Unseeing as a tool of oppression - Minority Africa
minorityafrica.co
November 17, 2019
Even as a publication, we too have been struck by the reinvented millennial practice of unseeing. At its rudiments referring to an instance in which someone so badly wants to forget and/or to deny a reality they have already experienced.
Unseeing howbeit useful and contextual in instances of trauma has taken a new meaning on Twitter threads and it is simply denying the existence of an occurrence that is retrograde to your belief, in hope that stripping an event or a person of being in that moment would mean that they never were or that it never happened.
We believe everyone needs to have the ability to unsee, it is what keeps us sane in this otherwise crazy world but we are also aware of the likelihood of unseeing to metamorphose into a technique of oppression used to blot out minority persons and communities from the grand space of conversation.
To unsee is deeper than just unlooking, while the latter functions on a premise of acknowledgment, unseeing, however, requires that you not only look away but that you forget.
And how tempting the prospect to forget a group that has been an object of collective discrimination, how easy it is to look away, to unsee a person and strip them of continuity.
This tool has made it easy for trans women in Uganda to be forgotten, to be excluded from the halls of policymaking, for persons living with albinism to be seen only for their body parts, and for refugees to be perceived only as predators on the economy or not to be looked at at all.
Unseeing doesn’t deny the existence of a thing, it, nonetheless, aims to forget it, to keep it out of memory. And we know from history that exemption is in itself oppression.
With Minority Africa, we want to make it harder for you to look away from African minority communities and persons, we are creating a digital publication that is designed solely to cater to the demographic that is not the majority. Through an approach that is data-driven, we bring you multimedia solutions content focusing on these groups on our digital platforms.
And we do not just stop there, we take this to your communities, to your schools and to your spaces of comfort. Not anymore will you unsee us, not anymore will you look away, for it is indeed impossible to exempt us when we become the gatekeepers.
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