When advertisers show us only the poor in far-away countries, are they being objectified? How should we respond?
I was watching public television a few weeks ago and they ran a feature on the Democratic Republic of Congo . DRC rarely makes the news and when it does it is usually about the ongoing complex humanitarian emergency in the east of the country, one that has persisted for over two decades and has resulted in more lives being lost than in all of World War II. I figured the program was going to be related to this, but it was about something else entirely: entrepreneurship and movie theatres. It showcased a local filmmaker, Petna Ndaliko, who is also the artistic director for Yole! Africa, the organization he founded to “empower young people to see themselves as agents capable of thinking critically and acting non-violently to shape their own realities.” He hosts a film festival each year and has a vision to create a state of the art cinema in his hometown of Goma.
When was the last time you saw the words “DRC” and “artistic director” in the same sentence?
Because of that, people normally don’t associate DRC, or many other countries in Africa or the rest of the developing world as places where social entrepreneurship is thriving, where people are chasing their dreams, where hope is flourishing.
That story is rarely told in the West. There are many reasons for this, including the media’s focus on disasters and tragedies. The press sub-Saharan Africa gets has been reduced to about four things: genital mutilation, rape, child soldiers, and lions. That’s about it.
The ubiquitous images of “the poor” seen in so many missions and charity fundraising campaigns objectify human beings for the sake of eliciting an emotional response. |
But it can’t all be blamed on the media. Another major factor is pornography: poverty porn.
The ubiquitous images of “the poor” seen in so many missions and charity fundraising campaigns objectify human beings for the sake of eliciting an emotional response. Yup, just like real porn. Except that its “users” are praised, not told to go join an accountability group and confess their sin.
Advertising works by eliciting an emotional response. Fundraising campaigns do the same thing in order to be effective. Here’s what it looks like: We get something in our inbox from a missions organization or relief agency. We click on the message and front and center on the screen is the image of a black baby in Africa with a distended belly and flies swirling around her head, which makes us feel guilt. The guilt causes us reach for the checkbook or type in our credit card number. Now the guilt is relieved and tension reduced as a cascade of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin is released in the brain.
Pleasure circuits in the brain light up, kind of like, again, real porn.
Now, I am not saying anything is wrong with this, it’s simply how our brains work. I’m not implying a moral imperative or that we shouldn’t donate, because perhaps we should. Furthermore, there is no point in going to war with our neurobiological circuitry. What I am saying is that there is degradation taking place, as it does with actual pornography. The objectified “poor” in the images are robbed of their dignity. They become objects of our compassion.
We are presented with an incomplete image, one that sustains the narrative that the economically marginalized are helpless and need us to rescue them.
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Also, photos like this reinforce stereotypes by telling a skewed story about who these people living on the margins really are.
The west has been shown a single image of the developing world, and alongside that has come a single narrative (which Chimamanda Adichie talks about in her compelling Ted Talk, The Danger of the Single Story). We are presented with an incomplete image, one that sustains the narrative that the economically marginalized are helpless and need us to rescue them.
Treading that fine line between a candid pictorial representation of the inhuman conditions of poverty and the sensationalistic, one-sided narrative that these images articulate is not an easy task. And to be honest, I don’t know exactly how it can be done with more integrity. The fact is, many of these organizations that use these images do really great work in some extremely difficult places, like South Sudan, where I lived and worked a few years back. I am aware that I have many more questions than answers when it comes to this issue.
The only thing I know how to do is listen to the stories of people who are from these communities, people like Petna and Chimamanda rather than levying our stereotypes and misconstrued understandings onto places and people we don’t know much about.
Petna’s wife, Cherie says, “It’s incredible to see people…who have no sense of confidence, no sense of their own self-worth because they have only seen images of themselves that portray them as worthless.
“It’s incredible to see what happens when they learn they can tell their own story and in their version of the story they can be the hero.”- Cherie Ndaliko
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It’s incredible to see what happens when they learn they can tell their own story and in their version of the story they can be the hero.”
The hero, not the helpless victim.
To see someone like that means we first have to let go of our own desire to play the role of hero, of savior, a role that poverty porn claims we can be.
Image: Yole! Africa – Peace Everyday Goma Dance Mob
“has resulted in more lives being lost than in all of World War II”
This is incorrect. 3-6 million Congo, 25-60 million WW2. Some say the Congo is the largest loss of life *since* WW2.