Transcriber: Majd Mustafa Reviewer: shirin etebar
Hi, everyone, my name is David Asplin,
I graduated from the University of California, Riverside,
and I’m a cultural anthropologist.
So what is anthropology then?
Anthropology is a holistic discipline,
meaning that we're trying to understand people from all sorts of perspectives.
And mainly when we talk about anthropology,
it's divided into four disciplines.
You have cultural anthropology, physical anthropology,
you have archaeology and you have linguistics.
They are meant to help us understand people from the past and present.
In anthropology, the idea is that we want to make the familiar strange
and the strange familiar.
And by that, I mean that we want to take
a normalized behavior or something that we have been, you know, brought up with.
And we want to question it so much that it becomes strange to us
and at the same time, we want to understand other people.
So even though it seems strange,
we listen to other people in order to understand.
So the strange becomes the familiar.
And this talk I'll be speaking about why Black Lives Matter issues to protest
despite during the pandemic.
And I’m going to use an informative talk to do so.
And I understand that, you know,
people that are protesting feel a deep sadness and pain and rage.
And I feel with all of you
and I also understand why perhaps health care workers and people
who are not a part of the demographic
or part of the black community understand this
because they have their own struggles.
You know, they're fighting to keep people alive,
especially if you are nurses and doctors who are doing a phenomenal job.
And I understand your pain as well.
But this isn’t about what I as an individual think,
regardless of which, you know, community that I come from.
This is about understanding.
It's about listening and giving the other person
a platform where they feel that they can share with them
what they are going through and be heard and listened to.
You know, in anthropology, we talk about cultural relativism.
And cultural relativism, what that is, is that it is a tool
in which you let the person that you are listening to explain to you
something that they’re going through, or it might be how they eat
in this particular community or how they practice, how they live
without you telling them what’s right
and that’s wrong from your own perspective.
Opposite of that, you have ethnocentrism,
which is the idea that there's
a hierarchy of how to do things where your, you know, worldview,
where your culture is objective, it’s universal.
Everyone must do it.
You are cultured and civilized and all these other people are, you know,
stupid if they don't agree with you or they are barbaric or they're primitive
Moral relativism, lastly,
is your own values,
your own sort of beacon that you have been, you know,
given the guide you through life,
what decisions are right and what decisions are wrong.
So what do we do then?
You know, you might think that, well, more people are suffering,
you know, not just black folks.
So why should we care about the Arab community
or the Asian community?
Well, the idea is that, you know, you don’t have to
you don’t have to agree with one person or one community
and not agree with the other.
But the problem becomes when you use one community or one issue
as a catalyst for another demographic.
For example, let’s say your partner,
you know, comes home after work and they’ve had an awful day.
And the first thing they tell you is that I’ve had the worst day ever,
I feel really bad.
You don’t turn to them and say, well, I’ve had a bad day too,
so we need to talk about my bad day.
Like, yes, your bad day matters and it should.
And I'm sorry that you had a bad day, but it's not the main issue.
You shouldn't use your partner or your friend or your family
or other people's issues as a catalyst and make the primary issue secondary
so that you can focus about yourself.
Be bigger than your own emotions.
And I think that’s the problem that keeps happening is that
we don’t listen to understand.
We listen to make it about ourselves,
because somehow, we have rationalized that
our issues and our problems are somehow more important.
Right now, my mom is combating a very critical cancer.
And I’m not able to see her as much as I would like,
which I'm sure many of you can relate to.
And if you think that I would be devastated if she called covid
because people are out protesting, you are wrong.
But it’s not about me, it’s not about my mom,
it's not about just my family.
You can’t use your own individual opinion
as a holistic and objective truth.
I can still be devastated, you know, if my mom called covid,
but I can still sympathize with people out protesting
because there are reasons why protests are happening
and getting educated on the subject matter is important.
Reading up on Jim Crow, reading up on the prison industrial complex,
reading up on how gerrymandering is preventing, you know,
minority communities from creating change in their communities.
These are important topics that need to be read upon and educated about
so that you can understand what other people are sharing their struggle with you
And I’m not like, again, I’ve said this and I will say it again,
Don’t throw away your moral,
your moral, your values and your opinions are important.
But they are not objective truth.
And by listening to people and by educating yourself,
I hope that will help you understand why people choose to do something
and why people choose to do something,
because they feel that they are rationalizing why it makes sense.
So then to summarize or to recap this talk, what can you do?
These are real issues and they may be far away from your reality,
but that doesn't mean that the people that have gone through it
for generations until this day isn't suffering from it.
And it’s OK not to know.
We’re not expecting. I’m not expecting.
I don’t think anyone’s expecting you to know everything.
But I think that in order to understand each other
and in order to acknowledge someone else’s reality, I think it’s important to,
at least to the bare minimum, believe their stories.
They are real,
and it is and it has been damaging and targeting black folks,
which is one of the main reasons why I think that despite
the pandemic protesting during it.
It’s still happening.
So with that said,
I would like to thank all of you for tuning into my TED talk.
My name is David Asplund. Thank you.