Thu 22 May 2008
References on National Public Radio to the section of Baghdad known as Sadr City seldom fail to mention that it is a “Shia slum.” They don’t call it an impoverished neighborhood or its residents a disadvantaged minority. Rather, they employ a slur–they did it again repeatedly this week–and a particularly disparaging one at that.
To call it a slum is to imply that the people who live there are inferior to those of us who don’t live in such places. In our country, we have low-rent districts to house the unemployed and underemployed. The housing tends to be run-down and poorly maintained and, when conditions in a tenement or neighborhood are bad enough, you might hear it called it a slum. Twenty-first century conventional wisdom holds that people who are down-and-out are responsible for their own misfortunes. Accordingly, we don’t grieve much for residents of our slums, who can escape if they want to, we believe.
Sadr City is another thing altogether. The residents have been systematically relegated to squalid neighborhoods–typically without sanitation or public facilities–because they belong to a religious sect that is linked in many Arab minds to Persian culture. Iraqis who belong to this branch of Islam, which tends to be stricter and less secular, are deemed by their neighbors to be inferior, primitive, not true Arabs.
Things were tough when it was the Sunni government of Saddam Hussein that kept the Shia masses confined within the invisible barriers of what was known then as Saddam City. Things are even worse now, as our heavily armed occupation forces literally wall the people in with concrete and barbed wire.
Why do the editors at NPR News insist on referring to this section of Baghdad as a slum? Are they trying to tell us something about the residents? Do they want us to believe that the people who live in Sadr City–and there are over two million of them–are unworthy in some way? That they’re so far inferior to us that we needn’t worry about them any more than we would about rats in a sewer? Does NPR remind us that their neighborhood is a slum so that we can kill them without remorse? If so, it’s not working.
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Steve-
Seems like you do care about language and the ideas it perpetuates- maybe you shouldn’t title your posts things like “Cracker Glossary” (a couple weeks ago). I got your point about racism and the coverage of the Obama/Clinton race, but ‘cracker’?
That just perpetuates the stereotype that poor white “backward” people from the south are responsible for racism. We New Englanders love that idea, don’t we?
May 24th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
It’s an insulting term, for sure, but maybe not as insulting as the pitch Clinton was aiming at West Virginia and Kentucky voters. I was hoping they’d prove both of us wrong. They didn’t.