AdderXYU wrote:
Besides the fact that there are much wider issues other than lack of food that keep people in places like Africa hungry, making your donation less assured of helping anyone but the corruption keeping people down in the first place, there certainly is nothing wrong with where you send your money. But it is arguably ignorant and racist to have people automatically think of Africa as the be all and end all of poverty.
...Needing help and hope and nourishment is something wide-reaching. Plenty of people were able to evoke this without reaching in and pulling out any racial or cultural content, and make it truly universal. I think it's incredibly tacky to make it into a "all I know about poverty is those black people with the ribs showing" thing. And to me, that's what this is all representing... a lack of understanding of the bigger picture. And while there is a bigger picture than just what is happening at home, ignoring at home makes you just as blind to what's really going on.
While I don't always agree with your judgment of individual designs, Adder, your analysis of this derby as a whole is spot-on.
I haven't voted for any of the shirts in this derby, and won't. They seem to fall into 3 main camps, with a little bit of overlap between them:
- Happy multicultural kiddies - world hunger is a serious problem, but the reasons for the problem in different places and for different cultures are not all the same; these shirts seem to me to obscure the fact that hunger is a problem, and a problem that is not the same for everyone everywhere.
- Abstract designs or animals/cute things+food designs - seem to be beside the point; world hunger is a problem for people (I know that abstract designs were encouraged by woot this week in the derby rules, but I think that's a problem in and of itself).
- Starving children in Africa - Yes, hunger is a problem in Africa. No, we shouldn't ignore that. But does our vision of hunger always have to be starving, dirty brown children? If that's our vision, why is that our vision, instead of skinny white middleaged guys in line at the local soup kitchen, or moms rotating the days they eat so that their kids can get fed? Why is it viewed as "ok," or even laudable, to have that image of hunger be the first one people think of, without even realizing it, much less realizing or caring about the implications of it?
In this design--and in many others which feature a map or globe--the Americas are literally pushed off to the side or cut off. I understand that on this shirt in particular, that's partially a map projection problem, but that design choice also has sociopolitical implications, as do many other design choices--the robot shirt in the fog, for instance shows a clean silvery-white adult robot 'feeding' dirty brown children robots. Just because a design has sociopolitical implications that you didn't consciously mean when you designed it doesn't mean those implications are not there.
Maybe those implications weren't quite what you were going for, and maybe you didn't realize you were putting them in--but those implications are totally what you actually got, whether you realized it or not.
