I recently had a controversial conversation with a friend whose mum is Muslim and dad, atheist. Such scenarios are prominent in Ghana and children often have the freedom of choosing their religious grounds, however my friend chose to be Muslim. The first thing I could think of was why he did not choose to be Christian and he answered “because the church as a whole is always corrupt”. Not only have I heard this answer from him but also from other non christian friends.
The assumption made me critically think of the stereotypical claims people make concerning religion and race. Recently, its either all Muslims are violent due to the abusive and brutal actions of ISIS and the Boko Haram or all black people are of doubtful honesty and are ‘criminals’. However it can be understood that such claims or assumptions are made due to some present or recent events.
I joined Facebook not too long ago but stopped using it because people in Ghana prefer to use other social forms of social media other than Facebook. Twitter for instance is a good place to find out what is trending in the world today. One of the ways in which this has been made easy is through the use of the hashtag. Some examples are #blacklivesmatter and #prayforParis). Not only do these forms of media circulate positive updates, also they tend to increase the number of religious and racial stereotypical claims. I have seen pictures and read stories on places like Beruit, Mali and Kenya and the tragedy they live in. However the media circulates their attention on the “Great countries”.
In addition, due to actions of ISIS in Paris on the 13th of November, 2015, the life of a normal muslim is being threatened. On Tuesday, I was reading daily tweets of people and I came across a story that had a title ‘ New York can driver breaks into tears after passenger speaks out against Islamophobia’ which was published by the International New York Times. This cab driver was ignored by most people because they felt threatened he was a potential threat to their lives and however felt grateful when someone picked his cab.
To some extent, the way social media portrays such events and such people make people end up making trite claims.
However, through fairness, I believe the world would become a better place.
