The last few entries I've posted about the Olympics have been pretty sentimental (raving about the opening ceremony, drooling over athletic bodies, and beaming with pride about Team Jamaica's historic wins during the games' highlight competitions - the men's and women's 100-meter dash). However, I've been taking my time to put together a much more somber and intellectual post (and doing so in global/transnational perspective of course), so here goes.
I was alerted to an article in The Nation, titled
Blind to Bolt in Beijing, in which the author Dave
Zirin offers this quote from a poster on
The Washington Post boards: "Seriously, I'm sitting here watching the [U.S.] basketball team destroy Spain when I could have been watching the first person in history beak the 9.7 second mark? NBC has been dropping the ball all week on what they have been showing. They think that just because we are in America, all we want to watch are Americans." (Glad to know I'm not the only one who is royally ticked off at
NBC's nationalistic broadcasting and its
failure to join in the global spirit of the games.)
For example, did you know that the U.S. - thanks to
NBC's myopic coverage - was the only country that didn't watch
Beijing's opening ceremony live? And that's really the problem with where we are as a nation, isn't it?
If nothing else, we have
got to challenge the Telecommunications Act, which has led to nothing but media empires and controlled information - we can rag on China's state control of the media all we want, but what good is
our information when it's controlled, not by the state, but by corporations?
Apart from corporate-controlled media, somehow, we have subscribed to the long-standing imperialist view of the "West and the Rest," an ideology that the Bush-Cheney administration has managed to tweak in these early 21st-century years into an "Us vs. Them (the Terrorists)" mantra and has promoted to ensure that we will continue to view the world as some "scary others" whom our military (and the never-ending spending on our military budget, at the cost of our other institutions) will protect us from and whose presence must be halted by a well-built wall along our southern border. It's the same ideology that has blinded far too many Americans who would still question whether or not
Obama is the better candidate for the job in the White House (versus an aging, post-traumatic-stress-disorder-syndrome-suffering, ex-POW, pro-life rhetoric-spouting, stuck-in-the-bygone-era-of-the-Cold-War candidate who admits that he doesn't even know how to use a computer!).
What else has created such tunnel visions other than a worldview that has encouraged us as a nation to be suspicious of a man who, as Jon Stewart joked at this year's Oscars, "has a name that rhymes with
Osama" and who can be satirized by a "liberal" and "sophisticated" magazine like
The New Yorker as a turbaned Muslim terrorist in disguise, married to that long-standing figure of ridicule, the "angry black woman" (caricatured in everything from
VH1's New York to Tyler Perry's Medea)? Where else could such doubts flourish but in a nation that thinks, because the "
blackface" performance in
Tropic Thunder is combined with a critical race theory-based criticism within the script, it's all good and, subsequently, can be supported all the way to the top of the box office? And how do such doubts shape a myopic view, courtesy of our corporate-controlled media, of how the "rest" of the world works?
Fareed Zakaria, a journalist whom I've been watching since PBS's Foreign Exchange (yeah, I'm nerdy like that) well before he joined CNN, recently wrote the book, The Post-American World, and has been arguing that America has globalized the world but forgot to globalize itself. It's an intelligent look at the ways that China, India, and other major players jockeying for key positions on the 21st-century world stage have been opening themselves to free trade and capitalism - in essence, modernity - while integrating their own cultural perspectives. As he argues, the "Rest of the World" is less "anti-American" and more "post-American."
While I tend to disagree with
Zakaria's ideology at times (he is pro-globalization and, like so many others writing on the subject of globalization, overlooks the gendered implications of the global economy - ignoring, as we often do, that it is on the bodies of women throughout the world that allowed for globalization to flourish, courtesy of our "feminized labor made cheap," to quote Cynthia
Enloe, or that it is our traditional labor that got displaced and replaced with corporations, hence contributing to the global
feminization of poverty, which impacts the rest of us in the long run), what is valuable about his critique is his reminder to those of us in the privileged U.S. of A. that there is a "
Rise of the Rest" that we don't pay attention to because our media emphasize America at the center of the world with nary a thought about what occurs beyond our borders.
At the same time, I'm skeptical that Americans en
masse are woefully ignorant in this way (for instance, I'm sure that the poor and struggling within our borders are made all too aware of the realities of the rest of the world, since signs of the world's presence - immigrants, undocumented workers, jobs relocated overseas, etc. - exist within their own neighborhoods). I'm sure the middle-class immigrant class to which
Zakaria belongs contrasts sharply with, say, a working poor immigrant's experience, the kind of experience that
Sri-
Lanka-born and U.K.-raised hip-hop artist M.I.A., who has lived in the
Flatbush section of Brooklyn until she encountered visa problems for rapping about suicide-bombing and the PLO, has highlighted in her music .
Hmmm, there goes a potential pairing that I could teach:
Zakaria's Post-American World and M.I.A.'s latest album,
Kala.
So, apart from a corporate-controlled media and an "Us vs. Them" foreign policy that has committed us to perpetual warfare and an anti-immigration discourse are the familiar class divides that shape our worldviews. It's always been made clear to me, for instance, what the
socioeconomic backgrounds of my students are, depending on how they respond to the materials that I teach. More often than not, I often teach a multiracial and multinational classroom (when my Women's Studies courses are
crosslisted with other departments), and the conversations showcase a class of new students who have a sophisticated worldview (and trust me when I tell you all that it is
this generation that has the power to put
Obama in the White House). When I teach a stand-alone Women's Studies class, the privilege is noticeable right away: often privileged white female students dominate such classrooms (and subjected me to those questionable comments I endured this past summer), and from this group of
young'uns, one can see how they have uncritically accepted certain worldviews, promoted by our corporate-controlled media, and I can't help but think how this passivity is both gendered and class-based (does privilege make it harder to be critical of a system from which one has
benefited?).
I'm not being accusatory of my fellow Americans. Far from it! If there is anything I've learned from teaching my online women and media course this summer, it's that education is the best medicine for many of our race, class, gender, and national ills. At first, I recoiled and cringed when my mostly white female students uttered the most ignorant remarks about "other" women: be they black, Asian, Arab, Latina, etc. Finally, my students and I came to full understanding and openness. It took a few of them (maybe the safety of the computer screen helped them to be honest?) to finally admit that they "knew nothing" about other women or that they "felt racist" just talking about race and differences between women. Finally the magic that is needed in order for a professor to rise to her task unfolded: they
collectively pleaded to me: "I know nothing. Will you please teach me so that I can know something?"
They humbled themselves to acknowledge their lack of knowledge, and I humbled myself into not taking their offensive remarks personally. They asked me to teach them, and I did. I remember the most comprehensive online lecture I offered them took me a full weekend (in which I canceled dates and get-
togethers) to put it together. If they wanted to learn something about the world and why women have been undercut in the global process (and how media contributed to this), I was going to let them know all that I could teach them on the subject so that they would rethink the world (and their place within it).
At the end of the course, my students wrote glowing evaluations, and many said my class was the first Women's Studies class they took in which they studied "a diverse group of women," how it was the only class that "wasn't about me."
I may have been very critical about
Obama's world tour, without recognizing the larger global context in which he wanted his fellow Americans to understand and consider. At the time, I thought he was grandstanding and played into the images the Republicans were creating of him as "arrogant" and "
presumptuous." At the time, I thought, "America doesn't give a crap about what the world thinks, and the world doesn't vote, so why are you over there?"
I'm now thinking that he was offering us an important vision of what it would mean for America to finally globalize itself, rather than "globalize the Rest." Perhaps NBC could learn this lesson too as they continue their myopic coverage of the Olympics. Maybe they too will arrive at that point where my students did and recognize
it's not always about us.
What is so funny about this spectacle? Really? And, already, 
