Visibility

So, today I started to think about visibility - who has it, and who doesn't. It really hit me when I bought the new book that I'm supposed to be reading for my 20th century fiction class, "Anil's Ghost" by Michael Ondaatje, the same person who wrote "The English Patient." In my class, we've read about eight or nine books, all from different parts of the world, all concerned with themes of feminism, identity, colonialism and postcolonialism, modernism and postmodernism, and the merging of cultures. I thought that we had hit all the bases until this book (it takes place in Sri Lanka), which got me thinking about how we had not read anything from India.

It is interesting, how both India and China together have a quarter of the world's populations yet we rarely see anything regarding those countries unless natural disaster strikes (the Tsunami of 2005) or self-interest (the Olympics this year). We rarely see Indian people on TV or the radio or in movies, and the ones we do see are from England. We rarely see Asian people of ANY ethnic background or denomination, and the ones we do see are stereotyped. It really makes one think about the value we put on white culture, and how Anglocised our American viewpoint is. Soon, a quarter of the population will be Latino, a great chunk of it is already Asian in California, and a huge fraction is black in the southeast.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with white culture, but I definitely feel like the scales are unequally balanced when it comes to visibility. Don't even get me started on queer people, or on people who fit into both categories. Even on a caste level we can say that the scales are unfairly tipped - think about how many reality shows are devoted to rich people (The Hills) and how many are devoted to people who struggle and could actually benefit from visibility?

Its pretty gross.