How to fight hate without being hateful | Charlotte McDonald-Gibson | TEDxAntwerp
[Applause] so I think most of us here today can agree but doing nothing is kind of nice I think some of us call it relaxation but some I've got two small children two very energetic boys under the age of four doing nothing unfortunately as a bit of an alien concept for me in fact when I was invited to give this talk today my first reaction was ah I've got so much to do I should try and get it all out of the way so maybe I can do nothing when the holidays arrived but what happens when we do nothing bear with me for one second actually make that three seconds in those three seconds of me standing here doing nothing around five people somewhere in the world were forced from their homes by war persecution climate change a few years ago I wrote a book about five such people ordinary people whose lives were turned upside down by war and they were forced to make that dangerous journey to Europe to seek sanctuary you know I thought that if I could show that these five refugees were in fact just ordinary people people like you people like me then there would be more compassion there would be more empathy and things would get better it hasn't works out that way though today it's not the language of compassion that we hear from so many of our leaders but the opposite the language of dehumanization language which numbs the empathy which fosters violence which splits society all over the world politicians using this language of hate and fear are winning and it's so easy to feel powerless in the face of it all to feel like one person can't make a difference but nobody is powerless and with the right tools and understanding each and every one of us can start fighting back against the hate now in my many years reporting on the refugee crisis and then the rise and populism nationalism extremism I've come across two different points of view about what's going on in the world today I'm going to call these people ostriches and penguins now the ostriches yeah that's right they bury their heads in the sand they can't bear to look at what's going on in the world it's too depressing I turn off the news look away the penguins meanwhile just like that hardy little bird that we all love that survives in a harsh environment the penguins can see opportunity in today's difficult times without something to fight against they argue people get complacent and nothing changes those penguins I think they might be onto something have a look at the US midterm elections back in November in 2018 we saw the first Muslim women elected to Congress the first Native American Congress women the first openly gay governor I wonder without a certain Donald Trump in the White House if we would have seen quite so many historic firsts speaking of history I'd like to now step back in time for a moment to look at how we ended up where we are today because if we do want to fight those narratives of hate and fear we need to understand how they work and why they work the refugee crisis of 2015 this is when we first saw that hateful that dehumanizing rhetoric move from the political fringes and back into mainstream political conversation why there had been economic crisis people had lost their faith in the existing political systems politicians were desperate to regain a narrative and the refugees well they proved to be a perfect scapegoat suddenly we had leaders talking about swarms of migrants a columnist in the UK called them cockroaches in the u.s. her Republican compared refugees to rabid dogs politicians had rediscovered the power of fear so how are they using this fear a few weeks before those u.s. midterm elections I spoke about Donald Trump started talking about an invasion of migrants hateful fearful language aimed at making people feel afraid aimed at making voters feel like he was the only one who could keep them safe another example closer to home in Hungary earlier this year Prime Minister Viktor Orban seeking reelection referred to migrants as Muslim invaders who ex our daughters and women-folk to danger lies plain and simple dehumanizing an entire segment of the population for political gain to win more votes to get more power one woman in Hungary she told me that her mother had spoken about converting to Islam she was so afraid that if she didn't she would be killed in this coming invasion she kept being told about the fear is real even when the threat is not and that is what makes this rhetoric so difficult for us to challenge but if we don't challenge it what happens when fear is stoked in society hate flourishes and no one is immune study after study has shown a link between dehumanizing language and violence and hate crime is rising in societies around the world I'd like to step back a little further in time now to September 1941 the outskirts of Kiev in Ukraine the occupying German forces have marched at least thirty four thousand Jewish women her children the sick and elderly to the edge of Babel Yar ravine they take them away in small groups strip them naked push them to the edge of the pits and shoot them the writer anatoly kuznetsov was there and this is what he said as long as our hearts and brains continue to work we must not give in we must not forget those cries what new maybe ours by hidden in our future just biding their time and which of us alive today is perhaps already marked out for them he was right of course there have been plenty more Bobby ours just as the Nazis referred to the Jews as vermin so the who to leaders in Rwanda would refer to Tutsis as cockroaches the Serb leaders to Bosnian Muslims as aliens our repeated promises have never again a repeatedly broken and enough time passes and we forget the potentially awful consequences of our actions now I'm not saying we're headed towards another inevitable atrocity and I'm certainly not saying any of the leaders the politicians that I have spoken about today want that to happen they don't but we need to remind ourselves of the absolute worst that can happen we need to feel the horror of what happened in the past and use that horror to fight back to have the courage to stand up and say when something is wrong now I'd like to return if I may briefly to my ostriches and my penguins I hope I've shown that there is danger in doing nothing but there is danger in the other path too when we live in extreme times the temptation is to be extreme to to fight hate with hate to treat those who disagree with us as the enemy do you know why it's so easy for politicians to exploit fear because fundamentally we all want the same things to keep ourselves and those we love safe let me tell you a very brief story about a woman in my book her name is Sina and she's from Eritrea she travelled all the way from Greece to Sweden by herself with her three-month-old baby Anthony strapped to her chest in a baby carrier she told me that hardly anyone helped her in fact lying in a ditch on the Hungarian border her fellow refugees tried to convince her to drug her tiny baby so he wouldn't cry and attract the attention of the border guards but Sina understood it wasn't that they were bad people it's just that in extreme circumstances their priorities were their families and their children and we need to return to this understanding of other people's motives which Sina had a return to empathy because frankly nothing else seems to be working but this brings us to the the slightly tricky bit the what exactly can you do bit I read a lot about this because you know I want to know what I can do to and this is often where it gets a bit vague there's a few broad goals and usually the word grassroots in there somewhere and I never really know what that means so I've come up with four very practical things which you can do which can make a difference number one vote but don't vote for politicians exploiting the language of hate and fear number two find the politician in your area who best represents your worldview get on the phone and find out what you can do to help number three volunteer what skills and expertise do you have that can help bring people together and foster understanding in your local community perhaps there is an initiative which helps get young people registered to vote for the first time if you don't time donate these kind of initiatives now I'm aware that a lot of those points required time and/or money but my last point requires neither and in a way it's the most important don't be silent engage with other people and that doesn't mean shouting down anybody who holds a different viewpoint but listening reacting understanding the holidays are coming up we see old friends family talk about what's going on in the world what we can do to make a difference if you do hear the language of hate challenge it but challenge it with history with empathy with emotion most importantly with emotion that is what we see working real emotion my book so it got some good reviews but it didn't exactly set any bestseller lists on fire but a couple of people came up to me afterwards and said now I see that refugees are humans too a couple of people that's enough for me with passion and conviction anything you do will make a difference and you don't need to change the world just one person as mine would be enough and trust me I know how easy it is to say ah but I really don't have much time and you would be absolutely right we really don't have much time you