And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You

I really liked this poem. To me it was very powerful, to read the words of a woman addressing the issue of development and how it's viewed by US white women. It also reminded me a lot of the various accounts I've read in my politics classes.

The poem talks about how we see the parts of the world that we want to see, the pretty parts, the easy parts. But they also aren't the real parts. In one of my other textbooks, it was criticizing an ad that was for fair trade cotton. In the ad, there was a young hispanic looking woman "Maria" with even white teeth and a nice smile, her hair combed neatly and dressed in pretty clothes. But in reality, the women who pick cotton aren't smiling about it, they aren't beautiful as far as our public standards would call beauty. Their lives are hard and their bodies are abused.

Another criticism of US trade policy had to do with some piece of legislation that sought to end child labor in sweatshops. It said that the US could not import cloth (I think) that had been made by children. Unfortunately, all this legislation did was remove the legal restrictions on sweatshops. Children still worked there but now without any legal rights, because they were illegal.

When we try to impose our standards on other people from essentially different worlds, we tend to push them further away, further down. What's more, is that when we do choose to look at them, we only look at the parts that make us feel better about ourselves.