Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtalantikite | Hacker News Reader

"I tend to trace it back to a trip Melinda and I took to Africa in 1993. We went on a safari to see wild animals but ended up getting our first sustained look at extreme poverty"

All of us with privilege need to stop referring to the place as just 'Africa'. It's an incredibly diverse place, and just smacking that label on it to refer to every place on the continent trivializes the population.

Sure, the national boundaries are just some lines colonists in Europe drew on a map when divvying up the resources they were going to steal, but we need to be able to have a respect for people while we're talking about these problems.

View on HN

> All of us with privilege need to stop referring to the place as just 'Africa'

> Sure, the national boundaries are just some lines colonists in Europe drew on a map

Ummm, I have no words. Kettle, pot black?

If you can't even follow your own advice then you shouldn't' have the expectation that others will.

No, I don't agree. European history is something that children study in school year after year for their entire school lives. Then they take maybe a single year of 'world history', maybe two if they're lucky. "Africa" is a footnote comparatively.

Europe has power and does not suffer from the systems they largely put in place. As such, they are the ones that need to make a reversal, not the other way around.

I think just about every country east of the Iron Curtin would disagree with you. If you don't believe there's serious issues in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, you are mistaken.

You are right that to compare South Africa to, say, the Sudan is a gross simplification, but to compare Slovakia, Albania or Kosovo to France or England is also unfair.

Right, I'm with you. When we talk about Europe as colonists we're not talking about Albania and Slovakia. Albania was an Italian colony, right? We mainly mean England/France/Spain/Portugal/Italy/etc.

A lot of those in Eastern Europe probably wouldn't be considered European to many in the west of Europe, which is also part of the problem.

I think that's what people are trying to tell you. You say "Europe" like it's a thing. A monolithic entity that needs to address the complex problems that exist in Africa. But Europe is not a thing. It's has a complex set of its own problems. Gates is using "Africa" as a shorthand for the same reasons you used "Europe" as a shorthand, because it makes it easier to

1. Deliver the message quickly and clearly and

2. Bring people to the discussion who don't or can't have a complexed or nuanced view of the problem, but would like to do something to help.

I, for example, may have money to donate or some skill to assist, but I don't really want to commit myself to understanding "Africa". I'd rather leave that in the hands of someone who does understand it. That's what people who try to gain the limited attention of the public do, oversimplify. And regardless of what the public says, they want that simplification. My head would spin if I had to know every nuance of every specialty just to make a decision.

Also, Italy was hardly a colonial power in Africa, but Belgium was. So we're back to sum up a difficult history to a way people can wrap their heads around it enough to write a check.

Gates used "Africa" as a shorthand next to "safari" and "wild animals", which unfortunately is what many people think when they think of "Africa". I have no problem with the word Africa, but I do have a problem when people use it and reinforce those stereotypes.

All I'm trying to do is point out that those notions are part of the problem.

Where are you from that you pretend to know so much about the mindset of Western Europeans while showing that you in fact know so little?

If you take offense to use of the word 'Africa', you shouldn't use the word 'Europe' either.

Sometimes referring to a continent is useful.

Chill out. He was simplifying his discussion throughout the essay so that his writing would be accessible to a broader audience.

For all you know, his trip covered several African countries and he didn't care to list them all in that sentence.

I get that, and it's the simplification of an incredibly complex situation that is the problem

Rest assured that Bill Gates has spent at least 2 decades and countless financial resources in order to build his own understanding of the incredibly complex situation that exists not only in Africa, but also the rest of the world. He's part of the solution; are you?

Sure, half of my family is from "Africa", and have started businesses that create jobs and lift people out of poverty.

I also put myself out there to take a beating from peers of privilege to speak up about things I think are part of the problem. Reinforcement of otherness I think is a large part of the problem.

I agree with you and I don't see any problem with his comment. People often say "I visited South America" without everyone flipping their shit. Plus, if he said 'I went to X country' the probability that most Americans wouldn't know where (or if) it was in Africa is very high. Remember the Kony thing? No one could point out Uganda on a map.

Perhaps he visited more than one country during his trip to Africa?

> Sure, the national boundaries are just some lines colonists in Europe drew on a map

All of us need to stop referring to the place as just 'Europe'. It's an incredibly diverse place, etc.

That's similar to claims of reverse racism (towards whites); you need to be able to have an exertion of power to make that claim. Since you can't, those claims aren't particularly valid.

It's the same in this situation. Europe is one of the executors of the notions of otherness, and as such it needs to be working to fix that.

Really, lots of down votes?

How can we get the tech community to learn about race/class/colonialism? Because this is some freshman year cultural studies stuff right here.

Opening your mind sure helps when you're doing all the 'disrupting' and 'innovating'

I down voted you because of your comment about "Reverse racism" that's not a thing. It's still just racism. You claim that it's only racism if the racist has the ability to exert power.

Racism is racism no matter who is doing it to who. Claiming that only whites can be racist is ridiculous and something racism apologists often do.

Not to people that believe racism is systemic and doesn't rely on individual racists

There is a well established argument that racism is "prejudice plus power", which actually makes disempowered groups incapable of being racist. Small minded, bigoted and prejudiced, sure.

That argument is mostly used by racists to support their racist beliefs(by claiming that there is no way they can be racist). There are so many different levels of power and influence in society and it's so variable depending on location and situation that saying only one race or group is in a position to be racist is a joke.

> There is a well established argument that racism is "prejudice plus power", which actually makes disempowered groups incapable of being racist.

Note that that "argument" was an attempt to redefine racism after people had generally agreed that the old definition was a bad thing, so that the emotional negativity of that association would be limited to only things that the people doing the redefining didn't like.

Its obviously the case that, generally speaking, the harms produced by any kind of harmful attitude are increased as the people holding the harmful attitude have greater power, but its pretty silly to redefine racism from its generally accepted definition of "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior".

But, even if you accept the silly redefinition, you can still have prejudice plus power in a person of any race, even if in general members of that race are less likely to hold power than members of another race, so it would still not be the case that members of a disadvantage race could not be racist.

> Note that that "argument" was an attempt to redefine racism after people had generally agreed that the old definition was a bad thing, so that the emotional negativity of that association would be limited to only things that the people doing the redefining didn't like.

Citation needed. I have only encountered it in the context of wanting to disambiguate a series of words used as synonyms (bigot, prejudiced, racist...) to better distinguish between individual and societal level effects.

> But, even if you accept the silly redefinition, you can still have prejudice plus power in a person of any race, even if in general members of that race are less likely to hold power than members of another race, so it would still not be the case that members of a disadvantage race could not be racist.

That's why you'll note I only said disempowered groups.

> That argument is mostly used by racists to support their racist beliefs(by claiming that there is no way they can be racist). There are so many different levels of power and influence in society and it's so variable depending on location and situation that saying only one race or group is in a position to be racist is a joke.

It's a really bad argument for them then, because it still allows for them to be bigoted asses whose positions should be discounted entirely.

I've also never seen it used that way - I've only seen it used in discussions of the intersection of...you guessed it, prejudice and power, and recognizing that not all petty hatred has the same systematic level effect.

Tends to co-occur with statements like "Context matters".

Being an African I don't really get offended as you seem to think I would. Mr. Gates obviously isn't saying "Africa" because he's a privileged white man, but because that's how people talk and write. And contrary to your response, he obviously knows what you are saying to a degree that neither of us will ever know.

Yeah, I get that he knows how complicated the issues are, but the point is that that language helps reinforce an idea of superiority. Many people that read that article are going to continue to lump the entire continent together and continue to think "poverty, disease, black, rural, other", whereas the reality is much different.

Um, why? It's likely that their trip spanned several countries because the animals people are typically interested are usually spread out across several countries. I would wager that most people going on Safari end up visiting multiple countries, though that's a hunch and not a citation.

If I'm going to visit the UK, France, Switzerland, and Germany, I'm going to tell people I went to Europe.

Exactly, Africa is a continent of 50+ countries, many of which are even incredibly diverse countries of tens of ethnic groups.

There are many reasons why this is problematic one of which is that by lumping all countries into one bucket, you diminish the positive aspects of individual countries. How many people know, for instance, that Botswana had the highest average growth rate in the world over a period of three decades [1]? How many people, even on HN, know that Botswana is a country in Africa? There are other, better-reasoned arguments out there [2] [3].

If you want to debate mtalantikite, debate the points he has made, don't just attack him for referring to a 'Europe'. But note that there is a difference in context here. Bill Gates is referring to a particular place he visited in 1993. Was he in Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa? Who knows? mtalantikite is referring to a group of countries. He's referred to them as "colonists in Europe", not "Europe". There's no ambiguity here, we know this group of countries, in fact here's the list [4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Botswana

[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_...

[3] http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2013/08/confusing-coun...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_European_colonie...

I see your point and I'm not sure that it applies to the target audience of this essay but many people wouldn't be able to place an African country by name.

EDIT: Wow, I'll stop pointing out possible reasons for things, yeesh.

Exactly, that is the problem. Are people incapable of learning about other cultures? I doubt it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com