Beyond a Single Story: An Anti-Bias Framework for Human...
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1 Beyond a Single Story: An Anti-Bias Framework for Human Geography “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas…” ― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism
Transcript of Beyond a Single Story: An Anti-Bias Framework for Human...
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Beyond a Single Story: An Anti-Bias Framework for Human Geography
“Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas…”
― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism
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Resource OverviewBeyond the Single Story exposes students to the ways in which societies construct difference based on region, cultural framework, and history. Resources provide students with a core overview of world regional geography, engaging them in larger discussions of difference and the efforts of everyday people to overcome this difference.
Students are exposed to narratives of everyday people that complicate regional data. By analyzing the economic and geographic profiles of each continent, along with documentary films such as On the Way to School, they will discuss what writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls, “the danger of a single story,” and the role that single stories of a people play in constructing difference based on region.
Students will read about the roles of science and everyday experiences in constructing cultural frameworks--difference based on physical characteristics and cultural practices. Through a close reading of the text,Nacirema, as well as the photography exhibit, Delicatessen with Love, students will deconstruct the practicesthat they consider normal and imagine the world from another cultural framework.
Through excerpts from Peace Research Institute of the Middle East’s Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine, students will identify parallels between historic and present racial divides in the United States and those between Arab and Jewish youth in the Middle East. They will debate the extent to which everyday people are capable of overcoming the differences that have been constructed for generations, and the power of humanizing the “other” in helping to overcome conflict.
Essential Questions:• What are the reasons for and consequences of dividing the world into continents, countries, and
communities?• How does your cultural framework shape how you see the world?• Can personal relationships help overcome political differences? How does humanizing the “other” help
us overcome conflict?
Enduring Understandings:• The supposed coherence of region, continent and country is socially constructed. All places are diverse
and complex.• People have different truths; therefore, one’s perception is, in fact, one’s reality.• Everything is connected. You can’t truly understand what’s going on in one part of the world without
looking at how it’s related to everything else.• People share fundamental human experiences (we are all similar) and yet every single person lives a
different experience (we are all different). Holding these two truths prevents othering that is dangerouswhile also honoring the distinctness of cultures and lived experiences.
Suggested anchor texts and films:• Watch out for Flying Kids (informational text)• Encounter Point (film)• Budrus (film)• Promises (film)• The Danger of a Single Story (speech)
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National Geography Standards
Physical and Human Characteristics of Places• Explain how personal, community, or national identities are based on places• Explain the ways that physical processes change places• Explain the ways that human processes change places
Regions • Identify and explain the criteria used to define formal, functional, and perceptual regions• Describe and explain the changes in the boundaries and characteristics of regions• Describe examples of how perceptions of places and regions are based on direct experiences (e.g., living
in a place, travel) and indirect experiences (e.g., media, books, family, and friends)• Analyze the ways in which people change their views of places and regions as a result of media reports or
interactions with other people
Common Core ELA StandardsCCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.1
• Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, attending to suchfeatures as the date and origin of the information.
Teaching Tolerance Anti-Bias Standards• I respectfully express curiosity about the history and lived experiences of others and exchange ideas and
beliefs in an open-minded way• I relate to all people as individuals rather than representatives of groups and can identify stereotypes
when I see or hear them.
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Vocabulary
Assume/ assumption (v or n): a thing that is accepted as true without proof
Basic needs (noun): food, shelter, and clothing
Community (noun): a group of people living in the same place, or living apart but sharing particular linguistic, cultural or historical characteristics that connect them.
Continent (noun): any of the world’s main continuous expanses of land. The seven continents are Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America.
Cultural framework (noun): characteristics of your culture that you consider normal
Cultural landscape (noun): an area’s cultural and natural resources associated with the interactions between nature and human behavior. This includes any aspect of culture, such as language, religion, or economic activity
Culture (noun): the beliefs, traditions, and ways of life that make one group of people different from another
Demographic: the data of a country or community, often relating to age, race, or income
Diverse (adjective): representing a wide variety
Economy (noun): the system by which goods are bought, sold and produced in a community, country, or region
Indicator (noun): a measure of a country or community’s quality of life
Language (noun): the system of words or signs that people use to express thoughts and feelings to one another
Linguistic (adjective): related to language
Nation (noun): an area with its own government. Often synonymous with country
Neighborhood (noun): a residential area, often forming a community within a town or city
Perceive/ perception (v or n): how one interprets or looks at someone or something
Physical landscape: an area’s resources that have been untouched by the physical environment, including landforms, bodies of water, climate, and soil
Region (noun): an area or division. In geography, region often refers to a part of a country or the world having some shared characteristics, but not necessarily fixed boundaries separating it
Religion (noun): an organized system of beliefs and practices, often relating to the supernatural
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World Regions: Snapshot of Cultural Landscape
Continent Region(s) Language• Major languages
(if possible)• Linguistic diversity
Religion Economic Indicators• Income• Gross Domestic
Product (GDP)
Quality of Life Indicators• Life expectancy• Adult literacy
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Inde
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Poli
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of
the
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ugu
st 2
013
Aug
ust
2013
Bou
ndar
y re
pres
enta
tion
is n
ot n
eces
sari
ly a
utho
rita
tive
.
Polit
ical
Map
of
the
Wor
ldSo
urce:
CIA
The
Worl
d Fa
ctboo
k
7
Political Map of AfricaSource: National Geographic Society
8
Political Map of AsiaSource: National Geographic Society
9
Political Map of AustraliaSource: National Geographic Society
10
Political Map of EuropeSource: National Geographic Society
11
Political Map of North AmericaSource: National Geographic Society
12
Political Map of South AmericaSource: National Geographic Society
13
World Population DensitySource: http://jb-hdnp.org
14
World Religions MapSource: Pew Research Center
15
GDP Per Capita (current US $)From 2015Source: data.worldbank.org
16
Major World LanguagesSource: https://fedoramagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/world-languages.png
Distribution of Living Languages
17
Suggested Activities: Linguistic Diversity
Find the United States on the map of Major World Languages. Which language is identified? Is this the only language spoken in the United States?
Study the Distribution of Living Languages Per Country. Based on the information included in this list, does the Map of Major World Languages identify all languages spoken throughout the world? Why might some languages be included and others not?
In which country or countries are the greatest number of languages spoken? How does the United States compare to other countries in its linguistic diversity?
Is it possible for two people from the same country not to share a common language? How might individuals overcome this language barrier?
Suggested Additional Resource:
Noack, Rick and Lazaro Gamio. “The World’s Languages, in 7 maps and charts.” The Washington Post 23 April 2015. Online.
18
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20
Adult Literacy Rate (2010)Source: World Bank
21
Human Landscape: Guiding Questions
• Compare the GDP per capita of Sub-Saharan Africa to the GDP of Western Europe. In which region do you imagine that people have better access to their basic needs?
• What disparities exist within North America? Are some countries wealthier than others?• What might a country’s economic indicators reveal about the living conditions within that country? Do
these indicators reveal the living conditions of some or all of the country’s citizens?• How accurately do the economic indicators of the United States reflect the economic status of your
own community? Is a country’s economy an accurate reflection of the economic conditions of all of its communities?
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Zooming In: Geography of Our Communities Data provides geographers with a snapshot of places throughout the world. Through this exercise, we will explore the relationship between demographic data at the community, city, state, and national level. Do the communities in which we live represent the demographics of the larger country? How do we zoom in, beyond demographic data, to give us a full picture of people’s lives and living conditions?
Guiding Questions/Activities:• Identify two maps that reveal the economic conditions of countries throughout the world. What do these
maps reveal about the economic conditions of North America? The United States? • Choose one continent in the world that differs from North America based on any of the demographics
you’ve studied in the maps above. How does this continent differ? How might these differences affect the way in which people in each continent live?
Teacher/Student Research Guide1. Go to Census Bureau: America Fact Finder: http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml2. Go to Community Facts Page3. Enter your state, or the state on which your research will focus4. Choose one demographic characteristic (Population, Age, Business and Industry, Education,
Governments, Housing, Income, Origins and Language, Poverty, Race and Hispanic Origin, Veterans)5. Record data on the chart below6. Return to Community Facts Page7. Enter your city, or the city on which your research will focus8. Choose the same indicator9. Record data on the chart below10. Return to Community Facts Page11. Enter your zip code on which your research will focus12. Choose the same indicator13. Record data on the chart below
Demographics State City Community (Zip Code)
Discussion Questions and Suggested Activities:Based on the indicators that you researched, is national data representative of state data? Community data? Explain.
Based on these demographics, what differences might exist between two different communities in the same country? The same state? Is it possible for two communities living side by side to have different demographic characteristics?
Consider the cultural snapshot you developed of the continents throughout the world. Each continent is associated with its language(s), religion(s), and economic indicators. Does this data tell a complete story of each community and individual? Are there statements that we can make, based on this data, that apply to all people within a continent?
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Other Regions, “Other” People?Draw students’ attention to the following countries: Kenya, Argentina, Morocco, and India. Using map and Census data, ask students to identify the human and physical characteristics that distinguish each country and its continent, from their own. Note: This activity is developed to support the documentary, On the Way to School. It can be adapted to the teaching of any documentary by substituting the countries below with those featured in the selected film.
Discussion questions: • What does this data suggest about the quality of life in each country?• What does the population structure of each country suggest about people’s ability to access resources
such as schools and hospitals?• What differences might separate you and a person from other regions throughout the world?
Country Continent/Region Notes on the Physical Landscape
Notes on the Cultural landscape
Snapshot of Economic data
Kenya
Argentina
Morocco
India
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Documentary Analysis: Us and ThemOn the Way to School
Note: This activity is developed to support the documentary, On the Way to School. It can be adapted to the teaching of any global documentary by substituting the countries and names below with those featured in a teacher’s selected film.
Similarities you noted between yourself and the students featured in On the Way to School
Jackson: Kenya
Carlito: Argentina
Zahira: Morocco
Samuel: India
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Reflection Questions:
• How is your “way to school” different and similar to the Jackson, Samuel, Zahira, and Carlito? If they were to come to school with you for a day, what might they perceive as strange or different? Choose one of the children featured, and identify things you do that might seem foreign or different to him or her.
Example: If Zahira knew that the school bus picked me up everyday, she might…
• Before watching or at the beginning of the film, what assumptions or stereotypes did you have about them or people in their situation?
Example: Seeing Jackson dig for water, I assumed…
• What did you learn about the children that changed your perception of them? Be specific- what observations changed your perception and how?
Example: Learning that Samuel wants to be a doctor helped me realize…
• To what extent was their country’s economic data reflected in their communities, families, and ways of life? Would you have known the economic conditions of the country simply by watching the documentary?
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Documentary Analysis: Us and Them
Person/Country Similarities you noted between yourself and the person featured in the film
Reflection Questions:• How is your life different from the individuals featured in the film? If they were to spend a day in your
neighborhood or school, what might they perceive as strange or different? • Before watching or at the beginning of the film, what assumptions or stereotypes did you have about
them or people in their situation?• What did you learn about the individuals that changed your perception of them? Be specific- what
observations changed your perception and how?• Would you have known the economic conditions of the country simply by watching the documentary?
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Buried in DandoraSource: Pulitzer Center on Crisis ReportingImage by Micah Albert. Kenya, 2012
Pausing in the rain, a woman working as a trash picker at Nairobi’s Dandora dump, which spills into households of one million people living in nearby slums, wishes she had more time to look at the books she sometimes comes across. “It gives me something else to do in the day besides picking [trash],” she said.
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Buried in Dandora: Photograph Analysis GuideAdapted from resources produced by National Archives and Records Administration
Study the photograph for two minutes. Form an overall impression of the photograph and then examine individual items. Next, divide the photo into quadrants and study each section to see what new details become visible.
Use the following chart to list people, objects, and activities in the photograph.
People Objects Activities
1. Based on what you have observed above, list three things you might infer from this photograph.2. What questions does this photograph raise in your mind?3. What perceptions or stereotypes, if any, does this photograph challenge?4. What perceptions or stereotypes, if any, does this photography reinforce?
Suggested Extension Activities:
Ask students to “crop” a section of the image that most resonates with them. Teachers may cut L-shaped pieces of paper, or ask students to draw the lines on the image.
Ask students to take a photograph of an image from their community that challenges outside perceptions or stereotypes. Teachers may present these images in a gallery, inviting students to analyze their peers’ photographs.
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Part II: Defining Our Cultural Frameworks
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Suggested Activity:Discussion Question: What foods are normal in your household?
• Build a list of “normal” food items as a class. As each food item is read aloud, ask students to stand alonga spectrum indicating whether it is appealing or unappealing.
• View the photographs from the collection, In her Kitchen, by photographer Gabriele Galimberti.http://www.gabrielegalimberti.com/projects-2/delicatessen-with-love-2/#
• Students should move along the spectrum for each image, explaining their response(s) using specificdetails from the image.
Discussion Question: Why do we perceive certain foods as appealing or unappealing?• Provide students with the definition for cultural framework.
Discussion Question: Why are certain meals within our cultural framework, and others outside of them? Is it possible to change our cultural framework?
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Anthropologists are used to discovering different behaviors. But the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema are so unusual that they seem an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go.
The Nacirema are a North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Creel and the Yaqui of Mexico. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east.
In Nacirema culture, people spend much time devoted to economic pursuits, and a large part of their wages are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body. The appearance and health of the body are a main concern. While such a concern is certainly not unusual, its ceremony and ideas about the body are unique.
The fundamental belief of the Nacirema appears to be that the human body is ugly and it naturally gets sick and crippled. They believe that man’s only hope is to prevent sickness by using powerful rituals and ceremonies. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses. The greater the house, the more ritual sites there are. While each family has at least one shrine, the rituals are not family ceremonies but are private and secret.
The focus of the shrine is a box or chest, containing many charms and magical potions. The Nacirema believe that without these potions they could not live. They get the potions from many special professionals. The most powerful are the medicine men, who must be given big gifts. The medicine men decide on the ingredients and write them down in an ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.
After using a potion, they do not throw it away but keep it in the shrine. Each potion is for a different sickness. The charm-box is usually full or overflowing because the natives have many real or imagined illnesses. Some natives have so many magical packets that they forget what they are for.
In the shrine is a small fountain. Each day every member of the family enters the shrine room, bows his head before the fountain, and uses holy water to wash sacred parts. The holy waters come from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct ceremonies to make the liquid pure.
Below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists translated as “holy-
Body Ritual Among the NaciremaAdapted from Horace Miner, “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” Reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association from The American Anthropologist, vol. 58 (1956), pp. 503-507.
Anthropologist: somebody who studies human beings
Why is this anthropologist writing about the Nacirema?
Where does tradition say the Nacirema come from?
Economic pursuits:
What is the main focus of Nacirema ritual activities?
What is the fundamental belief of the Nacirema?
Are Nacirema body rituals private or public?
Why do the natives have many potions?
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mouth-men.” The Nacirema have a horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics.
The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite these people's care of the mouth, this rite involves a revolting practice. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.
Professor Linton discussed a distinctive part of the daily body ritual which is performed only by men. This part of the rite involves scraping and cutting the surface of the face with a sharp instrument. Special women’s rites are performed as well. Some women will bake in an oven for almost an hour. Other native women go to a specialist who performs a painful ritual in which strings are sewed into the heads of the native.
The natives believe that the body and its functions are evil. There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women’s breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large. General unhappiness with breast shape is symbolized in the fact that the ideal form is virtually outside the range of human variation.
The Nacirema are a magic-ridden people. It is hard to understand how they have managed to exist so long with the burdens they put on themselves. From our high places of safety and civilization, it is easy to see all magic as barbaric and irrational. But early man needed this power to master difficulties and advance to the higher stages of civilization.
Prestige: admiration and respect
Why do the Nacirema have a “horror and fascination with the mouth”?
How does the anthropologist perceive the mouth-rite?
What is a special daily ritual of men?
What is one female ritual?
Why is Miner surprised that the Nacirema have existed so long?
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Nacirema Guiding Questions:
After the First Read:• What rituals of the Nacirema do you perceive as strange?• What words does Miner use throughout the article to describe the Nacirema?• How does Miner perceive the Nacirema? Use evidence from the text to support your
answer. After revealing Nacirema = America:
What American practice did Miner describe through the following?
Ritual cite:
Medicine men:
Herbalist:
Fountain:
Holy water:
Holy-mouth-men:
Rod with Hog hairs:
Men’s body rituals:
• How did you perceive the Nacirema while reading the article for the first time? Why did you perceivethem in this way?
• What commentary does Miner make about American culture? To what extent do you agree or disagreewith him?
• How does Miner’s commentary change how you see American culture?• What lessons can you take from this article when learning about new cultures?• How do we construct our definitions of normal and abnormal? Use evidence from the Nacirema reading
to support your answer.
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Science Behind Stereotyping: Suggested Activity
Place the following “Agree/Disagree” statements at two points in the room. Ask students to stand along at the place on this spectrum that represents their position.
• I have more in common with people from my country than another region or country.• I have more in common with people from my own racial or ethnic group.• All people from the Middle East/East Asia/Sub-Saharan Africa/Latin America/Western Europe look
similar.• It is possible to determine a person’s race by testing his or her DNA.
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“We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups. It’s a natural tendency, since we must see the world in patterns in order to make sense of it; we wouldn’t be able to deal with the daily onslaught of people and objects if we couldn’t predict a lot about them and feel that we know who or what they are.”
- Psychologist Deborah Tannen
Source: Facing History and Ourselves
Frederick Douglass wrote the following in 1949, published in his abolitionist newspaper North Star:
We have heard many white persons say that “Negroes look all alike,” and that they could not distinguish between the old and the young. They associate with the Negro face, high cheek bones, distended nostril, depressed nose, thick lips, and retreating foreheads. This theory impressed strongly upon the mind of an artist exercises a powerful influence over his pencil, and very naturally leads him to distort and exaggerate those peculiarities, even when they scarcely exist in the original.
Source: Facing History and Ourselves
SUGGESTED RESOURCE:
The Myth of Race, Debunked in Three MinutesSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnfKgffCZ7U&app=desktop
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Race in a Genetic World (excerpt)Source: Harvard Magazine, May-June 2008
“I am an African American,” says Duana Fullwiley, “but in parts of Africa, I am white.” To do fieldwork as a medical anthropologist in Senegal, she says, “I take a plane to France, a seven- to eight-hour ride. My race changes as I cross the Atlantic. There, I say, ‘Je suis noire,’ and they say, ‘Oh, okay—métisse—you are mixed.’ Then I fly another six to seven hours to Senegal, and I am white. In the space of a day, I can change from African American, to métisse, to tubaab [Wolof for “white/European”]. This is not a joke, or something to laugh at, or to take lightly. It is the kind of social recognition that even two-year-olds who can barely speak understand. ‘Tubaab,’ they say when they greet me.”
Is race, then, purely a social construct? The fact that racial categories change from one society to another might suggest it is.
In fact, “There is no genetic basis for race,” says Fullwiley.
Last October, Fullwiley and colleagues from 14 academic institutions around the country articulated some of their concerns about ancestry testing in Science magazine. More than half a million people have paid between $100 and $900 for such tests.
The Journey of Man
Geneticist Spencer Wells has created the Genographic Project, a human family tree that traces “the journey of man” from a homeland in Africa. The project has used linguistic and genetic studies to guide its sampling of indigenous populations from around the globe—many of them isolated and remote—and now has the world’s largest and most representative anthropological database of human DNA.
At Harvard, a Pakistani-American student whose family had always told her they were originally from an area near the Arabian Sea had this confirmed by her DNA result. “Your family was part of the first migration out of Africa,” noted Wells. “You share that with the Australian aborigines.” An African-American student with ancestors from East Africa carried a genetic signature characteristic of that region. But an Asian-American student was surprised to find that she carried almost the same genetic markers as a Mexican-American student. Wells explained, “There is only one change, but you are fairly different because your lines diverged a long time ago. Still, you are part of the same branch of the tree”: the Native Americans who populated the Western Hemisphere originally came from Asia.
The Genographic Project aims to tell people “where their ancestors were living as indigenous people” at different points in time, but can’t, for example, tell most African Americans precisely where in Africa they are from because, Wells explains, “the database isn’t quite there yet.” Echoing Fullwiley’s reservations about all such tests, he says he’s “a bit concerned about some of the African-American DNA testing companies purporting to trace you back to your ancient tribe.” Ancestry is actually more complex for the average African American, he says, not only because people in West Africa (where most of the slave trade occurred) have moved around a lot in the last 500 years, but also because “group composition within Africa has changed over time.” Furthermore, because only a small number of humans survived the journey out of Africa some 50,000 years ago (and the slave trade on that continent was relatively localized), “there is more diversity in the average African village,” Wells notes, “than there is outside of Africa combined.”
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When asked about the question of race, Wells’s answer was unequivocal. “Racism is not only socially divisive, but also scientifically incorrect. We are all descendants of people who lived in Africa recently,” he says. “We are all Africans under the skin.” The kinds of differences that people notice, such as skin pigmentation, limb length, or other adaptations are “basically surface features that have been selected for in the environment. When you peer beneath the surface at the underlying level of genetic variation, we are all much more similar than we appear to be. There are no clear, sharp delineations.”
Guiding Questions:
• Why does Duana Fullwiley’s racial category change when she crosses the Atlantic Ocean? How does this change support her argument that there is “no genetic basis for race”?
• What is ancestor testing? Why might Fullwilley and her colleagues have raised concerns about these tests?
• Why might the results of the Genographic Project have been surprising to some who participated? Why might the outcomes have been different from what they expected?
• Wells argues that, because humans originated in Africa, “We are all Africans under the skin”? Does that mean that all people share one race?
• How does race impact our lives, even if it has no scientific meaning?
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The Truth About “They All Look Alike to Me” Own-race bias in eyewitness identifications Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/culture-conscious/201208/the-truth-about-they-all-look-alike-me
Most of us have heard someone say, “How should I know if I’ve seen the guy before? They all look alike to me.” We’re inclined to think the clueless person is a bigot, but might there be some truth to the idea?
For decades, psychologists have studied various factors that can affect the accuracy of eyewitness identifications. One of the most firmly established findings is that eyewitnesses are usually better at recognizing and identifying members of their own race or ethnic group. When a witness and a suspect belong to different racial groups, the chance of a mistaken identification goes up by about 50%.
This phenomenon is known as own-race bias or the other-race effect—and it’s been demonstrated in dozens of laboratory experiments. It’s also been documented in actual criminal cases. In one analysis of 77 mistaken identifications, 35% of the cases involved Blacks who were misidentified by Whites, whereas only 28% of the cases involved Whites who were misidentified by Whites.
When scientists first learned about the other-race effect, they guessed that racial attitudes were responsible, that prejudiced witnesses were the ones who produced the effect. But that’s not the case. Studies have found that racial attitudes don’t predict performance in cross-race identification tasks; prejudiced and non-prejudiced people are equally likely to fall victim to the other-race effect.
If racial attitudes can’t explain the effect, what can? Cognitive psychologists have pointed to the fact that faces are not all alike; they differ from each other in terms of specific features like width, length, size of nose, and color of eyes. Interestingly, a feature that varies a lot in faces of one race doesn’t always vary a lot in faces of a different race. Black faces, for example, show more variability in skin tone, but White faces show more variability in hair color. In short, races have different kinds of physiognomic variability.
The implications for eyewitnessing are clear. If a culprit is White, witnesses will be better off noticing and remembering the culprit’s hair color. Noticing skin tone is less helpful because Whites don’t vary much when it comes to skin tone. If the culprit is Black, witnesses will be better off noticing and remembering the culprit’s skin tone. Hair color is less helpful because Blacks don’t vary much when it comes to hair color.
Growing up, we learn which features can help us distinguish members of our own group, so Whites tend to focus on hair color and Blacks tend to focus on skin tone. This strategy works fairly well until we’re put into a situation in which we want to identify the face of a person who is racially different. This is exactly what happens when you witness a crime, the perpetrator’s race is different from yours, and the police ask you to look at a lineup.
The lineup will consist of individuals—usually six—who generally resemble the perpetrator. If the witness described the perpetrator as “a tall White man, about 25 years old,” then the lineup should not include anyone who is short, Black, female, or old. If the guy suspected by the police is the only one who matches the description provided by the witness, then the lineup isn’t fair; it’s biased against the suspect because he stands out as obviously different and the witness feels compelled to either pick him or pick no one.
Choosing the right person in a lineup isn’t easy, and the task is made even more difficult when everyone in the lineup is racially different from the witness. Because we have little practice distinguishing among faces of people of other races, we fail to notice and remember the features that would be most helpful. The paucity of our interracial interactions makes us less competent witnesses—and sometimes we make mistakes. “They all look alike” because we unwittingly look at the wrong things.
39
Guiding Questions:
• What is the “other-race effect” or “own-race bias”? What is its effect on our perception of people?• According to the article, prejudiced and non-prejudiced people were equally likely to fall victim to the
other-race effect. What does this reveal about the other-race effect?• According to Duana Fullwilley, there is no scientific basis for race. Yet race affects our perceptions of
others. Why is this the case?• According to the writer, “we have little practice distinguishing among faces of people of other races?”
What are the reasons for this? What are the consequences?• How, if at all, can we lessen our own “own-race bias”?
40
How Come Other Folks All Look Alike?Do whites look more different from one another than blacks?Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/looking-in-the-cultural-mirror/200912/how-come-other-folks-all-look-alike
About 20 years ago I was having dinner at a restaurant in Jakarta, Indonesia with a group of psychologists from various countries. Only two of us were men, and we were both white Americans. The other man was several inches taller than I, significantly heavier, and had lighter colored hair--though we both wore glasses and had short beards. Despite the (to me) obvious contrast in our appearance, the waiter kept getting our orders mixed up; and it became evident that he couldn’t tell the difference between us.
The waiter’s difficulty represents a fairly general perceptual phenomenon. For example, I would sometimes ask students in my cross-cultural psychology class “Who are more varied in what they look like, whites or blacks?” Among those who felt secure enough to raise their hands, whites said that whites are more varied, and blacks said that blacks are more varied.
Visual perception begins developing in infancy. In general, white babies and children see more white faces and learn to make the fine distinctions necessary to tell who is who, and black babies and children see more black faces and learn comparable visual distinctions.
One of the byproducts of organizing marriage, neighborhoods, and other social categories along color lines is the development of a kind of perceptual provinciality within each group. Early in my marriage, I would sometimes ask my African American wife “Is so-and-so black?” I have become more accurate over the years, but have by no means fully compensated for my early perceptual training.
Psychologists have shown that there are many problems with eyewitness testimony. These difficulties are compounded when a victim has to identify the face of a perpetrator of a different race who was seen only fleetingly during a traumatic event.
Apart from people’s perceptual learning, there is an objective answer to the question of whether whites or blacks are more varied in what they look like. In fact, blacks are more diverse in appearance, as is evident to outsiders to the American experience. A woman who was an immigrant from the Philippines told me just this-- “Blacks are more varied.”
Why is this so? The cultural answer comes from America’s one drop rule-anyone with “black blood” is black. It is a strange rule. It means that a white woman can give birth to a black baby--for example our President--but a black woman cannot give birth to a white baby. The latter might be white in Brazil, and would be classified in various ways in other cultures. But if children of a black mother in the United States said they were white, they would be merely pretending--”passing for white.”
The one drop rule explains why there are light skinned blacks and dark skinned blacks, but only light skinned whites (even though, for reasons of perceptual learning, whites are aware of skin color variations among themselves). If we had a different cultural rule--for example, anyone with “white blood” is white--then the race of many American blacks would change, and whites would become more varied in appearance.
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Part III: Overcoming Division
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Mental Mapping Exercise
Source: Adapted from The American Urban Reader, Mental Mapping Exercise, Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Ph.D
All individuals have their own understandings of particular places. We carry individualized maps in our heads, based around the particular landmarks that are important to our conceptualization of place. These impressions of place are referred to as mental maps by geographers and other social scientists. These mental maps may be influenced to some extent by our gender.
On a sheet of paper, draw a mental map of your neighborhood. Make sure to indicate where you live, along with many other relevant landmarks for you. Label the general location of the map clearly. Take some time and care in preparing your mental map. Do not worry if the map does not coincide with a “real” cartographic map. Do not consult with a cartographic map in producing your mental map, because your individualized version of place will prove more interesting to analyze.
After completing your map, write a brief, 3-5 paragraph analysis of your findings.
Consider the following questions:• What do you personally consider the most important features on your map? Why?• Does the map show interesting facts about your life?• How long have you lived in the area depicted on the map? How has this affected your mental map?• What aspects of your identity affect your map? Consider age, gender, family structure, or any other
examples that may have influenced your experience within your community. • How might your map be similar or different to another person living in your neighborhood? In another
part of the city?• Consider the areas in your city or community not featured on your mental map. Why are those not
included? • Are there neighborhoods within your city or community where you do not go? Why might this be?
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Israel and Palestine
Suez
PortSaid
Mecca
Dubayy
Aden
Medina
Jeddah
Tripoli
Al Basrah
ArbilKirkuk
Al Mawsil
Al Mukalla
Ad Dammam
Al Hufuf
Al Hudaydah
Halab
Jizan-
Aswan
Asyut
Al 'Aqabah
Al Minya
Shiraz
Karachi
Herat
Kandahar
Mashhad
Esfahan
Tabriz
Alexandria
Beirut Damascus
Cairo
Kuwait
DohaRiyadh Abu DhabiMuscat
Sanaa(San'a')
'Amman
Baghdad
Al Manamah
Ashgabad
Asmara
Djibouti
Khartoum
TehranM e d i t e r r a n e a n S e a
A r a b i a n S e a
Gulf of Oman
PersianGulf
G u l f o f A d e n
Re
d S
ea
Str.
of Hormuz
CaspianSea
Suqutrá(Socotra)
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF
IRAN
S U D A N
ISRAEL
ETHIOPIA
SOMALIA
ERITREA
LIB
YA
TURKEY
CYPRUS
AFGHANISTAN
PAKISTAN
TURKMENISTAN
DJIBOUTI
E G Y P T
S A U D I A R A B I A
I R A Q
Y E M E N
OMAN
LEBANON
JORDAN
BAHRAIN
QATAR
SYRIANARAB REP.
KUWAIT
OMAN
UNITED ARABEMIRATES
S O U T H S U D A N * 0
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The boundaries and names shown and the designations used on this map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.
* Final boundary between the Republic of the Sudan and the Republicof South Sudan has not yet been determined.
Map No. 4102 Rev. 5 UNITED NATIONSNovember 2011
Department of Field SupportCartographic Section
MIDDLE EAST35°
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UNIFILUNDOF
DeadSea
Lake Tiberias
Gulf of
Aqaba
MEDITERRANEAN
SEA
Jord
an
QiryatGat
Dimona
Zefa'
Zin
MizpeRamon
Bethlehem
Hebron
Jericho
Ak Karak
Madaba
Ma'an
Ra's an Naqb
Elat
Yotvata
Al Jafr
Al Kuntillah
Bi'r Lahfan
Al 'AqabahTaba
'Akko
Haifa
Herzliyya
Ashdod
Ashqelon
Gaza
Tiberias
'Afula
Al Mafraq
Jarash
Az Zarqa'
An Nakhl
Khan Yunis
Al Qatranah
Tulkarm
Bi'r Hasanah
Hadera
Netanya
Bat Yam
Dar'aIrbid
Nabulus
Nahariyya
Tyre
QiryatShemona
Al Qunaytirah
As Suwayda'
Busrá ash Sham
RamAllah
As Safi
Al Arish
Abu'Ujaylah
'Ayn alQusaymah
Ramla
Tel Aviv-Yafo
Beersheba
Nazareth
Jerusalem
Damascus
Amman
NEGEV
S I N A I
NORTHERN
CENTRAL
HAIFA
TEL AVIV
JERUSALEM
SOUTHERN
JORDAN
EGYPT
LEBANON
SAUDIARABIA
SYRIANARAB
REPUBLIC
WEST BANK
GAZA
GOLAN
ISRAEL
ISRAEL
Map No. 3584 Rev. 2 UNITED NATIONSJanuary 2004
Department of Peacekeeping OperationsCartographic Section
The designations employed and the presentation of material on thismap do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on thepart of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legalstatus of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities orconcerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 km
0 10 20 30 40 mi
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Guiding Questions:
• What observations can you make about Israel by looking at the map of the Middle East?• What observations can you make as you zoom in closer and study the map of Israel? Students might note
the following: size relative to neighboring countries, borders surrounding the West Bank and Gaza, and internal boundaries (including reference to former Palestine Mandate).
• Israel and the Palestinian Territories (the West Bank and Gaza), have been engaged in an ongoing conflict since 1948. How might the geography of Israel and Palestine heighten the impact of this conflict?
• Consider both the ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine, as well as the information on both maps. Would you assume that two people from different neighborhoods in an Israeli city have more in common with each other, or with you? What similarities and differences might exist between them?
• What differences and similarities might exist between you and a resident of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv?• Is it possible to have an objective view of history? Why might two people, or groups of people, view a
historical event differently?
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Teaching with Identity ChartsFrom Facing History and Ourselves
Step one: PreparationBefore creating identity charts, you might have the class brainstorm categories we consider when thinking about the question, “Who am I?” such as our role in a family (e.g., daughter, sister, mother, etc), our hobbies and interests (e.g., guitar player, football fan, etc), our background (e.g., religion, race, nationality, hometown, or place of birth), and our physical characteristics. It is often helpful to show students a completed identity chart before they create one of their own. Alternatively, you could begin this activity by having students create identity charts for themselves. After sharing their charts, students can create a list of the categories they have used to describe themselves and then use this same list of categories as a guide when creating identity charts for other people or groups.
Step two: Create identity charts for a historical or literary figure, group or nationFirst, ask students to write the name of the character, figure, group or nation in the center of a piece of paper. Then students can look through text for evidence that helps them answer the question, “Who is this person?” or, “Who is this group?” Encourage students to include quotations from the text on their identity charts, as well as their own interpretations of the character or figure based on their reading. Students can complete identity charts individually or in small groups. Alternatively, students could contribute ideas to a class version of an identity chart that you keep on the classroom wall.
Step three: Use identity charts to track new learningReviewing and revising identity charts throughout a unit is one way to help students keep track of their learning.
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Sample Identity Chart:
ME
Asian-American
Daughter of immigrantsBorn in Mississippi
High School Student
Extroverted“B” student
Living with a single parent
Have a part-time job
Eldest in the family
Book lover
Basketball player
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Identity Chart Reflection Questions:
• Choose one identity on your chart that most influences the way you view those living within and outside of your community. Explain why you chose this identity.
• Choose one identity on your chart that least influences the way you view those living within and outside of your community Explain.
• Consider a historical event that affected you or members of your community. Which of these identities might view the way in which you view this historical event?
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The excerpts below were selected from the Peace Research Institute of the Middle East (PRIME) textbook, Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine.
The history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict…changes dramatically depending on who is telling it and where they start the story. Therefore, it is important to note that a historic timeline of events concerning this conflict is always difficult to present in an objective manner. For this reason, certain events of the timeline include both a Palestinian (on the right side) and an Israeli (on the left side) perspective.
Israeli Text Palestinian TextThe Jewish Homeland The Palestinian People
Until the 19th century, most Jews lived in the Diaspora. There were approximately 8 million Jews at that time, the majority of them in Eastern Europe. There were only some 24,000 Jews living in the Land of Israel. Ever since they were exiled by the Romans in the first and second centuries, the Jews had kept alive the hope of returning to their land…The change began in the nineteenth century with the birth of the Zionist movement, which aspired to return the Jewish people to its homeland.
The Jewish national movement, Zionism, was born in the nineteenth century…The Jews began to see themselves as a nation, desiring and deserving of a country of their own.
The Jewish settlers did not come to an empty land. Around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Arabs lived in both urban concentrations and rural communities in Palestine, and some felt threatened by the waves of Jewish immigration.
For the Palestinians, 1917 was the first of many years that were marked by tragedy, war, misfortune, death, destruction, homelessness, and catastrophes.
Guiding Questions:
• How does the Israeli text describe the Jewish relationship with the Land of Israel? What words and phrases reveal these feelings?
• Both texts reveal that the Land of Israel was not empty at the time of Jewish immigration? Who was inhabiting this land?
• Why might two groups refer to the same piece of land by two different names (Israel or Palestine)? What does this reveal about their different perspectives?
• How does the Palestinian text describe the impact of Jewish immigration to Palestine? How does this contrast with the description in the Israeli text?
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Israeli Text Palestinian TextThe Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939
With the outbreak of World War II, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the home of more than three million Jews. Nazi policy took shape as a planned and systematic persecution….The Germans moved not only against the Jews of (Germany), but also against Jews anywhere in the territories they conquered. Nazi policy, which before the war had encouraged Jewish emigration, changed to one of confining Jews in ghettos. During the war, this persecution would evolve into the systematic murder of approximately six million of the Jewish people, including 1.5 million children. The history of the Jewish people in the twentieth century cannot be told without reference to the Holocaust.
(Following the Holocaust), sixty-five ships carrying about 70,000 (Holocaust survivors)…attempted to reach a safe haven in Palestine.
The Palestinians were convinced that there was no reason for them to pay for the tribulations and torture that the Jews suffered at the hands of the Christians in Europe, which in fact amounted to a serious crime against humanity. Furthermore, Zionism appeared before the (Holocaust), which meant that Zionist aspirations in Palestine preceded the great crime that befell them during World War II. It was quite baffling to the Palestinians why it wasn’t fair for the Jews to be a minority in a Palestinian state, though it was deemed fair to transform half the Palestinian people, who comprised the majority of the original inhabitants living on the land of their fathers and forefathers, into a minority living under foreign rule in a Jewish state blessed by the partition plan*.
Many demonstrations were held against the partition plan. And immediately after the declaration of the partition plan, daily fighting broke out between the Arabs and the Jews.
*The partition plan was the separation, or partition, of twoseparate states: an Israeli state and a Palestinian state.
Guiding Questions:
• Why, according to the Israeli text, can the modern history of the Jewish people not be told “withoutreference to the Holocaust”? How did this period in history affect both the lives and aspirations of theJewish people?
• Although the Palestinian text acknowledges the suffering of the Holocaust, it differs in its description ofthe events that followed. How does the Palestinian text describe both the Holocaust and the subsequentwave of Jewish immigration to Israel/Palestine?
• How, according to the Palestinian text, did Arabs respond to the partition plan? How does the textexplain and justify this response?
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Israeli Text Palestinian TextThe War of Independence and the Founding of the State of Israel
Al-Nakbah, 1948
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved, by a two-thirds majority vote, a proposal to create two independent states in the Land of Israel-a Jewish state and Palestinian state, side by side…
Arab attacks on Jewish residents began the next morning, as the Arabs did not accept the partition plan. The war that began on November 30, 1947, is known as the War of Independence because the Jewish (state), succeeded in gaining its independence after the Arabs in the Land of Israel and neighboring nations tried to prevent it. Jews also call this the War of Liberation.
Eyewitness reports:
We saw clear as day what we were up against. Even now I fail to understand how people don’t realize that we were confronting a continuation of the Holocaust in Europe. We, the Jews of the land of Israel, were meant to be annihilated…It was obvious that we were fighting for our very existence, for the lives of the children who had been born here…
On November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly…called for the partitioning of Palestine in two states, an Arab state and a Jewish state. This was in fact the start of the countdown for the establishment of the State of Israel on 15 May 1948 and the 1948 Nakbah, which uprooted and dispersed the Palestinian people.
Al-Nakbah (Arabic for “catastrophe”) represents the defeat of the Arab armies in the 1948 Palestine War, the Arabs’ acceptance of the truce, the displacement of most of the Palestinian people from their home cities and villages, and the emergence of the refugee problem and the Palestinian Diaspora.
In 1948, Palestine had a population of 1.4 million people. After Al-Nakbah about 750,000 Palestinians were wandering about not knowing where to go. Families were separated, the elderly died, children carried younger children, nursing children died of thirst. Suddenly they found themselves expelled from their own homes and in an alien world that regarded them as a different kind of human being who evoked a feeling of fear and suspicion-they were “refugees”!
Eyewitness reports:
Jewish villages were built on the remains of Arab villages. You don’t even know the names of those Arab villages and I don’t blame you because geography books no longer exist. And not only geography books don’t exist anymore, but also the Arab villages themselves have disappeared…There is not a single place in this country that did not have a former Arab population.Guiding Questions:
• What is the meaning of the term al Nakbah? Why might the Palestinians have referred to the establishment of the State of Israel as al Nakbah?
• Why might Israelis refer to the War of Independence as the War of Liberation? What is revealed by the names we assign to historical events?
• Compare the Israeli and Palestinian eyewitness reports. Identify words and phrases that reveal each side’s connection to their land and people. What do these words and phrases reveal about their different perspectives?
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Suggested Extension:
How might different people’s treatment of the American Civil War differ, even today? How is this difference revealed in the names people use to describe the same conflict?
Teaching Tolerance, Getting the Civil War Righthttp://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-40-fall-2011/feature/getting-civil-war-right
The New York Times, Not Forgottenhttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/arts/design/in-the-south-civil-war-has-not-been-forgotten.html?_r=0
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Israeli Text Palestinian TextThe Six-Day War of June 5-10, 1967 Israeli Aggression Against Arab and Palestinian
Lands: June 1967 War
Israel gained a brilliant victory that changed its history and that of the entire Middle East. The Old City of Jerusalem was captured by Israel, as were cities and biblical sites in the West Bank, the Sinai Desert, and the Golan Heights. The Israeli public was euphoric to the point of intoxication, and some Israelis perceived the victory as a…religious experience.
The Arab forces took heavy human and material losses. The greatest and most serious loss, however, was the occupation of the Holy City of Jerusalem and the entire West Bank.
Guiding Questions:
• Identify some key words from each text that reveal the difference in Israeli and Palestinian interpretationof the Six-Day War. Using evidence from multiple excerpts determine the following: how did each sidefeel at the end of the Six-Day War?
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Israeli Text Palestinian TextFrom the Six-Day War to the First Intifada: Israel in the 1970s and 1980s.
Palestine and the Palestinians, 1967-1987
Israel enjoyed a measure of economic prosperity following the war, the broad support of world Jewry, and a large wave of immigration. Their overwhelming victory gave the Israelis a sense of extraordinary power, and the general atmosphere was almost euphoric. During these years, a new expression entered the Hebrew language: “Our situation has never been better.” This feeling diminished somewhat following the renewal of terror...
In Israel itself, the terror attacks became more vicious. In May 1970, a bus load full of children was attacked; in Ma’a lot, students and teachers were killed in an attack on a school.
The 1967 June war created a new reality for the Palestinian people. The Israeli occupation was beginning to have a great impact on all aspects of Palestinian life. The Palestinian resistance against the occupation was also starting to acquire an identifiable reality.
Guiding Questions:
• Both sides highlight acts of aggression perpetrated by the other. Why might both texts have cited actsperpetrated against them, rather than those perpetrated by them?
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Israeli Text Palestinian TextIntifada The Intifada of 1987
Terrorism was also on the rise in the heart of Israel itself: dozens of Israelis were murdered by bombs on buses, knife attacks, kidnappers Molotov cocktails, and drive-by shootings of cars with children inside.
On December 1987, an Israeli truck crashed into a Palestinian car in Gaza and four Palestinian passengers were killed. The Palestinians claimed that the collision was intentional-that it was malicious murder. At the funeral of those killed, the crowd attacked an (army) post in Gaza and threw stones; the rioting resumed the next day and continued over subsequent days. This incident is said to have market the start of the Palestinian war against Israel: the intifada (uprising).
In the occupied territories, conditions deteriorated to unprecedented levels. Suppression and negligence of the needs of the Palestinian people by the occupation also reached its highest levels. The Palestinians started the intifada in 1897, a peaceful, grassroots uprising, which came about as the only appropriate reaction to twenty years of oppressive Israeli occupation.
On 8 December 1987, just one day before the eruption of the intifada, an Israeli truck driver in Gaza deliberately hit an Arab car, killing several of its passengers and seriously wounding the others. The next day, over 6,000 people from Jabalia refugee camp, from this three of the people killed in the truck accident had come, participate in the funeral procession. The procession turned into a huge demonstration. As usual, the Israeli military forces met the demonstrators with live ammunition, tear-gas bombs, beating, and arrest. Scores of demonstrators were injured and one was killed; Hatem Al-Seesi was the first martyr of the intifada. When news of this incident leaked out, sweeping demonstrations erupted all over the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Guiding Questions:
• What was the intifada? How and why did it begin?• Compare and contrast each side’s description of the events of December 1987. How are they similar and
how are they different?
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Israeli Text Palestinian TextThe 1990s Reaching for a Settlement
After many years of terror, struggle, and bloodshed between Israel and the Palestinian people, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Authority, and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords in a ceremony on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.
Despite the undeniable achievements gained on both sides as a result of the Oslo process-indeed, perhaps because of them-opposition to the peace process spread an it became increasingly unpopular. During the years 1993-1996, nearly 300 Israelis were killed in terror attacks. As a result, many Israelis began to have reservations about the Oslo process and associate it with a genuine loss of personal security.
This period witnessed a series of Israeli security measures against the Palestinians including arrests, house demolitions, and the destruction of the infrastructure of Palestinian institutions. A 1997 report prepared by the U.S. State Department about the human rights of Palestinians…confirmed “an increase in the violations, arrests and torture of Palestinians by the Israeli…security agents and in institutional racial discrimination against Arabs in Israel.
Guiding Questions:
• According to the Israeli texts, who are the perpetrators of violence in Israel/Palestine?• Who are the perpetrators according to the Palestinian text?• Do you believe that the two sides can resolve these differences? What would this resolution require?
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Watch out for Flying Kids: Pre-reading Discussion Questions:
• Although Israeli and Palestinians live in the same region of the world, they remain deeply divided. Howmight Israeli and Palestinian youth perceive each other? What sort of divisions might have contributedto these perceptions?
• Are these perceptions accurate? Explain?• Return to your mental map and the areas to which you rarely travel. What divisions exist within our own
cities, communities, and neighborhoods?• Is it ever fair to judge people by the actions of their government?
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Excerpts from Watch out for Flying Kids
By Cynthia Levinson
Independence or catastrophe? Israel is shaped like a fat splinter. In square miles, the entire coun try covers less territory than the area that encompasses the cities and suburbs of metropolitan St. Louis. You could drive the length of the country-290 miles-in about nine hours. At its narrowest point, it is only seventy-one miles wide. The circus kids’ homes lie withing 10 miles of each other - half of the distance Iking’s and Meghan’s neighborhoods.
But despite the compactness of their country, Arab and Jewish children are segregated from each other in multiple ways. Unlike sprawling St. Louis, which merges the inner city, suburbs, and outlying areas into one interconnected metropolitan area, the Galilee’s villages are detached from one another. Public bus service among them is irregular, infrequent, and inconvenient. Each village is bounded by laws or security fences and is separated from the next one by rolling hills and olive groves.
The deepest gulf between the Jews and Arabs in the Galilee Circus is not geographical, though. It’s cultural. Young people here grow up speaking different languages, each with its own alphabet; the Jewish kids speak Hebrew and the Arab kids Arabic. They practice different religions, absorb different customs, and study somewhat different histories of their tiny, reluctantly shared homeland.
The gulf began over a century earlier with the birth of the Zionist movement in the 1880s. Jewish Zionists fled pogroms (violent attacks) and other forms of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. They bought land and settled in what was then called Palestine, where they hoped to establish a new country for Jews in the region that they saw as their Biblical homeland.
At the end of the nineteenth century, nearly 95 percent of the people in Palestine were Arabs. They had been tilling the land and herding sheep for hundreds of years. The land was theirs they believed, and they objected to the intruders from Europe. They demanded that their rulers-first, the Ottoman Turks and then, after the First World War, the British-ban Jewish immigrants. This tactic did not succeed, however. The Jews kept coming. In 1920, some Arabs in the Galilee started attacking Jewish settlers. Over the next twenty years, the anti-Zionist attacks spread and the violence worsened.
The situation reached a crisis during and after the Second World War. Even more Jews, many of them refugees from the Nazis, came ashore. Fearing the growing tension between the two groups, the British agreed to halt the immigration. They refused entry to many Jewish refugees.
To resolve the issues of where Jews and Arabs could live and how they should be governed, the United Nations proposed dividing Palestine into two countries-one for Arabs and the other for Jews. The Jews accepted this “partition” plan as a way-finally, after 2,000 years-to establish their own state. Arabs rejected the plan, arguing that Jews didn’t belong there at all.
On May 15, 1948, the Jews pronounced the portion granted to them an independent country, which they called Israel. The next day, the Arabs declared war on this new state. Jews call this conflict Milchemet Ha’atzmaut, the War of Independence. Arabs call these same events the Nakba, meaning “the Catastrophe.”
The repercussions of these hostilities and subsequent ones continue to rebound, affecting living patterns, social relationships, economic opportunities, and daily life for everyone.
Roey ShatranRoey stared at his friend. Yaron was tossing a cascade of small, brightly colored balls. How did he do that?
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“It’s easy,” Yaron told him. “I could teach you.”
With Yaron’s help, Roey learned to throw and catch two balls and to roll a diabolo along a string. When Yaron started showing off his tumbling tricks, Roey wanted to know how he’d learned to do those too. “Circus,” Yaron said. He and his older brother had been going to the Galilee Circus for two years, ever since it began. Noam could already juggle five balls.
Kids in the Jewish town of Karmiel, where Roey lived, could choose from lots of after-school programs. “I never thought about circus,” Roey said. He had barely even heard of it. But now that he had seen Yaron’s skill at juggling, the circus program appealed to him. In the fall of 2005, his mother drove him to the community center for a Galilee Circus open house.
The gymnasium looked gigantic to Roey, who was small for his age. He took it all in, astounded. There were so many kids, and the tricks they were doing with objects, each other, and their own bodies amazed him. Roey’s mother noticed something that he did not: more than half of the kids there were Arab. “I didn’t know this was Arabs and Jews,” she said, delighted to see the kids playing together.
Many of the Shatrans’ Jewish neighbors disapproved of “mixed” activities that tried to promote coexistence between the two groups. Roey’s parents, Hanoch and Orly, understood their neighbors’ concerns. “Most of them-the Arabs-don’t like us,” his father said. As a result, some Jews felt afraid of Arabs. Nevertheless, Roey’s parents believed, “We have to live with them.” They hoped to show that coexistence could work.
After all, about half the residents of the Galilee were Arab-a far higher proportion than in Israel as a whole, where they made up 20 percent of the population. A modern development town, Karmiel drew visitors from the entire region, including Arabs, who shopped in the same stores as Jews when they drove to Karmiel from the nearest villages, Biane, Majd al-Krum, and Deir al-Asad, which were less than three miles away.
The two groups rarely socialized though. At one point, Roey’s elementary school joined in a partnership with a school in an Arab village about six miles away. The children visited each other’s homes, but they didn’t really get to know one other. The arrangement was short-lived. Hanoch had worked closely with Arab colleagues before he retired, and he and Orly visited them on Muslim holy days. But most Jews in serene Karmiel thought it was too dangerous to venture into the congested Arab villages.
Still, some members of the community continued to try to bring Arab and Jewish young people together. Orly and Hanoch hoped that the Galilee Circus would have staying power, that the kids would not only get along but also develop long-term friendships. Connections would be even better than coexistence.
The Shatrans also hoped that Roey would have fun at circus. “He was afraid of a lot of things,” Orly said. Roey was fearful of big kids, physical challenges, new situations. Maybe circus would make him braver.
At the beginning of the first class, the circus manager, Ah-mad Sanallah, led the group in some ice-breakers. “The manager called everybody,” Roey said. “We sat together in a circle. We did all kind of name-games. Everybody says their name. He gave each one a ball, and you’d pass it to someone and say his name.”
Though the children couldn’t speak each other’s language, Ahmad translated for them. This was especially important for the Arab kids because the circus coaches were Jewish and only spoke Hebrew; without Ahmad’s help, they wouldn’t understand the coaches’ directions.
After the name games, they visited stations around the gym, where they tried different circus skills: juggling, flower sticks, poi, staff twirling, and acrobatics. “At each station, the coach did another game to make everybody
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know each other," Roey recalled. At the flower sticks station, for instance, each child made up a routine for the others to follow. Roey was proud that his moves were the most challenging for everyone.
“I just came to try once,” Roey said. But he was hooked. He told his parents he wanted to keep going. They were glad he’d found an activity he enjoyed, especially one that involved both Arabs and Jews.
“The first few months in the circus,” Roey said, “I really liked juggling.” In fact, he liked it so much, especially diabolo, that he didn’t try anything else. Fortunately, he was persistent at his favorite activity. “He was not good at all in the juggling,” Gilad Finkel, one of the coaches, said, “and had many difficulties.”
But Roey didn’t notice the difficulties any more than he noticed that most of the kids weren’t Jewish and didn’t speak Hebrew. Circus was fun.
"Circus was Different"There were no organized activities or parks or playgrounds in Deir al-Asad, the Muslim Arab village where Hala and her family lived. But every Monday afternoon, her brother Ali climbed on the bus heading for the nearby town of Karmiel to attend something called “circus.”
Karmiel seemed to exist in a different world from the one Ali knew. Almost every surface in Deir al-Asad, both horizontal and vertical, is carved from stone. Nameless roads, alleys, paths, and driveways slant at odd angles from each other, leading circuitously to a maze of tightly packed homes with no street addresses. As the bus drove through Karmiel, Ali could see parks and single-family homes with green lawns.
But Ali didn’t care about backyards or neighborhoods. He was most interested in the town’s community center where he was learning all sorts of tricks. Pretty soon, he could juggle three balls.
Manar and Manal, Hala’ s older twin sisters, began going to circus a year or so after Ali started. Then their father Yousef, started volunteering with the circus, setting up seats and hauling equipment for the end-of-year show.
All this time, Hala wondered, What does that mean -circus? Like Roey, she’d never heard of one or seen one. Finally, when she was about seven, she went to a Galilee Circus show. Manar was doing forward rolls. Manal was juggling. Ali was balancing on another boy’s knees. Now Hala understood.
“Tumbling, juggling, acrobatics!” she exclaimed. “It was a whole new world to me.” She told her parents that she wanted to go to circus too. However, she had one reservation.
“I was a little afraid,” she admitted. “There were Jewish [kids] there.” Hala had seen Jewish children, but she’d never talked with one. How could she? They spoke different languages.
“I had a feeling inside that they might have stereotyped ideas about the Arabs, especially because we’re Arabs in a Jewish country,” Hala said. “We are in the minority; they are in the majority.”
Although the Asadi family, like the Shatrans, believed in coexistence, Manal was well aware that Arabs and Jews rarely mixed. “Everyone knows the relations aren’t good,” she said. “Arabs hate Jews. Jews hate Arabs.”
But circus was different. Jews and Arabs in the Galilee Circus didn’t hate each other, Manal explained. “It’s different because everyone who comes to this circus is coming for peace.” Hala’s other sister Manar even told Hala she liked circus because of the Jews. “I do things with Jews I wouldn’t do before.”
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Her brother and sisters tried to reassure Hala. They’d be there to watch over her. They had picked up some Hebrew at circus, so they could help her communicate.
Hala wasn’t completely convinced. “I was worried about working and practicing with Jews,” she admitted. “I had never been in such a project that combines Arabs and Jews because there’s never been a combination. We’d never been together. They might think they wouldn’t want to work with us.”
Despite her concerns, Hala decided to join her siblings when classes started up again in the fall. She tried out juggling and acrobatics right away. Within months, she could do forward and backward rolls, spin poi, and even walk on stilts, as long as a coach held her hand.
As Hala interacted with Jewish kids, her fears began to recede-but they didn’t disappear completely. “In the beginning,” she noticed, “there were some-not discrimination-but deep down inside, we did feel something different.”
Hala wasn’t sure how to express the difference she felt, but Mysa Kabat, another Arab girl in the circus, put it this way: “When we joined the Circus, we weren’t unified ... As Arabs and Jews, there’s animosity amongst us. The Arabs were on their own ... There is always something that makes us feel like we are not good enough.”
Shai Ben YosefThe summer before Shai started second grade, he and his mother visited the annual fair held by the council of Misgav, the region where Shai’s village Atzmon is located. Kids could try out different after-school activities, such as art classes, athletics, and academics.
‘’A juggling teacher was there,” Shai said, “and he taught me a bit of juggling. I just loved it!” Shai also picked up a set of flower sticks and quickly got the hang of it. That juggling coach was Gilad Finkel, and he was so impressed that he asked Shai if he had experience. “I was good at it right away,” Shai boasted. “I haven’t met many people who can do it right away.” Shai signed up for Gilad’s course.
When the class called Magic and Juggling started that fall, Shai learned a number of fun tricks. The first half of each ninety-minute weekly session focused on magic. Shai learned how to make a coin disappear and then reappear. During the second half of each class, the ten or fifteen kids practiced the basics of fl ower sticks, poi, rolla bolla, diabolo, and ball juggling.
Shai had a difficult time learning to spin the two poi in a particular pattern. “The Butterfly-for boys, it’s very painful,” he said. “The poi usually are spinning either forward or backward but they’re not spinning on the same plane. In Butterfly, they are on the same plane. Sometimes, they hit each other, and the first place they hit is the groin! Either the head or the groin, depending on which way you’re spinning.” As Shai improved, he added unicycle, staff twirling, tight-wire, and stilts to his routines. “I left magic behind,” he said.
After five years, Shai was one of the oldest, biggest, and best performers in the class. In 2006, when he was almost thirteen, he was ready to move on to a higher-level class. “Aside from teaching in Misgav,” Gilad told him, “I also teach circus in Karmiel.”
“A circus?!” Shai exclaimed. He’d heard of circuses but he’d never seen one. He wanted to register right away. But first Gilad needed to have a talk with him and his parents.
“It’s a Jewish-Arab circus,” Gilad told them. “Do you have any problems with that?”
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Why would that matter? Shai wondered. He had met Arab people before. “They were always nice to me,” he said.
Arab kids weren’t the problem for Shai. The other Jewish kids were. “I was kind of a nerd,” he admitted. “People used to pick on me.” At school they sometimes called him names. “They would thump me on the back of my head.”
Gilad seemed surprised by Shai’s question. He expected him to be nervous about Arabs, not Jews. Tensions between Arabs and Jews seemed more taut than ever. Gilad needed to know in advance that Shai and his family would agree to get along with everyone.
This was not an issue for the Ben Yosef family.
“My mom is all for coexistence,” Shai said. “She’s in lots of Jewish-Arab projects.”
Doron Ben Yosef liked the idea of the circus too. Shai’s father taught a high school course that combined history, geography, and Bible. Shai had recently quit taking drum lessons and seemed directionless and unfocused. Doron was happy that his son wanted to get serious about juggling.
Wary of the other Jewish kids but not worried about the Arabs, Shai went to Karmiel for circus. He was already skilled enough that he immediately joined the advanced group, which practiced three hours a week. Shai recognized Yaron and Noam Davidovich, who had been in his class in Atzmon for a while. “They were the first ones I talked to,” Shai said.
Nevertheless, Shai developed more friendships with Arabs than with Jews, especially with Ahmad’s son Tamer and a girl named Fatmi Ali. The three of them performed unicycle together but Shai and Fatmi had trouble idling-remaining stationary with-out rolling backward and forward or falling over. Fortunately, Fatmi spoke Hebrew, so she and Shai could chat while they practiced.
“There was a really big fan with a cover we leaned on,” Shai said. “We were next to each other and worked on idling the entire three hours. We were just doing that, and we bonded.”
Gilad hoped that Shai could fix his relationships too. “He had difficulties in the social aspect,” he said. Propped against the fan, Shai hoped he could learn to idle on both legs-and to make friends with Jews as well as Arabs.
Hla AsadiIt wasn’t hard for Hla to learn about circus. Her cousins Hala ‘ Ali ‘ Manal, and Manar lived right downstairs, so she heard about it all the time.
Hla’s and Hala’s grandparents had built the first two floors of their limestone home on a flat stone foundation in 1967. Following local tradition, they’d added more stories, in 1995 and 2000, as their three sons married and had children.
Hla, her three brothers, and their parents lived on the fourth floor, with easy access to a rooftop patio. Sometimes, the entire extended family showed up there at mealtime.
On the floor just below them lived her uncle, his wife, and their three children. Below that were her grandparents and another uncle, who was not married. Hala’s family lived on the first floor.
One day, when Hla was at home watching television, she happened to catch a show about a professional circus-a
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real one, not just an after-school program. “Hey, Dad!” she called. “Look at that. It’s amazing.”
Her father Aziz asked her if she wanted to join her cousins at their circus program.
“Of course!” she answered. But when she found out that Jewish kids also went to circus, she was confused. “At first,” she said, “I didn’t understand the idea.” So she talked about it with her friends.
She discovered that “nobody understood about Jews” any more than she did. Her parents had a few Jewish friends, but just about everyone else she knew thought it was impossible for Jews and Arabs to get along, let alone touch each other, as they would have to do in circus classes.
Her grandmother disapproved of circus, not necessarily because of mixing with Jews but because of socializing with males. “You shouldn’t be free with boys,” she admonished Hla.
Of course, Hla would not be free with boys! She was a religious girl.
The Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, directs men and women to be modest and to refrain from displaying certain parts of their bodies. It also tells women to draw cloths over their heads and chests and to draw their outer garments closely around them.
People interpret this guideline in different ways. When she was eight years old, Hla told her father that she wanted to wear the hijab, the traditional headscarf worn by many Arab women. “No problem,” Aziz responded. Now she wears one all the time, except when she bathes or when she’s at home and her brothers aren’t around. Aya Aa’mar, her closest friend, wears a jilbab, a coat that covers her body and disguises her shape. Only three other members of Hla’s large extended family-both of her grandmothers and her cousin Manar-wear the hijab. No one in her family wears the full jilbab.
Despite her grandmother’s objections and her own confusion about how Arabs and Jews could get along, Hla decided to give circus a try.
The coaches didn’t teach skills at the first couple of classes. Instead, they talked about the need for the members of the circus to get along together, like members of a family. “The first meetings were conversation with the Jews,” Hla said, “in order to strengthen coexistence, strengthen the feeling of togetherness.”
They emphasized that circus, even more than other activities like soccer or orchestra, depends on unity and trust. After all, if someone is flying toward you and expects you to catch her, you’d better do it!
Hla started basic circus training, particularly elementary acrobatics, hand stands, and the splits. On her own, she worked on flexibility, her favorite activity. Hla tried to twist and bend and stretch her body like the contortionists she’d seen on television. “The first thing I tried was to do a back bend. But I’d fall on my head ... It wasn’t working,” she realized, “because I wasn’t flexible ... Nobody at circus was doing it... I wanted to do crazy shapes with my body.”
Marc Rosenstein and the Galilee Circus On Sunday evening, October 1, 2000, Marc Rosenstein stood on the front porch of his home in Shorashim, as he often did after dinner. A rabbi from Highland Park, Illinois, Marc had moved to this tiny community ten years earlier. As executive director of the Galilee Foundation for Value Education, he hoped to promote Jewish-Arab cooperation.
Marc looked across the Hilazon Valley toward a nearby Arab village. Sha’ab was close enough that he could
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walk there in about twenty minutes. This was not a safe night, however, for a neighborly stroll.
Sounds echo and reverberate across the stony valleys of the Galilee. On most nights, from early summer until the first rain in the fall, Marc could hear bands broadcasting outdoor wedding celebrations through loudspeakers in the Arab villages. That night, though, the loud noises he heard were rhythmic chanting in Arabic, as insistent and militant as drumbeats. He couldn’t translate all of the words, but as he watched brush and forest fires blaze along the ridge above Sha’ab and other nearby Arab villages, he understood the sentiment. Possibly, Sha’ab’s furious citizens were shouting “Give us back our land!” or even “Death to the Jews!”
Would they march into Shorashim, Marc wondered? Set fire to his home? Attack him, his wife, their three children? He had known his Arab neighbors to be peaceable, honorable, democratic citizens of Israel. Had he been deluding himself ? What was happening? Whatever it was, how could he stop it?
These events occurred at the beginning of what came to be known as the Second Intifada (“uprising”). Local Arabs were expressing their frustration at being treated like second-class citizens. The Israeli government gave Jewish schools and hospitals more money than it gave the Arab institutions. Many local Jews refused to hire Arabs. Jews didn’t shop in Arab stores.
Within days of the outbreak of the rioting, thirteen Galilean Arabs lay dead. The victims’ families blamed Israeli police for their deaths.
In the wake of the demonstrations that had flared up in Sha’ab, Marc felt perplexed and demoralized-but also compelled to act. He wanted, somehow, to bring his Jewish friends back together with the people he had thought of as his Arab friends.
During that uneasy winter, Marc visited an American colleague in New York City, who happened to share an office with Alan Slifka. Slifka ran the Abraham Fund, a charitable foundation, and had helped found Big Apple Circus.
Months later, back in Israel, Marc attended a gathering of Jews who felt the same way he did about Jewish-Arab relations. They sat in a circle, brainstorming ways for Arabs and Jews to get to know each other. Maybe an arts program for kids-painting classes, an orchestra?
“Hey,” Marc said, thinking of Slifka. “How about a circus? I think I know where I can get some funding.”
The group was intrigued by the idea, but no one knew anything about circuses.
Finally, after two years of pursuing various program ideas, Marc went back to his circus suggestion and obtained money from the Abraham Fund. He talked Arik Gotler-Ophir, a drama teacher who also knew nothing about circuses, into starting one. Arik hired Gilad Finkel. Then Ahmad joined the team. The Galilee Circus was born.
From the start, when nine Jewish and sixteen Arab kids signed up, the mission of the Galilee Circus was to bring together young people who would otherwise never meet or get to know each other. Although Marc didn’t know the term yet, this was the definition of “social circus.”
The staff wanted to balance the numbers of Jews and Arabs, but they had a hard time attracting enough Jews. Jewish schools already provided many after-school programs. But Arab schools did not. The Arab kids wanted an activity-almost any activity-and they were more willing to socialize with Jews. “The Arabs are less afraid of the Jews than the Jews are of the Arabs,” Marc said.
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At the end of its first season, the Galilee Circus held a few debut performances in schools and community centers in Karmiel and Deir al-Asad. A couple of hundred family members and friends of the performers came to their shows. While a few Arabs attended the shows in Karmiel, hardly any Jews “crossed the line,” Marc said, to go to the performances in the Arab village.
“After holding our breaths out of concern that we really would find enough kids, that they really would be able to work together, that they really would stick out the year, that they really would give a creditable performance after only six months of practice, we all breathed easily in June.” They even choked up, he admitted, “when in the curtain call, the kids stopped the music and said to the crowd, ‘The Galilee Circus family thanks you with all our heart!”’
No one believed that a once-a-week circus class could do a better job of bringing peace to the Middle East than politicians and negotiators could. Nor was the class much like a real circus. But juggling and acrobatics were a start. Where would they go from here?
During the summer of 2006, just before Shai was to start the Galilee Circus, he went to sleep away camp. It was scheduled to last five days. But he ended up staying away from home for over a month.
Other kids’ plans also turned topsy-turvy that summer. Roey and his family didn’t intend to travel, but they left home in July and didn’t return for about five weeks. Hala assumed she’d remain in Deir al-Asad, as she did every summer. But she left town as well. Hla soon wished she could escape too.
On July 12, a week after Hala turned eight, several Israeli soldiers on border patrol were killed by Hezbollah, an Arab military, political, and social organization in Lebanon. Two other soldiers were kidnapped. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) responded by firing at targets in Lebanon. In return, Hezbollah launched rockets into northern Israel.
Initially, neither Jewish nor Arab residents paid much attention to the rockets. Skirmishes between IDF soldiers and militants in southern Lebanon occurred frequently enough to be perceived as a persistent nuisance, rather than a threat of war. The border was less than twelve miles north of Karmiel, and residents had become accustomed to the sound of rockets.
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“Boom. Boom. Boom.” When the first rockets dropped, Roey was standing in line at a pharmacy in Karmiel with his mother, his sister, and his brother. “You heard three explosions,” Roey said. “Boom. Boom. Boom. Really soft.”
People around him were matter-of-fact. He heard someone say that they were just rockets from Lebanon.
“No one thought it would be big,” Roey said. “In the Jewish villages that surround this mountain, it was routine that missiles fall. People didn’t really notice.”
But on the drive home, Roey saw a father and daughter running down the street. He rolled down the car window and heard an air-raid siren. That meant the Shatrans had fifteen seconds to shield themselves from the incoming rocket.
Orly stopped the car in the middle of the road, and the family leaped out and scrambled to the nearest public bomb shelter. Once inside, they felt secure. They spent the next couple of hours chatting with neighbors, then drove back home.
The siren sounded again the next day. Roey and his family piled into the shelter in their basement, which his mother had been using as a pottery studio. Still, the Shatrans continued to believe, as Roey said, “It’s nothing. It’s probably going to stop tomorrow. It’s not going to be a war.”
The family felt relatively safe because the rockets that they kept hearing were not landing in Karmiel or in any of the surrounding Jewish villages. Either Hezbollah’s aim was off or its munitions experts weren’t yet using enough propulsion to reach their intended targets. Instead, Roey’s father recalled, the rockets, heavily loaded with steel ball bearings, were hitting the Arab towns of Biane, Deir al-Asad, and Majd al-Krum, where they killed people and destroyed buildings.
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“It was a Very, Very Tense Time” When they heard the air-raid sirens, many people in Deir al-Asad scurried up to their flat rooftops to see what was happening. Salam Abu Zeid, Hala’s aunt, believed the scuffles would end soon, just as Roey’s family assumed. “When the war started," she said, “we didn’t think it would be as difficult as it was.” Soon she changed her mind, just as the Shatrans did. “Once the rockets fell on our village, we got scared," she said.
Public air-raid shelters like those in Jewish towns are not available in Arab villages, but many homes have what is called a “safe room.” Unlike public air-raid shelters, though, safe rooms are not reinforced. They are windowless spaces, preferably interior ones, on the south side of a building since the rockets come from the north. If one of Hezbollah’s rockets fell onto or even close to a house, it could severely damage it. The house might even tumble down the cliff on which it sits. Hala and Hla’s house has a safe room on the first floor, but it had not been well maintained.
Salam owned a home in Beersheva, a town 140 miles to the south-too far for the rockets to reach. When bombardment started that summer, Salam left for Beersheva and took Hala with her. They remained there for ten days.
The rest of the family stayed in Deir al-Asad. “I spent a lot of time in the safe room," Hla said. “It was a very, very tense time. It lasted for a whole month. It felt like forever.” Her parents didn’t want the children to be frightened, so they provided games to try to distract them. Hla passed the time playing cards with her brothers. Although they were terrified by the rockets, the girls and their families felt ambivalent about Hezbollah’s actions. As Arabs, they sympathized with the Arabs in Lebanon, including members of Hezbollah. Yet, as Israelis, they didn’t want Hezbollah to attack their country.
“All of us have complex feelings about all of this,” Salam explained. “It’s not really easy for us to say that we hate Hezbollah. But it’s also not easy for us to say that it’s good for them to shoot rockets here .... We don’t want to be hit with rockets, but we don’t want them [Lebanese] to be shot at [by Jews].”
Other people in her village were proud that their Arab “brothers” in Lebanon were taking action against the Jewish people. Jews had confiscated their property-their country, they believed-in 1948. They felt it was time to retaliate, to eject the Jews, and to reclaim the land.
Hala did not support the attacks. She would be starting circus soon, and she’d have to face Jews-Jews whom other Arabs were trying to kill.
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“I Don’t want to Stay Here!” Israeli media did not announce the exact locations where Hezbollah’s rockets landed. They didn’t want the organization to know that they were falling short of their targets. Nevertheless, within two days of the start of the attacks, Hezbollah’s aim improved.
While the Shatrans were eating lunch at home on July 15, Roey’s father heard a whistling sound. “Run to the shelter!” he shouted. “Run to the shelter!”
Seconds later a bomb thudded into Roey’s backyard. By the time he and his family reached the stairs to their shelter, a second bomb hit nearby.
“We heard all the windows in the house shattering,” Roey said. “We felt the shock wave.”
The family locked the massive steel door to the shelter. Fortunately, they had already removed his mother’s worktables and pottery wheel and laid out mattresses on the floor, just in case.
Roey jumped onto a mattress and covered his head with his arms. But he could still hear his sister crying and, at the same time, laughing hysterically. “We’re going now!” he demanded. “I don’t want to stay here.” His parents agreed that they needed to escape Karmiel as soon as it seemed safe to do so.
Just then, a policeman banged on their door, yelling, “Get out! Get out! Your house is on fire!”
The Shatrans ran back upstairs, where they discovered that the fire was a small one and only in the backyard. But shrapnel and shards of glass littered the floors; a steel ball bearing had been driven into a window frame.
Within half an hour, the Shatrans had packed up their belongings, including the two family dogs, and headed to Haifa, twenty-seven miles to the east and, more importantly, thirty miles from the Lebanese border. “Haifa is far from Lebanon,” Roey said. They spent that night in the basement of Roey’s aunt and uncle’s home, where they felt more secure.
But the next morning, they heard another explosion. This time, it was Roey who became hysterical. “No one believed it would come to Haifa,” he said. They fled again, to another relative’s home, this time in Tel Aviv, fifty-seven miles to the south. Sixteen family members squeezed together for six weeks.
Despite the dangers, Roey’s father returned to Karmiel. He had to go to work. Some of his colleagues were Arabs, and, despite the war, they continued to work alongside each other. On weekends, he drove to Tel Aviv to see his family.
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“I Froze and screamed” Shai and his fellow campers were evacuated to Tel Aviv, and then after a week to Modi’in, where he stayed with family friends. Meanwhile, his parents and sister were still in Atzmon. He worried about them at first, but then felt reassured, knowing that they’d be safe in their home shelter.
The children finally returned home the second week in August. Shai’s sister showed him where a piece of a rocket had fallen outside the gates to Atzmon. Otherwise, the villagers and their property were unharmed. Until the cease-fire, Shai and his sister alternated between their rooms and the shelter, keeping board games going in both places.
Hala was ecstatic to see her family again. Hla finally had someone else to play with besides her brothers. Roey remained so traumatized by the war that he soon developed phobias-irrational fears. His mother suggested that the family visit a nature preserve. What caught Roey’s attention at the preserve were hundreds, possibly thousands, of dragonflies, hovering and darting over the lake. “I froze and screamed,” he said. “My father caught me and hugged me really hard but I couldn’t move.” Roey’s fear of bugs practically paralyzed him. “It was really bad. It really stopped me from living my life.”
They returned to Karmiel, and he managed to go back to school when it started two-and-a-half weeks later. So did Hala and Hla in Deir al-Asad and Shai in Misgav.
Several weeks after that, the Galilee Circus reopened. Despite his traumas, Roey returned to circus, as did Hala’s sisters and brother, along with other Arab and Jewish kids. Shai and Hala attended for the first time.
No one at circus talked about the war. Or about what they had done that summer. Or about where they had hidden. Or about their fears, especially not their fears of each other.
“Once we get to circus,” Hala explained, “there’s an agreement. We don’t talk about such issues. Discussions don’t enter into the circus.”
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“We Don’t Have Anything Against Anyone” In early November 2008, posters popped up on lampposts around Roey’s hometown. They stated, “My House Is Not for Sale.”
This declaration was not directed at real estate agents. It was a campaign slogan from a new political party called My House. The party’s candidates, who were running for election to the Karmiel City Council, believed that the town should remain Jewish-all Jewish. No Arabs allowed.
Zoning laws regulated the expansion of towns into the Galilee’s green space. The Jewish town continued to sprawl as its population grew, while the Arab village was restricted to its current boundaries. The only places for them to build more housing were either closer to their neighbors or on top of their relatives.
Some Arab villagers had been moving to Karmiel for this reason; there was no more room in their towns. Now about 10 percent of Karmiel’s population was Arab. Hla’s mother, Sameha, who yearned for privacy, space, and quiet, wished she could join them.
Members and supporters of My House wanted other Arabs to stop moving there, and they wanted Jews to stop selling them their homes. Oren Milstein, the party’s founder, stated, “We don’t have anything against anyone. We are just in favor of our [Jewish] character.”
Fourteen miles away, in the ancient city of Akko, Jews and Arabs lived side by side. Generally, they did so peacefully. But a month before the election in Karmiel, there were clashes in Akko on Yorn Kippur, which is normally a holy and quiet day.
The My House candidates pointed to the violence in Akko, implying that it could also happen in Karmiel if Arabs kept moving in. Many Jews equated “Arab” with “terrorist.” Other Jews chimed in, saying that they didn’t want a mosque in their town, with a muezzin calling Muslims to prayer through a loudspeaker five times a day. A member of the City Council said, “Just as Arab boys marry Arab girls, we want our boys to marry our girls.”
In the fall of 2008, Roey started attending a new school. The father of one of his classmates was involved in politics, and the elections were a topic of conversation in their classroom.
Roey knew, of course, that some Jews were anti-Arab. Noam and Yaron’ s father claimed that Israel was too small to contain both groups. He wanted all Arabs to be “transferred” to another country, any country. As far as Roey knew, Yaron did not agree with his father. But he was dismayed when he discovered that almost everyone at his school supported the position of the My House political party.
“Most of the kids,” Roey said, “are really against the whole Arab-Jewish idea of being together .... They say racist comments ... [such as] ‘Arabs ... shouldn’t be here.”’ Statements like this made him feel bad.
Initially, Roey tried to convince his friends that they were wrong. He discovered, though, that none of them listened to him. Hardly anyone at school knew that he participated in an Arab-Jewish circus, and he wasn’t about to tell them.
In mid-November, the My House slate won three of the seventeen seats on the Karmiel City Council, and Milstein was chosen Deputy Mayor. An opposition party, called Karmiel for All of Us, proposed a mixed slate of both Arab and Jewish candidates. It didn’t win any seats.
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“In the Shade of a Patriot Antimissile Missile Launcher”In the spring of 2009, Marc received an invitation that surprised him. The Israel Defense Forces wanted to know if the Galilee Circus would perform at a nearby air force base on Yam Ha’atzmaut-Israeli Independence Day.
Jewish Israelis observe Yam Ha’atzmaut much as Americans celebrate Independence Day, with outdoor concerts and firework displays. They also tour local military bases.
The next day, Israeli Arabs observe the Nakba-the anniversary of the Arab displacement following the founding of the modern state of Israel. Many visit the sites of Arab villages that the IDF destroyed in 1948 and hold demonstrations or strikes.
Marc worried that the Arab families might be upset if their children performed with Jewish kids on Israeli Independence Day-at a military installation, no less. So, he asked Ahmad for advice.
“Are there going to be planes?” Ahmad asked.
“Of course,” Marc answered.
“So, what’s the problem?”
Ahmad knew that the kids would love climbing inside the jets and watching flyovers at close range. Anyway, all of them were Israeli citizens. Even if, like most Arabs, they decided not to volunteer for the IDF when they graduated from high school, the base was as much theirs as it was the Jews’.
“So, there they were,” Marc said, “Jews and Arabs, in the shade of a Patriot antimissile missile launcher, launching balls, rings, and each other into the air, to the enthusiastic applause of hundreds of [people] who had come out to show their children Israel’s military might and eat ice cream.”
The audience was so impressed that the following year, the troupe was invited back. As before, none of the Arab families objected to the circus’s visiting an air force base. But Shai did.
“I decided that I’m a pacifist,” he said. “I’m against wars and violence... I will not take part in the division of the world population.”
Shai considered boycotting the production, but he agreed to perform because of his love for the circus. He did not, however, tour the base or clamber into the planes. His decision led him to ponder whether or not to officially declare himself a pacifist. This path would have consequences two years later when, like almost all Jewish high school graduates, he would be drafted into the IDF.
Not long after their second visit to the base, the circus kids and their families took an excursion together to a beach near the Lebanon border. They hiked, shared food and recipes, chatted, and swam. The family members watched the kids perform. This joint outing became an annual circus tradition, each year in a different setting.
Marc later wrote about these ordinary-seeming yet extraordinary outings: “The people so naturally chopping cucumbers and arguing about the number of falafel balls and chasing their kids around the picnic ground and joking with their peers were all Israelis, but comprised two populations .... [T]hey were all conscious of the fact that probably 99 percent of their families and friends and neighbors had never had such an experience.
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“We Got to an Understanding!’’ Around the same time, Oren Milstein was fired from his job as deputy mayor of K armiel for discriminating against Arabs. Roey was glad to see him go. He did not, however, try to convince his friends and classmates of his view. He had come to the conclusion that such conversations were futile.
“I never talk religion and politics with friends because you never get to a good place,” he said. “None of my friends have the same point of view that I do. They have a totally different point of v iew. They’re not willing to hear anything else.”
As a result, he still didn’t even tell his school friends that he was in the circus, and certainly not that the circus met in Biane. “I know people,” he added, “who think that if you go into an Arab village, you’re going to get hurt; you’re going to get lynched.”
In fact, Roey had a frightening experience in a nearby Arab village where he, Yaron, and Ali went to perform at a party given by a friend of Ali’s. Three local kids, suspecting that he was Jewish, surrounded him so that he couldn’t get away. They asked him where he was from, why he was there, and who brought him. When he pointed to Ali, they backed off. Roey wondered if the local kids would have hurt him had he not come with an Arab friend.
He did not discuss the incident with either his schoolmates or his circus friends. The tradition at the circus remained, “When we get to the circus, we just do circus.” Shai added, emphatically, “We. Do. Not. Talk. Politics.”
One exception to that tradition arose on May 15, 2011. On that day-the Nakba-residents in Deir al-Asad went on strike and held a large protest rally.
“Everything in the whole village closed,” Ahmad said. Parents of some Arab troupers asked him to close the circus as well. But for a change, he decided to bring the Jewish and Arab performers together for a discussion.
Ahmad asked them if they knew why the villagers were protesting. Roey explained what he knew about the history of the Nakba.
Ahmad asked, “What do you think about the Palestinians?” Shai expressed sympathy for their situation. “It’s a very sad day for them,” he said.
Hala considered herself Palestinian as well as Israeli. “There was a little bit of tension because of the fact that the whole Nakba thing is between Arabs and Jews,” she said. “We can talk together, and we’re happy practicing together. But once the whole issue is brought up to a level where you bring up all of your stereotyped thinking, there can be a bit of a problem.”
Unaccustomed to confronting the long-standing conflict openly, everyone felt awkward, tense, and somber. After quiet conversation, Hala said, “We got to an understanding.” Yet, they hoped never to have to talk about these topics again.
Such stereotyped thinking did become a problem the following year. The circus was performing in Akko. Some Arab boys insulted Shirel, who was wearing her revealing circus costume on the street. “I hate this about Arabs.” she said to Hla, “But I love you like a sister.”
Hla was hurt and angered. She said to Shirel, “You must not think that all Arabs are like that. There are a lot of Jews who act the same way. You must hate the behavior, not the people. Don’t say, ‘I hate Arabs.’ I hate Arabs who do that as well.” Shirel agreed with her friend.
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Watch out for Flying Kids: Identity Chart ActivityChoose one of the young people featured in Watch out for Flying Kids and create an identity chart for him or her.
Guiding Questions:
• Choose one identity on your chart that you believe most influences the way this young person perceivesthose living outside of his or her community. Explain why you chose this identity.
• Choose one identity on your chart that you believe least influences the way this young person perceivesthose living outside of his or her community. Explain why you chose this identity.
• Consider a historical or current event that affected this young person or members of his or hercommunity. How did he or she view this event? Which identities most influenced his or her view of theevent?
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Excerpt from Our Kind of PeopleBy Uzodinma Iweala
In the spring of 2006, in New York, I attended a talk about HIV/AIDS sponsored by the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The speaker stepped to a podium in the cavernous Lerner Auditorium bathed in bright white stage lights. His voice tremulous with concern and amplified by large speakers, he painted such a dire picture of HIV/AIDS in Africa that it seemed only a matter of months before all 800 million sub-Saharan Africans would contract the virus and perish.
“People don’t have access to information. People don’t have access to medication,” I remember him thundering as the mostly white, mostly Western audience sighted in sorrowful agreement. “People are dropping like flies.”
I sat up. I remember scribbling those words on a program that I have long since lost.
“Dropping like flies” is an often used and, as a result, rather innocuous simile, but in that context it made me wonder: is this how Africans are considered, as insects, animals, not human? Is resorting to a metaphor of inhumanity the only way to register the magnitude of the problem unfolding on such a vast scale before us? In fairness, “dropping like flies” can be used to describe any set of p eople, but historical associations of Africans and animals make such language very complicated. Sometimes it can even be perceived as outright disrespectful.
On the other hand, what does it mean to say that 33.4 million people in the world are HIV positive and 28.2 million of those in sub-Saharan Africa? What does it mean to say that 1.8 million people in Africa died last year as a result of the virus and its effects? There is no love or loss in a decimal point, no resilience and no redemption. Statistics, however beautifully rendered in tables or graphs or charts, cannot even begin to relay the tragedies and triumphs of this situation.
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The Danger of a Single StoryBy Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieSource: Ted Talks
I’m a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call “the danger of the single story.” I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children’s books.
I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.
Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.
My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.
And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.
What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available, and they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.
Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.
I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.
Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.
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Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.
I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn’t consciously identify as African. But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in “India, Africa and other countries.”
So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide’s family.
This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as “beasts who have no houses,” he writes, “They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.”
Now, I’ve laughed every time I’ve read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are “half devil, half child.”
And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not “authentically African.” Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African.
But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.
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I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.
So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is “nkali.” It’s a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another.” Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.
I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called “American Psycho” --
-- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.
Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.
But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America’s cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.
When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me.
But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.
But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.
All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
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Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.
I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.
So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide’s family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls “a balance of stories.”
What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don’t read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them.
Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, “I really liked your novel. I didn’t like the ending. Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ...”
And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.
Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers.
What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband’s consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition?
Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.
My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don’t
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have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories.
Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. “They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.”
I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.
Thank you.
Full text and video: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en
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Guiding Questions:
• How did her introduction to African literature change Adichie’s view of the world?• Compare Adichie’s assumptions about Fide with her college roommate’s assumptions about her. Why
does she present these two stories side by side?• According to Adichie, how did her roommate’s single story of Africa emerge? How can we, as teachers
and students of the world around us, avoid forming a single story of the places and people we study?• What is the meaning of the Igbo word nkali? How does the concept of nkali shape the way in which
we study history, geography, and literature? Is it possible to study the world around us in a way thatchallenges the principle of nkali?
• Have you ever met a person who had a single story of you or your community? What would you like tosay to that person to challenge this single story?
• Think about a person you have met and perceived in a particular way. What would it take to engage inmultiple stories of that person? How might that challenge your perception?
