On the Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax and Filtering Our Stories Through a White Lens

June 15th, 2011 by Latoya Peterson

I wonder how did Gay Girl in Damascus amass such a following, while other activists and bloggers did not? Probably for the same reason Peggy Seltzer’s memoir was a literary darling until they discovered it was fictional, and why a young white able-bodied male college grad could make headlines by explaining that poverty isn’t so bad after all. Writing from a white western perspective confirms a white western perspective. Or to put it more simply, like recognizes like. Clearly, people were able to find Syrian activists, writers, and bloggers to go on the record about this in the aftermath – where were their voices before?

This whole drama hearkens back to the enduring issue of diversity in media. Most people can see, visually, the lack of racial/ethnic diversity and a failure to incorporate women into the higher echelons of news and culture institutions. But the problem runs far deeper than that. Who do we consider an expert? Frustration is the only word that came to mind when the news coverage of the MENA region started and television networks could deliver me nothing that wasn’t filtered through a white man over the age of fifty (and in some cases, someone who may have directly contributed to the cause of the unrest). How can we adequately frame issues from around the globe without featuring voices from around the globe? Traditional news has always been about selection – what a roomful of men thought the world needed to know about. When I interviewed Derrick Ashong from Al-Jazeera’s The Stream, he mentioned:

Ashong pointed out that media has traditionally been a top down kind of business, where a handful of people were expected to curate what was newsworthy for the masses.

“If I turn on CNN, I won’t hear anything about [what's] going on in Africa unless there’s a conflict to be covered or a tragedy. As a person born in Africa, that’s unacceptable to me. It isn’t that there’s no news being created, it’s just that we won’t hear about that news.”

We have come to a sad state of media affairs when fictional creations receive far more attention than those actually putting their lives on the line, and that the stories of “others” are only worth telling once they have been co-opted.

—

Further Reading:

“The story of a gay girl in Damascus or, a straight guy in Edinburgh” [Daily Maverick]

Doree Shafir on White Intellectual Norms Post-Seltzer [The Doree Chronicles]

Daniel Nassar on “The real world of gay girls in Damascus” [The Guardian]

Liz Henry on Amina and Fictional Blogging [Composite]

Page 2 of 2 | Previous page

Posted in LGBTQ, WTF?, discrimination, diversity, everyday racism, media, misrepresentation, news | 5 comments

Previous post:
Next post:

  • inkst

    There was actually a good analysis of this by a guest speaker on Talk of the Nation today. The guest was a white man (can’t remember his name, editor of a poetry publication I think) who even pointed out the irony of his own accepted “expertise” due to his race. He didn’t mince words and called out the arrogance of this privileged ventriloquism. 

    http://www.npr.org/programs/talk-of-the-nation/ Story: White privilege and the Gay Girl in Damascus.

  • Pingback: Ron Silliman and the Amina hoax « Have a Good Time

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_EC4V7AGCKZBTV7PPGQ5MVZ7Z7E Patrick

       There is so much wrong with this that it is hard to know where to begin.

       The guy is a liar, and nothing he says is likely to ever be believed.  I would be surprised if anyone trusts him in the future, or maybe I shouldn’t be…. sigh.

       He is not Syrian, but he created a Syrian political and cultural identity that claims to speak for the Syrian people.  How wrong is this?  Beyond belief.   (It is a typical trick of the ruling media in America to pick who they want as the spokespeople for non establishment views, this allows them to have control over how those views are presented to the public.)  

       Not only has he lied, and tried to claim to “be” the Syrian opposition, but he has made it harder for the genuine voices of Syrians.  In the future, people will read these voices and wonder if they are real.  Mr. McMaster has, at the very least, made the lives of those he claims to care for much much more difficult.  He may have made it next to impossible for their voices to be heard (because the media is discussing him, not them).

       What could he have done?  If he wanted to help, he could have used his knowledge to create a portal, a gateway to the genuine voices coming out of Syria (pretending that he actually had such knowledge, of which I am not convinced).  By doing this, and calling attention to it, then stepping back, and letting those voices be heard, he might be helping.

       I think that there is a difference between opening a gate to another part of the world, serving as a portal to bring other voices over, and “filtering”.  But I realize that this is tricky.  I often get irritated when someone tells me about the latest book about China written by someone white person, and suggests that this book will explain all things Chinese.  When I ask them why they don’t read books written by Chinese people, I get uneasy looks and no real answers.

      People were communicating with this guy and imagining they were communicating with a “Gay Girl in Damascus”, meanwhile the real inter-cultural communication that needs to happen was being blocked by this pretender.

       We are desperately in need of honest communication across cultures.  Mr. McMaster hurts a lot and doesn’t help at all.

    PatrickinBeijing
       

       

  • Pingback: World News – beware the piranhas « A Gaming Girl's Take on Life

  • Pingback: What’s “gender justice writing”? « Herpreet Kaur Grewal's blog