Editor’s Notes: Overcoming old thinking
Trending
Sometimes I get unusual reminders that I'm as guilty of not seeing the big human picture as some of the other people I tend to feel comfortable judging.
The other day I was reading a news item about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist who won a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts against the Taliban stopping girls from attending school. A member of the Taliban shot her in the head when she was 15. She received the Nobel Peace Prize when she was 17, back in 2014.
Now, she is announcing her marriage to Asser Malik, an operations manager for the Pakistan Cricket Board. Her announcement said "We celebrated a small nikkah ceremony at home in Birmingham with our families."
And my small, small brain went "What in the world are they doing living in Alabama?"
I'm not proud of the amount of time it took me to realize that Yousafzai is in Birmingham, England, which has been a significant settlement since the 1300s.
My programming had me searching online for more information because it had to be some mistake that the reporter had her in Birmingham, (Ala.) It was only after being reminded of the other, much older Birmingham (and the one that would likely come to mind for people in just about every other country) that I thought "Oh! Of course."
But then, brain trap number two, I started to write about this and type something along the lines of "people have been in Birmingham, England, for more than 700 years longer than Birmingham, Ala." But fortunately the ignorance of that statement struck me even as I was figuring out how to write it.
Yep, I still find myself falling into the completely nonsensical idea that the Americas were "discovered" because well-funded western European white people landed here. I still fall into the kind of thinking that had me failing as a child to question signs that hailed some dusty duke as the "first PERSON to cross into such-and-such territory," when I knew full well there had been indigenous people living in those areas for millennia before.
Cue more online searching. Did you know Moundville, Ala., is the site of the second largest Mississippian culture complex in the United States (according to Wikipedia)? I didn't.
My knowledge of those who lived in what is now the United States before my own ancestors landed is … limited at best.
If you're rolling your eyes at me right now, that's fine. I deserve it. I would have done the same if I had heard someone else say the only Birmingham that came to their minds was the one here in the U.S., or using language that indicated the only humans they thought of as people were the ones who looked like them.
But I needed this. I needed a strange reminder that overcoming the way we were taught and the kind of thinking that now comes naturally is HARD, no matter who we are. Some of us have just had more practice than others. The trick is to check our own thinking while understanding everyone is facing the same challenge. The hope, of course, is that each generation will find it easier.
For that to happen, we will -- all of us -- have to acknowledge that challenge and get to work.
Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com