16 Nyákáanga 2013—A Cautionary Tale

The Crimson (the student newspaper for which I am a designer) sent out a solicitation in May for “summer postcards” from staff-members doing interesting things: short vignettes to be published on the website. I signed on to write three. Both that I have submitted so far are adaptations of posts on this blog; you can find them by going to thecrimson.com and searching for my name. The relevant one here was a shortening of the “uruunturuuntu” post from mid-June.

The guidelines for the postcards said that they should not be longer than 500 words, and the shorter the better. Shortening that post meant removing a lot of detail, mostly in the background for the sake of keeping the core discussion intact.

Soon after it was published, I found out that a certain Facebook user (another Harvard student) had read it, thought it was racist and posted a very sarcastic criticism of it, which got a bunch of likes and started a debate in its comment thread.

I think the complaint was somewhat exaggerated, though in retrospect I see some places where what I wrote might be misread as patronizing. This is specifically in the first two sentences, which were condensed down from several paragraphs. From one perspective, they might seem like blanket statements about a society, whereas the original piece phrased them unambiguously as raw impressions of a few individuals’ actions. Further, they might even lend the rest of the discussion a distasteful tone.

So evidently it is possible to read that vignette as meaning (wording exaggerated) that I was surprised to find that Rwanda was not a place full of evil, and that I rather decided it was full of noble savages right out of a nineteenth-century ethnography.

It is also certainly possible not to read it in this way (as several people have confirmed for me). And it’s all resolved, at least as far as that comment thread is concerned. We agreed (I think) that I am neither a raging colonialist nor a well-meaning-but-subtly-prejudiced gawker. It was nevertheless quite a surprise to be so accused: I think that having mature perspectives, especially on Africa, is very important, and I much more often notice insensitive statements in others’ writing.

So there is a whole series of lessons to extract from this:

First and foremost, when publishing a piece of writing, one has to expect that people will read it from a very wide range of perspectives, and that some of those perspectives may lead to quite divergent impressions: in this case, those who find it racist or those who see it as subtle affirmation of a problematic view they already had.

So from that, I can think of three points to remember in the future about the risks of writing on the Internet. (a) Be prepared for the consequences of writing, or at least aware that there may be some. (b) Understanding that misinterpretations can happen, try to minimize the opportunities for misreading. The writer’s goal should be that no one misreads his work, even and especially those who will trumpet it on social media. (c) When writing on a very sensitive topic—like the Rwandan Genocide, or an entire society of humans—take extra care not to misrepresent!

That is not all, though. Showing me an insensitive vignette is one of the easier ways to get me worked up about something. This post about me was not unlike others I have seen on Facebook, liked and even commented on.

The first thing I realize is that the portion of the personality that a short vignette disseminates is minuscule. I now cannot help but think how many of those whose writing I have criticized might have just miscommunicated themselves. Moreover, even if their views were reprehensible, they were almost certainly complex, interesting human beings nonetheless. Internet commenters can be harsh, and there is potential for personal damage without accountability in a way that even truly flawed writers probably do not deserve.

(I do not feel damaged; as far as personal attacks, I can handle a lot worse. It is still educational, though, to see the discussion from the opposite perspective.)

Next, a lot of the discussion dealt with how the privilege of the platform (in this case, The Crimson) brought with it the responsibility to treat one’s subjects carefully and respectfully, especially if those subjects do not have the opportunity to speak for themselves. That’s true, but it gradually occurred to me that I was not the only one with a powerful podium: Facebook enabled my critic to make inflammatory claims about me and my character, with direct access to several hundred members of our shared college community and, at least at first, no opportunity for me to defend myself.

This unexpected parallel arises only because the two of us happen to share a distinct social community. It is not that uncommon, though, for this sort of thing to happen: The Crimson publishes lots of opinion pieces that students generally agree are half-baked or worse. The next time I see such a discussion proceeding on Facebook, I will approach it from a different perspective.

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When I came to Rwanda, I knew I would find new things, and I did not quite know what those things would be. Almost everything I have experienced so far has been new and fulfilling in some way, but I find that, every so often, some event is just so far out of the range of what I could have expected that I have to scratch my head for a few minutes once it is all over. This is the most recent addition to that ill-enumerated list, which I think is three items deep now. Along with the others, it stands out as one of the less comfortable things that has happened to me here, but also among the most memorable and educational. The others haven’t actually been blogged about, for one reason or another, but I’ll touch on them at some point.

Tomorrow I travel for a few days, to see some of the country and hopefully get a little research in!