Broken boats and starfish

I argued with Maureen earnestly. I was leaning on the door frame to my room, she was sitting on the floor of Soni’s room and they were both looking at me –quizzically, maybe. I’m not sure what the expression was exactly. But they were not in agreement with what I was saying. They didn't think I should stop the international work.

A few months away from my departure from Uganda, my plan was to leave international development work altogether. 

Conflicted didn’t begin to describe it. Doesn’t describe it now. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about my career trajectory in one breath and cultivating joy in another. Sometimes the notion that the two can come careening together in an epic and entangled way makes me smile with enchanted wonder. 

What if someone paid me to travel and eat and write (or any one or combination of those things)? I could pay my bills doing something I do anyway! But as I’ve been unable to cobble together a feasible business plan for that dream I instead focus on other passions. Travel still floats to the top but so does making a difference in the world. 

My brain has been ticking. What does my future look like? What is my next step?

Friends urge me to take stock of my skills and consider their application in a wider arena but ultimately I find myself crafting an imaginary position that is neither imaginary nor new. International public health emerges again and again. And I find myself circling back to that conversation with Maureen and Soni. I left that work for a reason.

I spent an evening talking to a new friend about my disillusionment with development. I talked about the macro: money inspired power dynamics, cultural ignorance, unintended consequences, differential pay scales, Sisyphean feats (because we really aren’t clear on the problems let alone the solutions). The list goes on. I rattle them off periodically when the call of some place far off tickles my feet and makes me wonder if just maybe I could manage it. 

He takes more of a starfish approach. 

“If you could help 100 people in the next 10 years doing this work that you are frustrated is not being done, isn’t that worth it?”

I remember having this conversation with a friend while we working in South Africa. She  was frustrated then. Feeling useless then. Wanting the development system to be as dedicated to meaningful change as the people on the ground – host country nationals and foreigners – who stretch the money, work the programs, celebrate each new well and properly erected mosquito net and grieve each mother and infant that die in childbirth and each outbreak of a preventable disease. And then, I urged her to think about each starfish tossed back into an expansive ocean. “It matters to that one.”

It still matters to that one. To those many that manage to find their way back to the water. 

I can’t measure the worth of a person. Not in the line item of a budget, or the salary of a community worker, or the time in transit to a village. I can’t measure that worth to say interventions shouldn’t continue to happen as they are.

I can’t measure the worth of a person and so I struggle with continuing to throw people back into an ocean one by one when I know that the tide will wash them back on shore once the temporary safeguards (programming without infrastructure or sustainability) are gone.

There is no perfect solution; perfect is the enemy of the good. Waiting for a perfect system would mean countless deaths. Countless more than we see now. 

So what then?

When cholera swept through London in 1854 John Snow figured out that drinking water had something to do with it and then the work of protecting the water source became the priority. Energy is wasted if attention is only paid to the effects of something and not the cause.

My fear, both when I’m working in a country and when I’m sitting comfortably in my bedroom as I am now, is that everyone is so busy bailing water from a damaged boat that no one has time (inclination) to fix the hole in the boat…or even the hole in the bucket (the development system). 

There are a lot of people doing amazing work helping to save lives, partnering with people to improve quality of life…hell, years of life. But Teju Cole wasn’t wrong when he wrote about the White Savior Industrial Complex. The problems of any region, or country, are complex. Piecemeal answers aren’t the only answers, the ways things are currently done aren’t the only ways they could be done, and good works don’t erase the other inextricable issues tied to poverty, illness, and politics.

My new friend is right that sitting here in the US doing other things isn’t helping. But I am still cautious. I still see the danger that doing something can do whether from unanticipated consequences or feeding a system that needs a lot more than tweaking. 

It is easy to sit by the wayside and “tut tut” the work being done, but that isn’t my intent. I want to repair the bucket, patch the boat. Hell, I want a new boat altogether. To my friend’s point, I need to think harder how to make that happen.

Blame Culture

*potential trigger warning for sexual assault survivors

Jordan Davis was murdered for playing loud music.

A recent piece in The Root breaks from traditional black convention on “preparing young black men for the world”. In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder, the Rules of blackness are a much talked about rite of passage for black children with special emphasis for young black men:

•  When pulled over by the police, keep both hands on the steering wheel until asked for ID, then move slowly and narrate your actions
•   Pull your pants up and take off your hoodie
•  “Yes sir” and “no sir”, politeness to the extreme is essential not a nicety.

This list is not exhaustive but you get the gist. The piece inspects these “protective rules” and finds them lacking. At the heart of these rules, she maintains, is teaching young blacks to submit. 

Submission is a heavy word. Submit to some unspoken but innately understood idea of what a threat is and contort yourself in an attempt to avoid being that. 

If only he’d taken off his hoodie, hadn’t had tattoos, hadn’t been playing loud music…then he’d be safe and alive and wouldn’t have looked suspicious, would have celebrated his birthday last week, wouldn’t have been murdered in a parking lot. 

Seldom do we question the faulty premise. Florida’s flawed “Stand Your Ground” law and repugnant acquittal by a jury didn’t push the issue. Didn’t stop blaming the victim long enough to prosecute his murderer. 

My sister was conflicted by the Root’s article. I think the troubling part was theory vs. practice. A black man should be able to don a hoodie and go for a run. He should. But who volunteers to test that theory? Do you want your loved one to push that issue?

Surviving a racist society as a black person is parallel to surviving rape culture as a woman. They aren’t the same but they have common threads. 

“Why was she there?” I, and the rest of my classmates, asked. 

The Sociology of Deviant Behavior class was discussing a hypothetical rape at a fraternity party. “Where were her friends?” “She had to know being there wasn’t safe.” Our minds churned out questions thinly veiling blame…of the victim.

I cringe to think of it now. I am horrified to remember how entirely and obliviously I was entrenched in the assumptions of rape culture, in the blame of rape survivors (mostly women, although not entirely) for the abuses heaped upon them. In that moment I didn’t see anything wrong with our line of questioning or the way we were considering the situation. Our discussion mirrored every discussion I’d ever heard on the subject, directly or indirectly, on television, informally in high school and now my early years in college.

And then Prof. Hunt asked, “Why are you focused on the perceived faults of the victim? If I told you she was robbed would you ask the same questions?”

I wracked my brain, turning over what he’d asked and trying to find absolution for my views. But I couldn’t. I was a part of the problem. In that moment my freshman year in college, I began to reorient my thinking. No more double standards for victims or thresholds of blame. A rapist was a criminal, not the raped. 

That conversation spurred me to be vocal, to question the narratives surrounding rape and behavior. I remember a close friend of mine comfortably assured that victims of rape were responsible for what happens to them.

“What if it were your sister?” I asked.

“I don’t have a sister?”

“What about your favorite cousin?”

“She wouldn’t be stupid enough to be in that situation.”

He was adamant in his understanding of rape and I was just as adamant in trying to dismantle it. Adamant in trying to bring about that moment of clarity I’d had in Prof. Hunt’s class years earlier. I’m not sure I was successful but I’ve never stopped having that conversation. Never stopped asking how a victim is somehow to blame for her/his attacker. 

If we hold to that logic of victim blame then robbery victims are to blame for having stuff worthy of stealing and murder victims for having a life to take in the first place. It becomes a theater of the absurd.

I still didn’t go to frat parties alone. I am still mindful of where I walk (my sophomore year I didn’t argue with my boyfriend when he’d send a cab for me instead of walking the short distance home from campus when I worked late at the paper). I do not see culpability in someone who doesn’t take those precautions but I haven’t removed them from my arsenal. 

Ultimately, the rules we put into place are a mental protection. We blame the victims because it gives us a sense of control where, in fact, we have very little. If she was raped because “she looked slutty” and he was shot because “he looked like a thug” then if I dress a certain way, if my children are dressed a certain way, we are protected. The reality that some people walking around are rapists and gun-toting racists is too scary and dis-empowering to contemplate.

If I had children, no doubt, I would share the Living While Black rules with them as well as all the rules I navigate my world with as a woman, because who wants their child to face danger because in theory they should be safe. 

But you can’t change an inherently racist and sexist system by altering one person's behavior. Altering individual behavior is a survival mechanism for the moment- for the individual. To change a culture of sexual and racial oppression we have to have conversations that extend beyond rules and incorporate race and gender and privilege and entitlement as well. We have to be bold and confront fallacies of blame passed off as truth so that discussions of murder place blame on those doing harm and we can stop pretending that rules stops bullets.