The Damaging Portrayal of Developing Countries
Novelist Chimamanda Adichie delivering her talk at TEDGlobal 2009 (TED).
By Mitchell Simoes
Senegal Erupts in Protests, With a Rape Charge Only the Spark; Nigeria’s Boarding Schools Have Become a Breeding Ground for Kidnappers; Gunfire at Mogadishu Protest Intensifies Somali Election Impasse. These are just a few of the many tragic headlines pulled from The New York Times website when searching for news in Africa. These are not the exceptions; these headlines are typical in the media when concerning places like Africa – monolithic portrayals that form a singular damaging narrative. For countries like Mexico, Haiti, India, and even Africa (yes, a continent, yet often misidentified as a country), U.S. media depictions are very skewed and even misrepresentative, reducing the countries and its people to their state of need while shunning the breadth of culture, diversity, and identity in these places. We are fed an incomplete narrative about the world around us, and thus fail to see them as our equals, but rather as a people to be pitied and saved.
Growing up in Miami, a cosmopolitan of misrepresented cultures, I have seen firsthand how wrong and incomplete the media coverage of these places is. I often saw stories of the violence, corruption, social inequities, and countless injustices that go on in countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia. But growing up around the people, hearing their stories and experiencing their culture, news articles were never my sole exposure to these places. It is because of this that I know there is so much more to Cuba or Venezuela or countless other Hispanic countries than just corruption and poverty and suffering. Of course, all these issues are very real and need to be talked about, but the problem arises when it is the sole interest. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie put it in her 2009 TED talk, “… to insist on only these negative stories, is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me.” I have fallen victim to this very same error countless times, believing the media stories about India, Iraq, Jamaica, and many others to be holistic representations of the country and its people. This is not done consciously, however when we are given but a single lens through which to view a thing, it becomes difficult to see it as anything but.
What happens when we begin to view places, and in turn entire peoples, from such a narrow point of view is that we start to see them as an “Other.” We believe that this Other is nothing like ourselves, so much so that the Other is fundamentally different and implicitly less capable than we are. Speaking to this, Andy Baker describes in a 2015 Washington Post article how “the recurring helpless-victim storyline dehumanizes foreign blacks by downplaying their ability to exercise agency.”
There is a need for a balanced narrative when it comes to talking about these places. There are too many headlines and stories about their struggles in and far too few about their complexities, resilience, and culture. This is how we begin to mitigate the damaging singular narrative surrounding developing countries, by having coverage of not just the tragedies (which are important in their own right) but also that of the success stories, of overcoming the odds, of expression of culture, and displays of their humanity. Of course, this is easier said than done – especially with an uncooperating news media system that focuses on generating profits with the most attention-grabbing, catastrophic headlines it can muster. There needs to be a certain willingness among news media to achieve such a balanced narrative, which will likely require some incentive other than money. It is then that we will begin to view these countries as equals – not as pity-worthy stories of disaster, not places that need to be saved, not hopeless peoples to which we cannot relate, but as places and people that bring us together through our humanity and that are raised up by their own laurels.
