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Lined with towering luxury hotels, beachside bar and grills, nightclubs, street vendors, prostitutes, and overpriced stores Kalakaua Ave is the ultimate tourist trap of Honolulu. Rushing to Don Ho concerts, cheesy luaus, hula or surfing lessons are your typical tourists, white middle class Americans, not unlike those described in Kincaid's Antigua. It is fairly easy to spot these people, loud, aggressive types, sporting overpriced straw hats, sunglasses, pastly pink sunburn, clad in matching aloha print shirts and dresses. The term "Haole" means "short of breath" in Hawaiian, describing a cause of the pale, fair faces of these sailors, due to their lack of proper breathing. Soon, after missionaries, whalers, plantation owners followed those sailors; "Haole" came to mean simply "white foreigner", along with several negative implications. On occasion, my friends and I would strut down the strip, shaking our heads, laughing; these "Haoles", were so clueless, so strange, and so different.
These were some of the more personal images that came to mind in reading Professor Elder's essay of "us and them" in the beginning of the course. This underlined sentiment is strongly reinforced by Kincaid, Columbus, Professor Fair, and Lutz/Collins. It is this frightening human tendency to make these extreme separations between groups unlike their own that have created and maintained barriers between people resulting in cruel, inhumane actions that have been a product of history. Kincaid mentions in her book A Small Place the silent anger of the native Antiguans hold toward the white tourists that vacation there. For the people of Antigua, they are enslaved financially by these white visitors that look like their former masters, victims of a continuing tradition of oppression. The Antiguans laugh behind the white's backs, the way they eat, walk, look, and talk. It is only through this ridicule that the Antiguans can attempt to even the bumpy ground that has been left between Antiguans and their former slave masters. It is by this further distancing between former slave and former slave owner that two clashing and vengeful cultures choose to associate with one another. Looking clearly at an early white imperialistic perspective, Columbus's tone of voice in his letter to Sanchez is quite sickening; he repeatedly refers to the native people of these newly discovered islands just as Zoologists might refer to monkeys in a scientific study. He has even captured a few of these gentle, timid creatures for specimens.
Professor Jo Ellen Fair brings up several strong points in her lectures on the media coverage of Africa by western journalists, as well as the disadvantaged African film industry. According to Fair, it is the effects of consumer interest driving American media and filmmaking that largely motivates the content and nature of what is reported, and what is filmed. Nobody wants to hear about the pain and suffering that we as Americans are inflicting on Africa, we do not want to hear about how our presence in Somalia was not welcomed, or how our cruise missile attacks in the Sudan were not justified. As proud Americans, we want to hear about how great American policy is in Africa, about how the backward people of Africa need our help; how they need western American minds and ideas to survive, such as Democracy, human rights, free market. This attitude is the very same we hold in enjoying to hear how a bunch of western musicians get together to for a humanity effort in Africa, or how whiny-voiced lady named Joyce wants you to "feed the children" in a 30 second commercial. We take pleasure in watching films of "us" the good guy going over and helping "them" the poor black people in need. We want to see movies depicting the white hero coming into the savage land of Africa and become accepted and praised, as a white hero in Africa. Movies such as "The Air up there" "Out of Africa", as well as the numerous cheesy feel good Disney movies of South Africa with Johnny white boy who fights for the black African's rights. Then direct parallel of these views of Africa and Africans by American media is the assumptions and stereotypes depicted towards African Americans as well as other American Minorities. Once again, the separations between each group of "us" and "them" outside as well as within America's borders are obvious. It is due to the western world's inner biases and prejudices that makes way to an unfair portrayal of It creates a separation, a barrier if you will between we Americans, and our deceitful history. We are still outsiders, we Americans are still "us", and they the Africans are still "them". In looking at media coverage of Africa as well as the third world, National Geographic also is culprit to stereotypical views and opinions of people who are different, non-western. "They" are exotic, black, different, tribal, and as Lutz and Collins put it, noble savages.
This explains the tone angrily voiced in A Small Place. Kincaid's portrayal of the British is unique of the other three examples, as she is the lone voice that speaks from the viewpoint of non-whites, the former slaves and laborers. Her words are understandably bitter, and truly justified. She voices the anger towards the typical, average American who is to be reading this book, she addresses the unfair stereotypes and assumptions that the tourist has of those who are not like them. Yet it is a sad fact that these attitudes, justified and all, do the same evil of creating larger and greater barriers between people already unfairly divided in race, class and Nationality. Antigua and Hawaii both share similar histories, the distinctions between whites and non-whites have led to unfair treatment. It is an interesting irony that this class is called global cultures, explaining the course content of learning about cultures other then the American and western lives that we all know. The difficulties in accomplishing this are apparent in the institutions established by colonialism, as well as the misreported and racist media coverage of Africa, and the third world. Elder's first reading reminds us all of the difficulty of truly bridging that gap of culture and identity. For the most part we have been missing the large magnitude of our arrogance of the "us" and "them" train of thought. We as college students in a poorly ventilated classroom are still in many ways stuck in our stuffy little minds about the nature of the world. We sit and discuss the atrocities and the injustices done to these "other" people, how it isn't fair for "them", how "we" were wrong. We can talk about how unfair things are, and how we understand the hardships and cruelties, and how we can even relate from personal experiences. Even in acknowledging and discussing the wrongs of the past doesn't separate the barriers that we all hold as humans from people who we perceive as different then us. What we must realize in order to overcome so many inner demons is to take in heart the last passage of A Small Place:
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