Minority / Majority

I wrote this essay for my Perspectives on Race class that I'm taking right now. It's an interesting class, for all that we mostly just sit around discussing the issue more than trying to find an answer. Which begs the question, Is there an answer? We were supposed to write about a time that we were a minority or a time we were discriminated against, so I chose to write about living in South Korea. We were supposed to keep it to two pages (it's a large class, over 80 people), but I could have written a lot more on the subject if I'd had the space. If I had written more, I think I would have included more about what I learned and discussed in greater detail the treatment I received while I was there. But here's what I did get written.



"It's hard to be a minority when you're white and middle-class and living in America. I was never “normal”, per se, but I didn't stick out too much if you just looked at me. Which is why moving to South Korea for a year and a half rocked my world so much.

The United States may seem like the bastion of white middle-class-ness, but compared to South Korea it's incredibly diverse ethnically and culturally. For the first time in my life, I was the outsider in every way it was possible to be outside the norm: I wasn't ethnically Asian, I didn't speak the language, I couldn't eat the food, and the culture was totally foreign to me. I couldn't walk the walk or talk the talk, and I definitely didn't look the look.



My time in Korea wasn't my first experience being a minority – I grew up in an LDS family smack dab in the middle of the small-town, Bible Belt American South – but it was the first time people stared at me before I opened my mouth. In fact, I didn't have to do anything other than exist to get looks, both covert and overt, as I walked down the street. I was used to being “strange” because of what I believed and certain things I did or didn't do, but I wasn't equipped to handle the curious stares and whispers that trailed in my wake. I had years of experience explaining myself and my religion to skeptical and sometimes even hostile listeners; but now I couldn't communicate more than a few halting sentences, and anyway how can you confront people for merely looking at you? What could I have said?

My initial reaction to being so utterly foreign was a crippling self-consciousness. I tried to comfort myself by telling myself that not everyone was staring, but the truth was most people were. I'm average height in America, but in Korea I'm on the tall side. My hair, though light brown, is naturally wavy instead of heavy and straight. Even bundled up against the cold as I was there was no mistaking my double-lidded green eyes, and the weak winter sun and harsh wind only made my skin paler and my cheeks redder. It didn't help that little old ladies would come up to me, fascinated, and pat me on the back. You look just like a doll! they'd exclaim, reaching up to run their fingers through my hair. Is it natural? they asked.



After a few weeks self-consciousness gave way to anger. Stop looking at me! I wanted to shout. I'm just minding my own business, riding the bus just like you. Have you never seen a white girl before?! But of course they probably hadn't, not up close, and so the anger never made it past my thoughts. In time, the anger faded into amusement and the amusement faded into indifference. The stares and the whispers, the pats and the questions and the exclamations – they were all just part of life. It became such a part of life that coming home and fitting in again was almost as much a shock as sticking out had been when I first got to Korea.

I wouldn't say that I was particularly prejudiced or close-minded before going to Korea, but my experience there had a profound effect on me. I know what it's like now to be the person that isn't like everybody else. I know what it feels like now to be lumped into a stereotype willy-nilly, with no thought for who I am as an individual. I know how it feels to tamp down on the annoyance or anger that bubbles up when people make off-hand comments casually condemning something about which they know nothing.



It would be a lie to say that I don't have stereotypes and biases of my own, but since my experience in Korea I have tried hard to judge people on their own merits. I resist expecting people to act according to what “everyone” says. I've made a concerted effort to realize that people sometimes have very different ways of approaching life and its problems, and to reserve judgement on people's actions until I've at least tried to see things from their perspective. The outcome of those efforts has been profoundly enlightening, and I have come to see the world in a very different way from how I once saw it.

I don't relish being a minority. I returned to Korea one summer after I'd been back to America for about a year, and on bad days that annoyance and anger would flare up again. It's not particularly enjoyable to be stared at and whispered about and pigeonholed into a certain stereotype, but my life has become so much richer for that experience. My life has changed for the better, and I have become a better person for it. I cannot claim to be wholly without prejudice or bias or stereotype, but I can now recognize more easily when I've allowed them to creep into my judgements or my perceptions of people. My experience as a minority certainly doesn't equate with those whose experiences have been lifelong and overwhelmingly negative, but I can try to empathize based on what's happened to me. But I think most importantly my experiences have left me with a need to reach out to others, to overcome those small things that separate us so that we can learn from each other. Because what makes us the same is so much more than what makes us different."

Half the Sky

Photo can be found here

A friend of mine is spending the summer in Uganda. She just posted this post about the thing she's found the hardest about being in Uganda. The whole post is very thought-provoking and interesting, but I'll just quote a little bit here:

"I may be in Africa right now, but still there is a separation between me and these people, as tangible as the glass pane separating me and these little boys.  It’s a weird feeling.  I wonder how long it takes in Africa to stop feeling like a philanthropic tourist.  I’ve wondered a lot since being here if I love Africa for the right reasons.  Or better, do I want to make changes in Africa for the right reasons?  There are over 8,000 NGOs registered in Uganda all trying to make a difference, some for the right reasons, some for other reasons.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the enormity of development here.  It’s different than I thought it would be.  It’s messy and disorganized and sometimes (often) ineffective.  I believe in it though.  And I believe that the sooner we’re on the same side of the glass the better it will be."

I just finished the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide yesterday. (I wrote a little about this before here, before the book came out. The authors had released excerpts as articles in the New York Times.) It's a sobering read, but a very eye-opening one as well. We, as humans, have a tendency to block out the uncomfortable things about life and the human existence. I find this tendency to be much stronger in America; the majority of us tend to turn cringing away from the homeless man on the streets of our own town, let alone from the suffering of millions in other countries. Safe in our little bubble of (tenuous and fragile) prosperity, we don't really want to spend a lot of time contemplating the plight of the uneducated, abused, malnourished, and impoverished "other" people that live all over the world. People that don't even have a real floor or running water, let alone the latest iPod or the newest smartphone.

And then, when we do finally look outside of our carefully constructed bubble world, we go into these people's countries and cultures and try to "solve the problem" with no reference to their situations within that culture. Which doesn't really solve anything and just takes a lot of money to achieve (usually) very minimal results. And so, for the last few days I've been thinking about that, and my friend's post just helped me articulate some of my thoughts. The authors of Half the Sky make the point that the kind of aid that countries like Uganda and Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, etc really need is the grassroots kind - that is, locals helping locals, funded by foreigners when the locals don't have the resources. Reading Half the Sky has really gotten me thinking about how we're supposed to fulfill the commandment the Savior gave us when He said we need to love our neighbors as ourselves. Obviously, we need to spread the gospel, and obviously it's the only thing that's really going to fix the problems in this world; everything else is just some form of a stopgap measure, when you get right down to it, or treating the symptoms instead of the actual disease, if you will. But on the other hand, the Church (or its members) can't just waltz into places and start teaching the people and telling everyone to clean up their act without so much as a by-your-leave, and some kind of action must be taken in the interim. The question is, what is most effective? And how can I be part of the solution instead of part of the problem?

That's what I've been pondering. And no solution has readily presented itself. That's the thing about problems that confront half the population of the world - there are no easy solutions.

"How thankful I am, how thankful we all must be, for the women in our lives."

-- President Gordon B. Hinckley

This article is a sobering look at the challenges facing women and girls today, especially in developing countries. I hope that you will take the time to read it; I think it will change how you think of the challenges in your own life. Find the article here at the New York Times. When you've had a chance to read it, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Meanwhile, here's a little something to whet your curiosity. 

"Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation. Our awakening came in China.

"After we married in 1988, we moved to Beijing to be correspondents for The New York Times. Seven months later we found ourselves standing on the edge of Tiananmen Square watching troops fire their automatic weapons at prodemocracy protesters. The massacre claimed between 400 and 800 lives and transfixed the world; wrenching images of the killings appeared constantly on the front page and on television screens.

"Yet the following year we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life. A result is that as many infant girls died unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died at Tiananmen Square. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.

"A similar pattern emerged in other countries. In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — but these rarely constitute news. When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news." 

-- Kristoff and WuDunn in Half the Sky

read the whole article

Knowing things like this happen in the world only makes me more grateful for the light of the restored Gospel -- and with it, the knowledge that the Lord knows and loves each and every one of His daughters just as much as He loves His sons. Truly, in the eyes of God, there is no inequality between the genders; that rests in the eyes of humanity alone.

Want some further reading on the subject? See what a prophet of God has said about the women in our lives, and what the Lord has told His children about the family.