Two days. That’s how long it took to raise $1 billion after the destruction of Notre Dame. Five days. That’s how long it took to raise less than half of that for the 60 historic buildings in Lebanon at risk of imminent collapse following last October’s explosion in Beirut, including famed edifices like Sursock Palace which holds Middle Eastern art and religious artifacts. Similarly, the tragic wildfires that swept across Australia dominated Western media and garnered immediate celebrity attention. Everyone from Kylie Jenner to Chris Hemsworth pledged money and urged their tens of millions of followers to do their part. Just a few months after, the floods that swept across East Africa –– displacing around 1.5 million people and killing hundreds –– barely made a headline.
The pattern is clear. Time and again, the disparate attention paid to tragedies in the Global North and Global South reveal underlying inequities.
To be clear, I do not aim to invalidate the tragedies of Notre Dame or Australia by highlighting these discrepancies. Notre Dame is a cultural staple and a site of immense religious importance to Christians across France, Europe and beyond. Likewise, the Australian wildfires caused immense ecological damage, led to the death or harm of billions of wildlife, resulted in the displacement of tens of thousands of residents, and served as a poignant example of the necessity of comprehensive climate policy reform. However, we must also acknowledge the stark disparities between the cases of France and Australia and those of Lebanon and East Africa.
So why is there such a troubling disparity? An easy explanation for this phenomenon would be that the Global North — comprised of the world’s wealthiest and most “advanced” democracies — simply does not care about those suffering in the Global South. Historically, this answer might have some validity: see Winston Churchill’s refusal to allocate proper resources to India during the Bengal Famine or the Clinton administration concealing information about the atrocities of the Rwandan Genocide in order to justify America’s nonintervention. Yet, in the 21st century, this answer seems overly simplistic and untrue. In the new “progressive” era of Western politics, blatant apathy toward the Global South is not politically acceptable. Rather, upon deeper analysis, I find that the root of the issue is twofold: First, there is a pervasive undervaluing of non-Western culture; Second, the Western world has generally desensitized itself towards trauma in the Global South.
The devaluation of non-Western culture is not new. Indeed, it was the ideological bedrock of slavery, land theft and imperialism. The Western world viewed its civilization as superior to those it attempted to conquer. Poems like Englishman Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” and France’s political praxis of “la mission civilisatrice” evidence the ubiquity of this ideology.
With the end of imperialism, at least in its traditional sense, overt white supremacy exited the mainstream by the end of the 20th century, but its impact is still felt. There seem to be vestigial thoughts that Western culture is the pinnacle of human achievement, while non-Western culture is a relic of a bygone era. Even in our post-imperialist setting, this sort of thinking leads to the belief that the damage of a 500-year-old church in France is infinitely more tragic and urgent than the loss of a 1000-year-old mosque or records of indigenous religious practices in the Middle East. Both are devastating, and both cultures have something to offer the world. Yet often only one story is told.
While this subconscious Western superiority complex helps explain the relative lack of outrage when The Great Mosque of Aleppo was destroyed, it does not address the lack of media coverage or government action vis-à-vis human-centered catastrophes. The reason for this disparity is less tangible than the centuries of cultural ideology discussed prior. Rather, I argue that on a psychological level, those in the Global North have been conditioned to expect disaster throughout the rest of the world. Just as many Americans have become desensitized to gun violence, so too has the West been desensitized to tragedy in the Global South. While news from the Global South is underreported, when it is covered by Western media, the narrative is nearly always negative: snapshots of starving children and war-battered refugees. Since images of suffering are the only ones associated with the Global South in the collective Western psyche, far too many believe and accept that death and destruction is an expected, even natural, part of life there.
There is a cruel irony to this phenomenon. In denying sufficient attention to the many issues facing the Global South, the Global North ignores its role in manufacturing them. When examining natural disasters such as flooding and drought caused by anthropogenic climate, for example, the irony lies in that while the Global South contributes the least to climate change, it is affected more harshly than any of the Western nations that have historically done the most to harm the environment.
These same nations fail to act when nations in Africa experience climate trauma. The California and Australia fires were met with public outcry and politicians’ promises to do better, but similar climate catastrophes in the Global South received no such response neither from the powerful nor the public. In truth, we, as citizens of the Global North, have power. If not the ability to stop corporate pollution ourselves, we have the ability to at least pressure our governments to change. Yet, somehow, we have been lulled into a belief that tragedy in the Global South is inevitable and thus do nothing to fix it.
So, what is the solution? The process of learning and unlearning should be at the forefront. Citizens across the Global North must unlearn implicit biases and assumptions that prize Western culture as the zenith of the human experience. From a young age, children should be exposed to the wonderful diversity of human culture and be taught that difference does not mean inferiority. Far too often, in history, geography, and social studies classrooms across the West, children learn that non-Western cultures were backward and underdeveloped prior to European contact. There should, of course, be a celebration of Western advances, but also an equal appreciation of the artistic, cultural, and technological innovation of peoples from across the Global South. While push-back to a structural overhaul of education systems is inevitable –– the whirlwind of backlash to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, which reframes American history through the lens of slavery, is evidence of that. However, petitioning school boards, superintendents and administrators to rethink the way we talk about the many cultures of the Global South is necessary work. This may seem daunting, but current trends give me hope.
The more challenging goal is to reorient the North’s view of the Global South in general. We must consciously ensure that we don’t assume and accept the worst when considering the Global South. The perception of the Global South as a monolithic entity where tragedy is bound to strike at any moment is incredibly damaging and obfuscates the fact that billions of lives are impacted.
When disaster does strike, Western media –– from student publications to international news conglomerates –– should cease to paint these tragic stories with broad strokes and instead look beyond basic statistics. Loved ones were lost, children will never have the chance to grow up, fiancés will never have their wedding days. We should be in the business of humanizing the Global South, not treating it as some downtrodden “other.”
Like all matters of international solidarity and development, this issue is complicated –– rife with centuries of complex and often painful history. I do not purport to have all the answers, but I do hope that, in beginning to unpack the web of underlying biases that result in stark disparities between the Global North and South, an important conversation is sparked about our own cultural perceptions.
