing done, and help customers trying to reach their loved ones. One of the customers we had however was a hairy man of around 33, well built, tall and spoke Hausa, English, and pidgin English. All the emails he had me type always began with “I am the nephew of the late General Sani Abacha, the recently demised Nigerian Head of State”. It went on to say how many millions the late General had stashed somewhere and pleaded to the reader of the email to contact him so that they could transfer the money together to some other account, and share it.
For those familiar with Advance Fee Fraud, this is usually the catch. There is a bogus amount of money somewhere, usually very large and tantalizing. All the reader had to do is to show interest in being an accomplice so that the sender can share some of the loot with them. It usually never works out like that in the end, of course. The unsuspecting responder would be asked to send his/her account number, and then some advance fee to “process” the withdrawal of the loot, and then the criminals go for the kill. By the time the responder discovers that there was no loot in the first place, he/she has already committed a large amount of his/her personal funds and will not be getting it back. There are other variants, of course. A man pretends to be in love with a woman he meets in a chat room. He makes her fall in love with him and then he feigns poverty and the woman starts sending money and gifts to him until he decides that he’s had enough. Sometimes he gets her to loan him a large sum of money, and then disappears. The woman then shows up in Nigeria and makes the front page of a newspaper. She’s looking for so-and-so person who she fell in love with. In many cases, the man had used a fake name as well…
Back to the story. At the moment of typing the said emails, the only thing in my mind was that I had finally met my nemesis. Relatives and family members of Sani Abacha were known to be brutal. People had disappeared and many had been shot for opposing his reign as a military dictator. So here I was talking with his nephew and helping him send emails that detail a series of large financial transactions with foreign correspondents. I was knowing too much and my life was about to change for the worse. I would not know until very much later that my fears were unjustified, and that there was no need for me to have immediately started avoiding the man for fear that he would soon want me dead for knowing his secrets. He was most likely not related to anyone relating to Abacha. All he was doing was trying to swindle whoever was stupid (and greedy) enough to respond to the email.
Of course, in the intervening years, I have also realized the very fine line between romantic scams and real love that transcends distance. I met and dated for a few years someone that I met online who has remained my friend and colleague ever since. I have also discovered the very many scams that dot the internet landscape, including ones that trick you into signing up for “free trial” products only to charge you a month later, or ones that tell you that you’re their “50,000th visitor” and try to get you to sign up for offers that you don’t need and that might either cost you, or clog your email bandwidth. There are thousands. Telemarketers call you with polite requests that you provide your address and then sign you up for magazines you didn’t want who send you the check in the mail a few weeks later. Credit card companies put hidden fees in fine prints and surprise customers across the country every day (with a sustained backing by the conservative political right who insist that banking regulations that look out for consumers are “job killing”.). In short, access to the internet and its many possibilities brought about as many negatives as positives.
Today, as it has been even before the internet came, fraud, by very many political names, have taken over the world – from a criminally-minded Nigerian (and non-Nigerian) youths aiming to swindle greedy western businessmen, or thieving marketing gimmicks aimed at the unsuspecting internet user. The “Nigerian Prince” variety however takes the cake, of course, because everyone at one point or the other has received such a mail claiming to be the relative of a recently dead corrupt politician, be it Saddam Hussein or a recently removed one, like Hosni Mubarak. Not all of those emails are Nigerian nowadays, of course. I know for a fact that regulatory efforts by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has made it hard to commit internet fraud in the country and go free. The “product” has been exported to other parts of Africa and the world. That doesn’t mean that the jokes will go away, but that Nigerians will – and should – begin to laugh with it as it goes on. According to Jon Stewart, they now also have Sarah Palin on their side.
I came upon an interesting realization today that the Yoruba cultural system has solved for the world long before now, one of the most pressing issues of predestination. I should preface this, perhaps, with a disclosure that my undergraduate university project was called The Multimedia Dictionary of Yoruba Names. I have been fascinated with the concept of naming and the thinking processes that go into them since a very long time. According to the Yoruba belief system, a child is named usually with a view in his/her potentials as well as the conditions surrounding his birth. Read more here.
The Western world, however, is a different case entirely, depending on a totally arbitrary system of child-naming. Not only is there no special day when the name of the child is declared to the world, it is perfectly acceptable to call someone Lemon or Bush, or Focker, Iron or Stone. I mean, what were the parents thinking? A few months ago, Congressman Anthony Weiner became a news item not just for what he did wrong, but for how his name had not served as a warning to anyone around him since he was a kid. A last comment on strange associations will go to the strangeness of calling people who practise same sex associations fruits. I’ve never understood why this is the case, but when CNN’s first openly gay man happens to bear the name of a real fruit, it makes one take a second look at serendipity. (No slight intended here, seriously).
I do not want to cheapen this subject so I’ll stop here. But let’s hear what George Carlin has to say: “Soft names make soft people. I’ll bet you anything, that ten times out of ten, (guys named) Nicky, Vinnie, and Tony would beat the shit out of Todd, Kyle, and Tucker.” I return to Yoruba roots where everything has already been patiently explained. Ile la n wo k’a to so omo loruko. A name is not just a name. A rose called by any other name might not always smell as sweet, so if you are naming one, be careful not to name it after a killer bee or a poisonous cantaloupe.
(The three previous precursors to this post are also worth checking out. Check the “related post” section down below.)