So I’m back at the beginning of my “mid-week” weekend… One more week and one more tutorial essay behind me… Yay! I’m now half way through with Michaelmas Term! I’ve really come to enjoy the tutorial essays… But this week’s topic, which I only handed in the essay for today, actually got underneath my skin a little more than usual… And I think it was because, for the first time in my graduate studies here at Oxford, it was a medical anthropology topic that I could personally relate to my own experiences abroad…
This week I studied ‘structural violence'… Yeah, I know what your thinking… More academic jargon… Well trust me, I can relate… As of last Friday the term meant nothing more to me than it probably does to you… But after a weekend spent buried in reading, and reflecting while desperately trying to find the words to write (what turned out to be a rather difficult tutorial topic prompt on under-nutrition and infant feeding) it is finally sinking in…
Structural violence (without going into what I assure you are piles of books on the topic) is essentially an academic theory that states that we (you and I and everyone born to a life of economic and political privilege) have an interest in promoting inequality in the world. Your first reaction, like mine was, may be defensiveness… And then I kept reading…
Time and time again I have come back to the same meaningless, “beat your head against a wall” conclusion when I come home from another medical trip abroad… No matter how hard I try, I have never been able to understand why I was born rich. I don’t understand why I was born white, or to well-educated parent’s who loved me and had enough food to feed me. It seems so unfair and pointless to imagine that such random occurrences are left to fate or the Gods. But what has lingered with me this week, is that structural violence says they aren’t random... That’s not “just luck” or “just the way the world is”… Life isn’t “just naturally unfair” because some kids like me get to pursue the education of their dreams while others die before the age of 5 of malnutrition… That is what is so haunting to realize.
The world wasn’t just made this way. We made it this way. Structural violence does point the blame. Not at individuals (so we can all stop trying to dodge the bullet we’re all so defensive about), but as a collective society. As a society that allows and even promotes inequality by buying cheap goods at Walmart that are made off the backs of impoverished people in sweat shops (and yes, I say this in full humility as someone who has greatly missed having a Walmart down the street )… We do it by arguing semantics when people are dying, by turning the TV off when we see something a little too upsetting (but it’s okay to let our children watch rated R movies, listen to racist/sexist music, and see sexy TV ads with half-naked, exploited women on them, right?)… We distance ourselves from “them.” The others… Those primitive, dirty, or “exotic” people… Or perhaps even worse, we romanticize their images as the quintessential “starving kid in Africa” or the “poor Haitian flood-victim”…
The reality of their lives is nothing more than an image, a foreign concept we can’t relate to. And I find myself in the same frustration that I always have when I return home from abroad. How do you describe a lived reality that is so desperate and so different from that of your own? How do you make the people you love (your friends, families, and maybe even strangers) understand how high the stakes really are? How do you explain suffering so extreme that witnessing it changes your life, and causes you to put off medical school and suddenly pursue a degree in Medical Anthropology? (Maybe my own personal life-twists now make a little more sense in context? Haha)
When I read about structural violence this week, it was not merely a distant academic theory. It was reality. It was the lived experience of the men, women, and children whose images I can’t erase from my own memory. And I don’t know how to make other people see that. I don’t know how to change a system of blatant human cruelty and inequality that is so ingrained.
And so I write, even though I’ve been writing all week… And I feel a sudden sympathy for all the human beings who have come before me, and also felt the burden of such realizations… I admire the writers, and activists, and poets, and physicians, and martyrs who have had the courage to do what was right, in the face of overwhelming resistance… People who could have turned off the TV, or stayed in their comfortable homes, but chose not to despite it all. People who understood that ignorance is no excuse for letting such atrocities occur unchecked. But surprisingly enough, perhaps it is youth or naivety, I have hope… I yield to someone much wiser who once said,
"I remain a rationalist and an optimist... If man has been able to create the arts, the sciences and the material civilization we know in America, why should he be judged powerless to create justice, fraternity and peace?" ~Dr. Ladis Kristof
And that sounds like a dream worth living for… <3
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