Recently I attended a lecture by photographer Fazal Sheikh, a MacArthur "Genius" grant recipient, during the opening of his exhibition "Blessed Daughters." Mr. Sheikh began by showing the audience photographs of Sudanese refugees in Kenya. He went through a dozen or so pictures of gatherings of refugees posing for his camera, while reciting each subject's name. He said he found it striking that the people he photographed there chose to represent themselves to the camera in a direct, unpretentious manner. Mr. Sheikh contrasted this authenticity to how he, say, would represent himself, a Princeton graduate and rising star in photography, in a photograph. What is different about Mr. Sheikh and the Sudanese refugees he photographed? In the pictures he was taking, Mr. Sheikh was concerned about the composition of the photograph, the lighting, and the like. Mr. Sheikh has enjoyed privileges that his subjects most likely could not fathom.
I often hear people deriding others' affects, pretensions and other ways of presenting oneself, who yearn for a life more "real" than their privileged Ivy League existence. This is idiotic. Acknowledging the privileges that have been bestowed on us by the circumstances of our birth is humbling. Denigrating "affects" and the "mediated nature of our being-in-the-world" is myopic and self-aggrandizing. When things aren't going well, whining about authenticity and mediation is an easy way to make one's immediate concerns seem less important. But at the end of the day, each of us still has to care about something.
The Sudanese refugees seemed direct and unpretentious because their immediate needs were pretty straightforward. It's hard to care about how your hair looks or how tight your pants are when you have dysentery and nothing to eat. This isn't a profound indictment of life in the developed world. Clean water comes out of my faucet and I scavenge for food in the Ratty. As a consequence, my days are free to be filled with other concerns. These concerns are necessarily going to seem less immediate when compared to the concerns facing these Sudanese refugees. This is not to say, however, that they are unimportant. It just means that they are less essential to my physical being. This relationship goes all the way up Maslow's hierarchy: the closer to the bottom of the pyramid you are, the more immediate the needs. People who have their immediate physical needs met still care about things. This is why I think it is silly to chastise people for being pretentious and affected.
All of this is to say that our concerns are determined by our privileges. I am concerned by the disappearance of hot ham from the Ratty because I have had the privilege to be a Brown student. I am concerned about the University of North Carolina basketball team's dismal showing in the NIT final because I have had the privilege of being a North Carolinian. All of us have the privilege of caring about our classes, Brown Dining Services' union, Snoop Dogg and looking fly. We shouldn't denigrate this privilege and those who will not have the opportunity to share in it by whining about it and being lazy and self-centered.
I am sure everyone here worked hard in high school and scored well on the SAT, but that individual effort pales in comparison to the work that being born smart in America has done for us, which we each had absolutely nothing to do with.
Using beautiful photographs of Sudanese refugees to inspire us to consider the privilege wrapped up in each of our concerns is a noble project. Hackneyed commentaries on the hardships of life in the third world are not. I believe that the former will result in more being done for Sudanese refugees than simply trying to make us feel guilty about worrying about what to wear to Fish Co when children are starving all around the world. Guilt implies wrongdoing. None of us have really "done" anything yet, because none of us have had the capacity to do anything yet. But we will.
We have all been given the privilege of being able to be concerned about other people's privileges, if we so choose. It would be a disgrace to ourselves, to the opportunities we have been given and to the concerns of the rest of the world if we never go beyond the set of arbitrary concerns derived from the equally arbitrary status in the world we have inherited.
Brian Judge ‘11 is a philosophy and political science concentrator from Chapel Hill, N.C.
