First Civic Engagement Field Day: Poverty Tourism

            Today for civic engagement we visited communities that Parker students would not usually come upon. We spoke to community advocacy leaders about what they were trying to fix within their community, and they lectured us about getting involved with our alderman and state senator. To culminate the conversation about the incredibly impressive lengths community organizations are taking to turn the area around (which appear to be really effective and well thought out, and generally awesome), we took a tour of a couple blocks of the neighborhood, where we were shown the bungalow housing that the community was proud of, and the gorgeous 1933 St. Sabina church. But, surrounding these highlights, were signs of a not-so-idyllic neighborhood, strange graffiti, abandoned stores, boarded up buildings etc. that weren’t really mentioned.

            Partway through the tour, we had a rather strange man point out that the neighborhood was all black, to unclear purpose. He claimed to be Smoky Robinson, and said some things about the neighborhood that our guide was quick to hush. The strange man followed us for the duration of the tour, nodding, and talking repeatedly about masonry. I doubt he meant any harm, but he did serve to further point out that as a group of white, well-off, schoolchildren, we may not be in the best position to appreciate the complexity of the issues his neighborhood faces. I felt like an unwanted presence, stealing the dignity of the inhabitants of Auburn Gresham by coming and intellectualizing their struggles and successes like they were something to be studied instead of actual human beings “so I can better understand the Chicago area”. While I agree that we definitely need to understand the Chicago area better, I don’t think its fair to treat a neighborhood like an exhibit. If I was an inhabitant of Auburn Gresham, I wouldn’t want children worlds away from me to believe that they understand my plights, and pity me, especially because I might be perfectly happy there, and it would be rude to deem my life less full and happy and worthy of pity because I wasn’t rich. We were not invited.

            So I did some research. Starting by searching “cultural tourism”, google gave me Indian tour companies. My next idea was “poverty tourism”, and immediately I found countless articles and papers debating whether going to Africa and talking to a rural village, or driving through the slums of India for the purpose of self-betterment was morally acceptable. I found an excellent but lengthy report from BU School of Law. Generally, I found that poverty tourism is viewed as acceptable if the community is benefitting from it. Our tourism of Auburn Gresham was purely for our benefit, making it morally debatable.

Here’s an excerpt that gives a brief idea about the larger debate:

Poverty tourists are drawn to a variety of places, from squatter settlements in India to garbage dumps in Mexico and to urban centers in the United States. Some philosophers, journalists, and writers condemn all such tours as harmful cases of voyeurism. Others disagree, insisting that some tours are not harmful at all, and actually generate important human interactions, including education and economic assistance. These mutually beneficial cases are invoked as counterexamples that deflate critics' claims that all cases of poverty tourism are impermissible. The counterexamples also include 'Pareto superior' cases where the tourists gain but the residents are made no worse off.

And here’s the link to the full paper:

http://www.bu.edu/law/faculty/scholarship/workingpapers/documents/SelingerE-OuttersonK-WhyteK052411a.pdf

Engaging through the Chicago Social Change Film Festival

I attended the Chicago Social Change Film Festival at Icon Theater to watch a film called SOLD from India. It was adapted from a novel by Patricia McCormick. It was very much a movie, not a documentary, which I think was valuable because documentaries can give viewers an intellectualized distance instead of an emotional response. The movie begins with a 12-year-old girl named Lakshmi from Nepal. She truly lives in the mountains, not even a village. Her family is very poor, and though they are already surviving on the bare minimum, they need a roof that will shelter them from the heavy rains. Lakshmi’s drunken father accepts money from a woman who wants to take Lakshmi to be a maid. Unfortunately, this woman is actually recruiting Lakshmi to be a sex slave. There are awful scenes of Lakshmi being beaten, drugged, raped, starved, but the film manages to keep you interested instead of crippled with depression. Lakshmi ultimately becomes a hero, escaping and rescuing all the other girls as well as guiding the police to the dead bodies of other young slaves.

While it wasn’t a true story, the film really forced me to understand the plights of being in a situation so horrible and distant from any experience of my own.

People, myself included, often subconsciously put an intellectualized distance between themselves and a particularly horrendous cause. It almost functions as a defense mechanism because some atrocities are so unpleasant to understand and empathize with.

We were reminded by members of an organization in Chicago, called TraffickFree, that sexual exploitation and human trafficking is not only an overseas issue. They estimate that over 24,000 woman are CURRENTLY being trafficked in Chicago. It was interesting for me because I actually knew that number was feasible, I knew that human slavery is an issue in America, but I more or less forgot about it. To me, slavery going on nearby was so hard to imagine that my brain hadn’t even incorporated it into my worldview.

SOLD, was a fantastic start to the year of Civic Engagement because I could actually engage. I’m really glad I saw it, and hope to learn more about human trafficking in the Chicago area.