Breathe
By Mariana Conde
After reading for the umpteenth time one of my favorite essays, We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, based on her first TED talk, I watch the video of that talk. I find myself nodding almost the whole time, getting indignant at times, at others pausing to laugh at the genius of this woman who touches on serious topics without losing her humor or her ability to entertain and relate to the audience and the reader. What a person, I think, and I end up filled with positive encouragement when I hear her words and the approving applause of the large audience to her ideas in response to machismo. The title is misleading because it is not a feminine call to arms or the burning of bras but something much more difficult: how to evolve, how to make the sexes, recognizing our differences, come to respect each other and treat each other as equals. And not only for the value of equality per se, but because we would make happier generations by giving the rights that correspond to girls and removing the mandate for boys to always be strong and invulnerable.
Chimamanda has another TEDTalk, The danger of the single story, which talks about the prejudices that make us see each other in a limiting way, and which curiously reaches almost identical conclusions to the previous one, inviting us to look at the other with more depth to understand the breadth of human experience that builds each one of us.
The same medicine for very similar evils: blindness to the reality of the other, the cataloguing we make of other people by assigning them their little square in a matrix that we calibrate from our ignorance, prejudices or lack of empathy.
On the other hand, and in the opposite direction, there is no end of news in the press about supremacist movements in North America or Europe that nostalgically evoke Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan, which, although they are careful not to use those brands, are driven by the same ideas: superiority of the white race. Specifically, there is a transnational organization, ironically called Human Diversity Foundation, led and funded by individuals and groups from Sweden, England, Germany and the United States, which is dedicated, among other things, to promoting a certain type of genetic research that seeks to prove that certain ethnic groups are biologically better and have a higher IQ. This trend is called scientific racism. There are millions of dollars from various donors behind this supposed science -completely disqualified as quackery by the scientific community- and a clear eagerness of its sponsors to infiltrate politics through extreme right-wing parties.
What they do not dare to state publicly is what these pseudo-scientific findings will be used for, what they intend to do with the results, although we do not have to look back many years or very far to guess it. Already some of the proponents of this thesis float the term re-migration which is nothing more than the expulsion of immigrant minorities back to their countries of origin, regardless of whether they run the risk of being sucked into war, famine or continued persecution.
I am left thinking about the contrast between these two currents of thought, that of Chimamanda and that of the neo-Nazis, both very much in force today, and I think more than ever that humanity instead of advancing only goes around in circles. Challenges that we thought we had overcome after years of struggle, loss, personal violence or holocausts return like tornadoes to slap us again with their cyclical flurry.
The tension between these two visions leads me to think about the human perception of power and how it seems that humans crush whoever they can. We come across paradoxes such as men from oppressed minorities who fight for the injustice they live in to end, but who oppress and mistreat their wives at home (in the same way that we hear parents of people with disabilities outraged by the discriminatory treatment their children receive in society, but who find the struggle for LGBT+ rights scandalous, for example).
It is amazing how difficult it is to broaden our point of view beyond personal experience and fight our own blindness to open ourselves to empathy. It is neither easy nor comfortable to do so, some even say that we are genetically designed to discriminate and thus protect our tribe from enemy danger, but we are no longer in the cave age. I believe that today we are more afraid of losing hegemony.
Those who grow up in the privilege of a sex, economic position or race that has benefited from the status quo want to continue to cling to that supposed superiority and the historical benefits that their birthplace or sex has given them. They will not let go of them willingly and the only way in the past has been to leave them no choice through a united society that does see the other and fights for the rights of all. I believe that in reality the most powerful weapon we have is equal education for children.
And about feminism, I don't know if we will be able to convince Mexicans to be all feminists, but for our sake and that of our daughters and sons it is worth trying. Not a distorted feminism of hatred and resentment, as it is positioned by some who want to defame it, but that of Chimamanda's definition:
"Feminist is any man or woman who says: Yes, there is a problem with the gender situation today and we have to solve it, we have to improve things. And we have to improve them among all of us, men and women."
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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