Don’t Take Anything for Granted By Obed Nkum, Student Fellow at the Center (Fall 2018)

You wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is to check your phone. You have no Chinese friends, you know nobody from the Congo, but that’s where the minerals came from. Your phone was made in China, but the company is based in California. You drink water that you didn’t collect nor process yourself. You switch the lights on, but you didn’t do well in science, circuits baffled you. You look in the mirror as you brush your teeth, you know nothing technical of glass making, plumbing, toothpaste or brushes. You take a shower using black soap, you don’t know how it got to you or where it came from. Your towel was made somewhere, you dry your skin, reaching for the coconut oil: it says made in Brazil, but you have never been there. 

Time keeps flying by as usual, you’re hungry now, throwing your clothes on. Labels are not a big deal to you, but they were made somewhere far from where you reside. Running down the stairs, you grab the handrail, wood from an area in America where there was a genocide against the natives. You couldn’t do woodwork yourself, you probably failed mathematics so dimensions for stairs would leave you puzzled. Oh yes, and you get to the kitchen which was built by people you don’t know, and might not even meet them. You have fruits for breakfast, bananas from Zambia and other nations in the tropics, Chaunsa mangoes from Pakistan, dates from Palestine, now a green smoothie to stay healthy, made of avocadoes which you have no idea about its origin (where are avocadoes from anyway?) Blender is made in Korea, where you’ve heard so many controversial stories about. You prefer a cup of tea, Moroccan, Indian, Iranian, you have so many options, and you can’t decide. The kettle from Taiwan is broken so you turn on the gas, wonder where that is from?

You haven’t even left the house yet, but you have used things which come from different parts of the world and made by people you may never get into contact with. You go out of the house, you interact with people of different backgrounds, race, size, complexion, sexual orientation, the list goes on and on. The people you meet tell you about their lives, goals and struggles, you can’t relate because you see life from a different perspective and haven’t encountered half of the problems these people face on a daily basis. You sometimes even play it down. We live in a world where if anybody challenges the norm, they become unpopular, radical, difficult, outspoken, rebellious and too deep. Calm down, it’s not that deep, that is how they feel and what they have been through and continue to experience. One of the truest quotes I’ve ever heard: “when you’re used to having privileges and power, any attempt at equality feels like an attack”. This points out the fact that humans are inherently selfish. Sometimes it’s open, sometimes it’s minuscule and shrouded, but there is always a personal agenda. We only love change and laws, not when they are objectively good but if they benefit us as an individual. Try to live your life in a phase of, what if the tables were turned, so you at least have a perspective of others’ daily struggles. Don’t be selfish; you are already a product of the selfish serving trade of classism and globalization. We are all one people, let’s start thinking more consciously, a reflection I was able to reached through the many conversations that the Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice afforded to me this past semester.

My name is Obed Nkum, I was born and raised in Ghana, and I am studying Industrial Engineering at Hofstra University, currently in my junior year. I have always had an interest in diversity, and understanding how our society operates in terms of race and social justice, and I was accepted as a fellow at the Center for ‘Race,’ Culture, and Social Justice during the fall of 2018 semester.  I wanted to share a few of my thoughts about how our lives are interdependent on other peoples and cultures.