Racism in Intercultural Context

Racism in Intercultural Context By Jim Harries | Submitted to Ezine articles on 20th September 2011 Harries, Jim, 2011, ‘Racism in Intercultural Context.” Ezine Articles (ezinearticles.com) http://ezinearticles.com/?Racism-in-InterculturalContext&id=6572400 The West is determined, it seems at all costs, to get rid of racism. Prejudice on the basis of race is seen as a great evil that must be stamped out. The issue of racism classically plays itself out along the white versus black axis. Those countering racism consider it to be a terrible prejudice to respond to assumptions about differences between one's own people and others. Instead we are asked to treat everyone as if they are the same. My heart warms to this stand. I want all men to be my brothers, and would love to have fellowship with all as equals. I struggle a bit more with the practical implementation of such an approach. To say that I can simply enjoy the company of anyone else as I do that of my brother who I have known inside-out my whole life - simply is not true. So then why pretend that it is? To ignore difference may possibly be a legitimate way of dealing with it. That does not mean that it is the only way, however, or necessarily the best way. Ignoring difference will not generally compensate for difference. On the contrary, difference typically has to be compensated for using difference. That is - large people need larger clothes than small people. Intelligent and hard-working people may give of themselves so much that they need to be encouraged to take it easy. Idle people who sponge off the efforts of others need to be encouraged to work hard. People in a desert are encouraged to conserve water, whereas those in tropical rainforests are encouraged to protect themselves from it. And so on. A deep contradiction appears to underlie assumptions of the absence of 'difference' between the powerful West and numerous other peoples around the world. Certainly this seems to be the case in Africa. That is - whereas claims by Westerners to have understood African people may well be met with disdain, Africans are assumed to be easily able to understand Westerners. The practice of taking Westerners as experts on Africa are often scorned. Western powers make major efforts to include nonWesterners in their scholarship, in the case of the USA and UK often using English. Africans are expected to be the ones to articulate their 'culture' to the West. When an African rises in the social ranks in the West he is contributing to a multi-ethnic community. When a Westerner does the same in Africa, he is a neo-colonialist. How come? Deep fundamental epistemological errors are being made by people who assume that it is easy for Africans to understand Westerners but not for Westerners to understand Africans. The contradiction in suppositions on the two sides points strongly towards the existence of a problem - why should one side (Africans) be able to easily 'understand' the other (Westerners) and not vice-versa? Surely difficulty of understanding must be mutual? That is - either Africans really cannot understand the West - in which case attempts at transplanting Western knowledge systems in

Western languages to them for their benefit, are fraught. Or it must be accepted that Westerners can and do relatively easily understand Africa. If the latter is the case, then why are Westerners' efforts at intervening in Africa often so fraught? It should be clear that difference(s) exist, and that such differences cannot simply or easily be overcome. I would like to ask: what happens to the differences that, in the name of countering racism, are commonly ignored? The answer to such a question is these days occluded, in part at least, by the fact that fast growing Western economies are becoming global. Advances in technology are enabling economic and social systems that were once confined to the West to serve an ever growing proportion of the globe. Areas of misunderstanding can therefore be concealed by a blanket rise in prosperity that is being governed by just one quarter of the world. Does this mean that misunderstandings have been wiped out? An example of the impact of the ignoring of cultural specificities often strikes me. I am a western person who has spent 23 years living with African people in Africa. The part of Africa in which I find myself is Anglophone. People are obliged to use English for official purposes. This means technically that they are obliged to follow a logic that they do not understand. Their not understanding 'what they are doing' results in a mis-function. Things do not work. (Things Fall Apart - according to Chinua Achebe's famous novel.) Corruption steps in. Because foreign imposed processes do not work, so the logical thing becomes to misappropriate funds before they anyway get lost or abused. Once such corruption has become the order of the day - then nothing works anyway. (Unless it is controlled from the West, which is increasingly what happens.) Instead of insisting that Africa constantly appropriate from the West, and implement what it has appropriated in an unfamiliar context, there is a desperate need for the finding of what can work in the African culture. Merely transferring ideas, languages and processes across the world will not, I suggest, suffice. Instead of taking local root, such are more likely to operate 'in the air', so to speak - using a foreign logic that makes few local connections and only continues as long as does the outside subsidy. What then, we can ask, is preventing adaptations and innovations of technology and other foreign inputs from being adapted to local African, i.e. non-Western contexts? At least a part of the answer to this question must arise from dominant Western society's attempts at eradicating 'racism'. This results in the West being determined to deny the existence of such differences. How can differences that do not exist, be compensated for? Adaption can be rendered impossible. In conclusion I suggest that Western people's attempts at solving the 'problem' of racism by ignoring differences between peoples is contributing to structural instabilities in societies around the world. These instabilities are rendering vast communities extremely dependent on Western governance through the global system. Understanding of these societies is not being improved but is in effect being rendered impossible. Ignoring differences often does not make them go away. The increasing spread of Western media / technology transforms Western policies into global impositions.

Potential solutions to the above dilemma could be searched for in at least two ways. First by making macro-changes in the ways in which the international community functions in favour of the recognition of difference. Second with respect to the individual, I would like to encourage individual Westerners to attempt in their own lives to compensate for what appears to be a looming disaster. They can do this by reaching-out to non-Western peoples. They need to be ready to stand-in-the-gap by working with a foreign people using their language. Also, so as not to steam-roll local complexities using imported solutions that do not fit - using the resources of local people rather than their outside introduced alternatives in their relating to those people. For more on this see http://vulnerablemission.org/.