Do they love themselves?

Do they love themselves?

Empowerment beings with the self. We can’t simply empower a community. In fact, we shouldn’t. it is not my job, as an outsider, to come into a community of which I am not a part of or know fully, and exclaim that my role is to empower the people of the community. No. In my Women and Internship class (Womens Studies 120), Dr. Bays remarked how one cannot empower someone or a community, but rather provide avenues for that empowerment to develop and facilitate the growth.

Which makes me wonder how do we provide those paths for empowerment?  If empowerment begins with the self, then it only makes sense that we begin there. But how do we do that? The Indigenous Model of Education, as used in M.E.Ch.A’s de UCLA’s Access Project—Xinachtli, suggests that we begin understanding the self by exploring the historical political and social factors that make us who we are. We must begin by exploring our histories.

All this ideas of loving the self reminds me of the sociological experiment in which young black students were asked to choose between dark dolls and white dolls. Most often, they chose the white dolls to represent the beautiful and smart dolls.

I wonder which dolls the kids we worked with at the Holiday Club would choose.  We speak so much about trying to empower this community, but we have to begin by exploring the kids sense of self. Do they know who they are? Do they know of their rich history and cultural traditions?

I heard stories of their mothers leaving them because of their abusive fathers. Other stories of their fathers in prison. And many stories of the violence that they encounter on a daily basis.

Violence is not unique to South Africa. But how we deal with the act of violence is relative. Unfortunately, the kids I spoke to had to deal with it. They had very few options. They had bright spirits and spoke with so much passion.

But do they know themselves? Do they really know who they are? Do they love themselves? Do they want to buy whitening soap and try to look prettier? They already want to speak “better English;” but at the expense of what? Loosing their Zulu accent.

I don’t really know if they know themselves. I can only hope that they learn how to love themselves. Only then, can we progress towards empowerment.