Fighting Pneuwokia
When I moved to Colombia over a year ago, I did so with the goal of reading 100 books during my 27 months of service. Having spent hours reading advice and packing lists on the Peace Corps sub-Reddit, I was convinced I would soon be faced with an abundance of free time that I could only survive with a Kindle in hand.
The books I read here serve many purposes. They are a distraction from the heat, they are something to share with friends here and back home, and they teach me new lessons. They challenge me to consider new perspectives and bring me comfort on days when I wonder what, if anything, I’m doing here.
My friend Kaleb likes to say that he sees his service through book-colored lenses, as it seems as though every book, even the one about an aristocrat in Soviet Moscow, has a piece of wisdom or a lesson that we can apply to our Peace Corps service. I recently finished Gang Leader for a Day, the tale of a rogue PhD student at the University of Chicago who abandons traditional research methods in favor of spending his days with a local gang leader. In this memoir, Sudhir Venkatesh recollects his adventures in Chicago’s Robert Taylor public housing project. Over the course of several years, he observed the daily life of individuals who manage gang factions like businesses, hustle the Chicago Housing Authority for bare necessities, and do whatever it takes to stay afloat amidst systemic poverty and discrimination.
In many ways, I believe Gang Leader for a Day should be required reading for anyone interested in designing policy changes or initiatives that aim to improve the lives of people living in high-density low-income urban communities. Venkatesh’s story highlights the universality of the problems faced by the gang-leaders, prostitutes, and hustlers who open their doors to the author, and the narrative illustrates the humanity of populations that are often reduced to statistics. However, I frequently found myself annoyed by the author’s naivety and inability to remove himself from the story, wondering when he was going to dig deeper and address the singularity and privilege of his experience conducting this “research.” Instead of handing over the metaphorical microphone to the people who lived the experience he described, he tells his own story. With a PhD in Sociology and extensive experience working alongside big names like Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, Venkatesh has a platform which could have been used to amplify voices that his audience typically wouldn’t hear. Thus, while I was intrigued by this book, I couldn’t help but want to yell at the author, “it’s not about you!”
In an attempt to pinpoint why Venkatesh’s approach to the story bothered me so much, I turned to my super woke little cousin, Mallika, who is much more perceptive and articulate than I could ever hope to be. In somewhat unrelated but very impressive news, she was recently awarded a Marshall Scholarship and will be studying Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy and International Political Economy in the UK next year. What I’m trying to say is she is super smart and I’m excited that people might think I am equally smart by association.
When Mallika and I were growing up, our mothers would force us to drink a mix of turmeric and honey at the slightest sign of a cough or cold. While we secretly knew it helped, at the time we were mortified if they even reached for the jar of haldi while our friends were around. Imagine our surprise in 2018 upon discovering that hipsters and health-nuts would not only pay $9 for a turmeric latte, but would mispronounce the name while preaching to us, the Indian choir, about this magical powerful healing agent. Children of immigrants, people of color, and minorities are all familiar with these moments of “yup, we knew that,” which can be frustrating but are generally innocuous.
We discussed Gang Leader for a Day and the phenomenon of outsiders “discovering” something, be it the cyclical nature of poverty, systemic racism, or an idea outside the mainstream, and sharing it with the masses while simultaneously patting themselves on the back for shedding light on said “discovery.” It comes in varying degrees. The turmeric thing is annoying, but at the end of the day it’s not a big deal. Though we’ve definitely suffered through jokes about Indian people smelling like curry, we were never oppressed or marginalized due to our ancestors’ appreciation for a variety of spices.
When the “Me Too” movement was at its height, we were forced to listen to men rattling off facts on sexual harassment to us, as if we weren’t acutely aware of this reality that, as women, we had been living our entire lives. Maybe if men shut up and listened to women more, this wouldn’t be such an earth-shattering revelation.
I grew up in white spaces, and over the years I’ve had multiple well-meaning friends say things like “can you imagine growing up and not identifying with any characters on television?” in my presence. Coming from a generation of brown girls whose only celebrity look-alike has always been “that Indian chick from the office,” I can imagine. I do not need you to explain it to me.
We searched for a word to describe this frustratingly common sequence of events, the gist of which is: “nice of you to finally join us in this wokedom,” and landed on pneuwokia. It’s okay that enlightenment took this long. Any progress is good progress. But don’t let the pneuwokia go to your head.
As a woman of color, I am not immune to this phenomenon. Whether you choose to call it pneuwokia or ignorance, it’s an easy trap to fall into. Serving in the Peace Corps has opened my eyes to many injustices, big and small, that I have had the privilege to ignore for most of my life. Yes, I knew that women living in machistacountries had it rough, but it wasn’t until I had to walk past a group of hissing and whistling men every day that I truly felt outraged. I am offended, I glare, and I wonder what I can do to make it stop, but at the end of the day I am lucky to be minimally affected by this pervasive machismo. I want to shout from the rooftops about how this daily objectification wears away at me every day, but I know it will make no difference. I have friends and family to whom I can (and do) rant, but I know I can escape this if I want to. Familial obligations or societal expectations won’t threaten to come between me and my education, and my employment prospects won’t fade at 35 like they do for most costeña women. I live here, I get catcalled, but my struggle is relatively minimal and when I leave Colombia next year, I get to leave the piropos behind.
So what is the cure to pneuwokia? We should strive to learn and educate others, but we have to recognize that perhaps our “revelation” is in fact not new to some people. Perhaps we are just discovering something new to us, and should take some time to understand its origin. Perhaps we have been living under a blanket of privilege, hidden from an injustice because we had the luxury of not knowing the truth. Gang Leader for a Day was Venkatesh’s attempt to share what he learned with his audience. By telling the story of his experience in a poverty-stricken community, he offers his readers a glimpse into a world they may not otherwise explore. However, missing were the voices of the subjects of his research. Everyone deserves to tell their own story.
Donning my “book-colored lenses,” I find myself wondering how I can use my privilege to highlight the voices of the people and stories I encounter in Colombia. I am grateful for the opportunity to live here in a community that is not my own, a community that has already taught me exponentially more than I could ever teach them. But if gratitude is step 1, I think part of the follow-through is learning to leverage privilege to maximize the impact of my work. In my career, I hope to tackle the roots of injustice, to work to expose and mend the fault-lines of our increasingly unequal society, while attempting to avoid the dangerous savior complexes that fill this line of work. Inevitably, I will continue to learn about new things, and will continue to be outraged or fascinated by the things I learn, but I hope I can find ways to channel that into something more productive than pneuwokia. It’s not about me.
