May 31st, 2018
Written By - Simran Surtani '19
April 14th, 2014. 276 girls were kidnapped. And how many of us actually knew that such an incident happened on the other side of the world? Two hundred and seventy six. And the public was too concerned with getting to know Zac Efron’s new girlfriend, Halston Sage.
This wasn’t the last time.
February 19th, 2018. 110 girls were kidnapped. And the media chose to focus on the fact that Justin Bieber accompanied Selena Gomez to church after their trip to Jamaica. One hundred and ten.
Boko Haram, the terrorist group that kidnapped the girls in Nigeria, sparked nothing but hashtags. #Bringbackourgirls right? That is our strategy to defeat this quasi-terrorist group, right? And the most we can do is put them on the UN sanction list?
How could we let something like this happen? Not once, but twice. How is it possible that the terrorist group that kidnapped the girls has existed longer than ISIS, yet there have been no responses by the rest of the world to defeat the threat?
Why can’t we care about non-white countries as much as we do about countries where the majority of people are white? Are they inferior to us or are they just not worth our attention? How could we just let the Nigerian government sit by and do nothing? And even let the Nigerian government go as far as to not even acknowledge the kidnapping and loss of hundreds of girls from society until almost one week after the incident? Is this how we are going to deal with the misfortune of our fellow human beings?
I don’t know the answers to most of these questions, and I know that if I ever find them, my faith in humanity will diminish. I’d consider myself a relatively informed person who tries to stay aware of the world’s current events. Yet, I didn’t even come across this kidnapping until I literally dug an article about it from the bottom of the news column for a current event in my history class. It makes me wonder if it was just my own ignorance or the media that filtered this information from getting to me.
Sometimes I think that if this happened in a European country, it would be discussed more in the community and in the world. For days, the Paris bombing was on the news. The attack in Brussels. The deaths in Nice. All of these incidents were in the media spotlight for weeks. And, don’t get me wrong, these were extremely tragic and I think that it is important that we stay informed about what happened, but what about events that happened in predominantly non-white countries? Why is the news about European countries so disproportionate compared to non-white countries? Why do I feel so uninformed about my world? Why do I feel like I’m losing control over what I can and want to stay informed about?
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