Awareness of Racism

A few days ago I was watching Sex in the City with my black roommate Sibulele. That she is black is significant in this context because in the episode we were watching the mother in law of one of the main characters made a racist comment that cracked her up, but I didn’t even notice that it was made. First I was shocked that in such a popular series like Sex in the City racist jokes where made so openly. And then I was even more shocked that I didn’t notice it. I always considered myself to be a very sensitive person and I thought I would be someone who is “aware of things” and who is critical but the racism in Sex in the City just past me. It made me wonder how much more I miss out. I guess I didn’t notice the racism because it didn’t regard me whereas for Sibu racism against black people is probably more of an issue she deals with in her life. If the character made a comment about Germans being Nazis or so I probably would have given it more attention. But does this mean you have to be pre-sensitised to things to notice them?

This issue reminds me of the language-thought-reality-problem, even though it’s farfetched - I know. But according to Whorf our language shapes our perception of reality and we are only able to see what we can name. Maybe my example indirectly proves that we need to be aware of things in the first place before we can be sensitive for them and this awareness might be influenced by our ability to name things.

Time can run!

A few days ago people in Germany changed the time. They all collectively set their watches and clocks an hour earlier to “wintertime”. Because in winter the days are shorter and the sun rises later and sets earlier, people get up an hour later now in comparison to summertime, so it is lighter outside and easier to wake up. But it is mainly done to save energy. Now the time difference between Germany and India is 4,5 hours and not 3,5 hours. When I told this my Indian roommate she couldn’t believe it. “You change the time? Just like that?” Yes, that’s what we do. I looked it up on Wikipedia (on the 10^th November 2009, “Sommerzeit”) The first time it was done in Germany during the First World War from 1916 to 1918. And again during the Second World War. After the war, there was some time confusion in Germany, because the time was set differently by the different occupying powers. According to Wikipedia the Germans changed their time regulations quite often until now. When I looked it up, that seemed even strange to me. The concept of time seems to be something one can play with. It’s just an agreement.

And also the perception of time is very subjective. Here in MUWCI for example time seems to go faster than it does back home. I can’t believe that in less in a month I am flying home for Christmas. There are only 3 weekends left. (I tend to think in weekends in MUWCI.) Here you are so busy and so many things happen at the same time and you can never do everything, that it seems you constantly run out of time and hence it feels time in MUWCI goes faster. But for example when in a biology experiment a beetroot as to be in a hot water bath for 20 minutes and you have nothing else to do than staring at the beetroot then even 30 seconds can seem to be the eternity.

For me this makes it hard to deal with time. It is something that seems to exist, but our measurements for it seem rather strange. Just because in Germany everybody sets the watches an hour earlier people in Germany don’t get an hour younger. (I can imagine a novel, in which someone is born in wintertime and then throughout his entire life makes strange experiences because (s)he arrives everywhere “an hour too early”…). Our body is probably the best proof for that something like a concept of time exist since our body clearly changes and we get older. Time seems to get visual with our body. But also this is not a reliable idea, since there are many cases in which the visual impression we get of someone’s age does not fit our actual measurement of time. People look older than they are supposed to be and people look younger. And the time limit to a human life is different to the time limit of a dog’s or tortoise’s life. Their body changes take place at a different pace. I remember in order to calculate a “dog’s real age” I would say, that one year in a dog’s life is around seven years in a human’s life. Environmental changes could also be used to physically experience time. The observation of seasonal changes and their repetition were probably the human’s starting point for measuring time. And even animals seem to have this perception of time as birds for example always fly around the same time during winter to a warmer place to survive. Nevertheless animals seem not to have the same consciousness about their past and their future. Humans are aware of the fact that they have a past and a future and we are influenced a lot by these two perceptions. Our perception of our present and what we do is influenced consciously and unconsciously by our past experiences and our future plans. With the help of our memories we can experience time also in an immaterial way.

I think time, even though it seems to be a somewhat vague concept, plays a big role not only for the human organisation in communities but also for our notion of human identity. However, I am not sure if something like a fixed time concept actually exists outside our perception of objects and how they change.

What stays from studying?

I just noticed, that it seems that not much of the Latin and Ancient Greek, I once studied, is left. And I was good in Latin and Ancient Greek but already after 1 year of not studying it, almost everything has found its way out of my mind. It seems far easier to forget things than to learn them. And that frustrates me. I am willing to put a lot of effort into studying for school, but when the knowledge I gain from it just does not stay, it is pretty depressing. It seems to be a good argument for less studying and more experiencing. Even though I can forget experiences as well, the change they may do to my personality stays. For example the knowledge about what drugs do to my neurotransmitters is not an insight that seems to be of great significance for my personal development. To take the drugs may reveal in the end an insight that make me learn more about myself. I know that is a bad example, because taking drugs is not an experience that is particularly good for my personality development. (I just had to learn all the impacts of various drugs on the body for a Bio test.) That the human being does learn from physical experiences seems to be supported by the IB-programme, since in order to get our diploma we all have to do a Creation and an Action and a Campus Service and a Community Interaction, in which we more or less exclusively learn from what we experience and learn rather less from exhausting ourselves mentally. When I look at myself, it seems, the things I studied in school were only in very few cases important in themselves for my personality. All the things that are involved in the process of studying in school such as having the feeling of success when you finally managed to understand a very complicated Math concept or to help other students to understand Math or working in a group or going successfully through the stress situation of giving a test or holding a presentation, these are certainly things that are very important for a personality development but they again seem rather to be experiences. Philosophy may be an exception, since the philosophical concepts I studied did something to my worldviews and hence my personality. Maybe the knowledge about drugs and neurotransmitters also does something to my worldview and I am just not able to see that right now, but when I forget it again, it anyway didn’t develop my personality, did it? Experiences can alter my personality even, when I forget them again, since experiences may have an effect on my unconsciousness and hence can effect my feelings and actions, which define my personality.

But probably that’s after all a wrong approach to knowledge in itself. Knowledge shouldn’t be judged or valued dependent on its significance to my personality. So I guess, there is some value to me studying Latin, mathematical concepts and neurotransmitters.

Cultural Identity

In MUWCI people from very different cultures meet, or rather could meet. I have the feeling, that in most of the cases people make friends with people with whom they share a certain cultural background. At the very beginning, I can at least say for myself, when I didn’t feel comfortable at all to communicate in English, I spent a lot of time with people, who spoke my language. It took me longer to get to know people with whom I only could communicate in English. And when I look at my relationships with people from various cultures, I have the feeling the degree to which I feel understood by them or to which I have the feeling they really know me differs. Is it possible that someone, who has no clue how my life was before I came to MUWCI, really knows me or understands me? I think, I only realized here in MUWCI, in this international environment, how much ones personality and attitudes are formed by one’s culture. Even though I am not Christian, I nevertheless grew up in a Christian society, which follows Christian moral values. Such moral values may differ from someone, who grew up in a Muslim or Hindu shaped culture. The political systems we grew up influence our attitudes towards politics. But also more trivial things like taste of music or popular TV shows are things that connect me to my “country mates” here in MUWCI and somewhat disconnect me from the people, who have no idea, what I mean when I talk about the TV show “Spürnasen”, which I used to watch when I was young. It is harder to convey how my old life was to people, who are not from Germany or not even from Europe or any other “western culture”. When I tell that I am from a big German city called Hamburg, then my German country mates can imagine how my life back home looked like. European people maybe as well, but in the imagination of most of the Asian people, Hamburg is not even a big city. They cannot imagine what it means to live in a city in Germany and what the growing up in a city like Hamburg might mean for my personality and also how this old life in the city influences my views now on a city like Pune or what it means for me now to live on this hill in an Indian rural area. I think people who don’t share a certain cultural background with each other are able to get to know each other, since you exchange your attitudes and experiences with the other people here, but they might never be able to actually understand you. Last year for example I would often only go to my German 2^nd years, when I was homesick. I had the feeling they understood me, we missed the same things: the German bread, the German autumn... We had the same cultural identity. But how important is it for a friendship to know someone’s cultural identity? Is it necessary to understand someone or is it enough to know someone? In order to like someone it seems definitely to be enough to know someone without understanding why he or she has certain attitudes or behaves in such and such a way, since in the end I became really close to people here in MUWCI who are not even European. And I am very happy about that, since these relationships are unique ways to get to know different perspectives. But I still have the feeling, that there is this gap that stays. Just the fact that I don’t understand my friends’ native languages is a barrier. I will never know how they express themselves in their native language and I know from myself, that I talk quite differently in German than I do in English and this also after now talking English for a year. I will never be able to “reveal my hidden thoughts” – to come back to my last post – to my non-German speaking friends in the same way as I can to German speakers. This links now to the question, how language, thought and identity are connected and it seems that these three influence each other more than I expected it at the beginning of last year.

Hidden Thoughts

Today someone told me, that one has to be very careful with making jokes or sarcastic comments in front of me. I would always fire back and tend to judge people according to their jokes and comments. I thought about it. And I am not sure, if that person, was right about that observation about me, but actually I think the jokes and comments someone makes, tell a lot about someone’s personality. A joke or a sarcastic comment is usually a very spontaneous action. You cannot “plan” a comment; you don’t think about it, you just say what comes to your mind. All day long we can control ourselves and the things we say. We can deliberately form how other perceive us. But when you make a spontaneous joke or comment you are just you without your controlled mask. Jokes reveal the real thoughts of a person. What also means, when I am able to laugh about someone else’s jokes, we probably share a certain mind set. I know of many people, including myself, who value a lot to share the same type of humour with a person in order to have a good friendship or relationship. This seems to support my thesis. So I think in order to get to know someone you have to listen very carefully to his or her spontaneous jokes and comments.

Beginning and Ending of Tolerance

To live in such a diverse community as we do demands from us to be very tolerant. But at the beginning of the year my tolerance got challenged, when students declared to be extremely homophobic. Can we tolerate people, who are homophobic? Should we tolerate them? Should we tolerate intolerance?And what is needed to be tolerant? I don’t think in order to be tolerant I have to like everyone. There are many people on campus I tolerate but still prefer not to spend my time with. Indeed there are people I avoid. Am I intolerant towards them? I think I am not. Since I still let them be how they are and let them do what they do. I don’t try to change them. This was completely different, when I was confronted with the homophobic people. I couldn’t accept their viewpoints and their behaviour. And I started wondering, how such people could be admitted by UWC. Even though I wished I could change them, I was not able to and throughout the conversation I started getting the feeling that I am not in the position to say that my stand was the better one and I had the right to judge them. Our backgrounds are so different and compared to their traditions these people are already extremely open. Is this something we should consider at a UWC? Should we judge people’s openness according to their backgrounds or according to western standards, since the UWC movement was initially a western one? When we look at our community agreement, one has to admit, that we are clearly a community that is shaped by western values and we just try to respect for example Indian traditions as far as it does not infringe too much on our western liberty. I think we keep forgetting that we actually life in India and we choose do to so. We are guests in this country and demand to live according to our own rules. Back home, I would consider people who behave like that as extremely impolite and our image in the valley is indeed quite questionable. It is quite possible that on this campus the culture shock is bigger for an Indian in his own country than for me from Germany. This seems rather odd. But of cause, after all I am not willing to give up the freedoms I have either. But maybe I should try to show more understanding for the other members of the community who struggle with these western freedoms and maybe these include the homophobic students I met. But after all should we be satisfied with tolerating each other? I think in order to have not only a functioning community but a good one, it is necessary that we all accept each other. But this is even harder to achieve. And you cannot force people to accept each other but you may be able to force people to tolerate each other. So should we force homophobic members of the community to tolerate homosexuals? To a certain extent we are already doing this but I am also forced to tolerate the homophobic students to a certain extent. I guess this is the secret of this diverse community, that we all demand from each other to tolerate us to a certain extent and hopefully we then meet somewhere in the middle and manage to live together.

MUWCI's community structure

MUWCI is a very special community. Every year half of the students exchange and 1^st years become 2^nd years. I felt a change in my “social role” in the community, when I came back to this campus in August. Especially when the 1^st years came, I realized that I am a 2^nd year now. And I developed the feeling that some students from my batch took over certain roles of my 3^rd years. And when I started thinking about this feeling I came to the conclusion that community structures do not change - at least their overall organisation.

When we were 1^st years our 2^nd years had certain roles for us. For example there was the group of people who would party every weekend. Others were the ones who would always talk in college meeting, student meetings or Global Affairs. There was “the artist” or “the joke-teller ” and many more such “roles”. How you name these roles does not matter and no role is better or more important than the other. But I think there are such roles and they are taken over by the 2^nd years of the next generation. Who will take them over depends on who meets who through out the year and this might only be decided by the fact, that you live in the same Wada or not. I think my 2^nd years probably influenced me more through out the year than I like to admit. How they treated me and what they told me about their opinions and experiences of the place had - I guess especially at the beginning when I was new and did not understand anything that was happening to me – a great impact on the opinions I have now and the experiences I made and how I will pass these on to the next 1^st years. When I talked about this with some MUWCI people and gave them examples of “who became who” according to my feeling, people often disagreed with me and said that these two persons were still very different and anyway our 2^nd years were too unique to be possible replaced by someone from our batch. But I think this might feel so for us, since our 2^nd years were the one, we “admired”, who would give us advice, but I think the 1^st years perceive again the same roles in certain persons as we did, since they cannot compare them with our “unique 2^nd years” and for them they are just by themselves now the “party-person” or the “joke-teller”. Some roles necessarily have to be taken over such as the roles of the CI-coordinators, but I think this “role-passing-on” is also happening in our social life.

This would mean, that the community structure of MUWCI does not change. There will always be “the trouble maker” and “the nerd” and “the caring person” and “the bitch” and “the gossip informer” to use very stereotype-like-names.

I think this is not only true for MUWCI. When I went two years ago to a summer camp such roles developed within two weeks! I hesitate to argue that all communities will always have the same set of rules, since different communities clearly develop under different conditions and hence different social rules might be needed and I hesitate even more to say that human beings will always take the same social role in a community. Since the latter would clearly link to Hosper and his determinisms and it seems rather unfair to build an argument on a dogma, but nonetheless, this idea is linked to questions of identity. When our identity is made up of the roles we play in life, the different masks we wear when we are a sister or a student or friend, then our identity is decided by the community we live in; the people we meet, who influence us to take over a certain role or not.

I actually hope someone can prove me wrong, because I personally do not like the idea that the fact that I lived in Wada 3 last year might have decided what defines my identity now at least in the MUWCI context.