BANDWAGONISM

 

Does anyone else feel as if some people are deliberately searching for ways to be offended? It seems to me  to be one of the routes by which social media create bandwagons and keep them rolling, collecting more and more indignant people along the way who agree with each other, and whip up anger and hatred against those who may have a different, but possibly rationally valid view.

Take Black Lives Matter.  Of course black lives matter.  I wouldn’t have spent 10 years in N Nigeria, working under Nigerian leadership, at their request, if I thought black lives didn’t matter.  And we weren’t there because people were African and black.  We were there because they are brothers and sisters and wanted us to do a job with them.  It’s about mutuality.

Yes, of course there’s racism.  It’s poisonous.  And it permeates most social structures.  Completely wrong, and should be righted.  And of course we all have bias – conscious or unconscious – and we need to be aware, or to be made aware of that bias, so we can do something about it.  I presume that means both negative and positive bias?  Has anybody asked this question? Does anybody ever mind about being the object of positive bias?

The rage and pain of slavery still permeates our societies, and we can see there’s a particular problem in the USA.  I’m not sure what it’s going to take, to heal that festering wound, but healing needs to be enabled, and it would be good to see a ‘bandwagon’ addressing it.

But recently I saw a thread on twitter that stopped me in my tracks.  Somebody was objecting to subtitles being used, when a non-native speaker of English was using English.  They felt this was a version of racism.

Please, do me a favour.  If I don’t understand what someone is saying on the TV, then I am mighty grateful for subtitles.  It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the colour of somebody’s skin.  It never entered my head.  I need subtitles particularly for American English, and I don’t always follow a broad Ulster accent either.

Bandwagons don’t do nuance.  And now I can’t even use a free image of a crowded railway carriage as an illustration, because it’s from another country.  Aha!  I must be racist!