Lost in Transportation

It was my goal to write two posts a month, and here I am on the last day of April taking the last chance I've got to stick to my goal. So, the month in review: I got a job teaching extra classes for big money (at least as far as this humble Fulbrighter is concerned), I've got a new class schedule because the seniors have graduated already, and every day is filled with small moments which astonish me. But of course that seems par for the course. At school I encounter a thousand small consequences of the way mass media influences people. It's so easy to see in kids, who are still open enough to accept challenges to what they think about something. It's harder somewhat to gauge the influence of parents and friends, but the media influences stand out pretty clearly. Particularly upsetting is to realize how our movies, music, and media portray such a racist image of African Americans. Today I was explaining how offensive the word "bitch" is, and how using sexualized words like bitch, whore, slut, etc. to criticize other women is very harmful, and that women are particularly guilty of doing this to one other. One girl innocently said, "black men use those words all the time." This struck me as proof of how, once a film, song, or text leave our borders, it takes on an air of basic truth that it might not have so directly within our borders. Americans know on some level, that when they see images of an angry black young man from the projects, that he is a product of his environment. They are more likely to have an idea of the range of social conditions that have caused him to become this way. They may also have real life experience which put the images into context. Of course, I believe constant exposure to the same stereotyped images of black people must have a damaging effect on the minds of all Americans. This effect is more subtle and difficult to quantify however, than the effects I see on young people here. Here, these images represent truth, they are taken to represent the people they portray.

Sometimes this leads to misunderstandings so big, they are even funny. For example, they see our somewhat sexy, party movies, and they think we are a sexually open or even libertine culture. This is so far from the truth that it is flat out comical. We are a nation where people get worked up into a frenzy about the smallest whiff of something sexual, something having to do with the human body itself, where when an artistic photograph of young Miley Cirus, queen of teen purity, shows a hint of her back, suggesting that under her covering she is naked, it is enough to provoke the outright wrath of mothers everywhere. I thought about that photograph a bit, and realized that it is not about what it shows, in fact it shows nothing which in itself is provocative, it is the reminder of what lies unseen that riles our puritan morals. It is the same reason that Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen was so provocative: provocation by omission, by leaving it up to the minds of the viewers he creates a space more provocative than any he could have put on stage. Anyway, I'm getting off track. So my point there was, American storytelling when it crosses borders is taken as a report of fact.

When I told Viktoriya that in the images of angry black men calling women bitch all the time, is not an actual portrayal of black men in general, she was sincerely surprised, telling me that that's what she's always seen. I told her that I grew up in a very white town, and I had heard many men (and women of course, which was my original point) who talk to women that way. I told her it had absolutely nothing to do with race, and everything to do with upbringing, socio-economic conditions, and education. Of course in our country minorities are underprivileged at a consistently higher rate than the Caucasian majority, which can lead to the impression that black people are naturally inclined to be a certain way. I told her though, that this is a false impression, although an understandable one given the images she's been exposed to. It had never occurred to her, and she had never been told that these images might be misleading. Just as easily as she had accepted that idea from the media that black people were a certain way, she assimilated the new information that this was not true, that these images are misleading and make for entertainment, not documentation.

It might have been possible that her understanding could just have been a one case thing, but my experience is that it is the rule, not the exception. Boys here worship their thug life rap idols, putting their image on a pedestal and seeing it in the face of every black person they come across. These images are so strong, and as they leave our shores, they gain strength, becoming unquestionable fact. I wonder whether this is a new problem, thanks to globalization. I am hard pressed to say, as this global world is really the only one I've ever known.

Well, I was planning on writing a light-hearted fluffy post tonight, but it seems that there is usually something more pressing on my mind. Tomorrow is May Day. A big deal here in Berlin, it's a favorite time for riots, burning cars and neo-nazis vs. punks. Should be interesting! Maybe May Day will provide me with some lighter material to reflect on. Mmmm.... or maybe not!