When Columbia Law School professor Sarah Knuckey and her team saw New York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristof on their flight back from Central African Republic a week ago, they braced themselves for the worst.
Indeed, Kristof was planning to go to Central African Republic because it ranks dead last on the Human Development Index and because approximately half the country is in need of humanitarian assistance.
In his announcement of the contest, in which an American student wins a reporting trip with Kristof, he mentioned CAR as a possible destination.
He also braced the potential winner: “We will be bouncing over awful roads, we’ll be eating wretched food, and you may get sick. ‘Hotel’ rooms may come with bedbugs and rats.” It was hardly a promising sign of a nuanced portrait of CAR, a country that has been embroiled in conflict since 2013. The situation is indeed dire and under-covered. But Knuckey worried whether bad coverage might be worse than no coverage.
In his story, published on March 23, Kristof refers to CAR as “arguably the capital of human misery” and “the world’s most wretched country.” The African characters are presented solely as victims (like Julienne Moada, “a Pygmy living on the edge of the jungle”), all of the experts he interviews are American or European, and one of the photographs features a naked child’s backside.
According to Knuckey, Kristof’s story offers “little recognition of the agency and work of the countless Central Africans who run NGOs, provide healthcare, work for peace, prosecute crimes, risk their lives to protect others.” These activists, some of whom Knuckey mentioned by name, didn’t make it in the piece.
Kristof’s response to her critique was dismissive — and condescending, for which he later apologized.
Perhaps the most egregious part of the story is his assertion that United Nations peacekeepers are the solution to the conflict, one that “may make liberal doves uncomfortable, but the blunt reality is that in some places the most important humanitarians are the peacekeepers carrying weapons.”
Liberal doves shouldn’t be the only ones uncomfortable: peacekeepers in CAR have been linked to the 2014 murders of at least 12 people and the abuse or exploitation of 42 civilians, mostly underage girls. Kristof fails to mention any of this.
TThis isn’t the first time Kristof has come under fire for centering white characters and ignoring local efforts. Kristof is frank about his decision to use “bridge characters” (such as American volunteers in the country he’s reporting on) as a strategy for getting American readers to pay attention to remote conflicts in countries they may never have heard of.
In 2010, a reader told him, “Your columns about Africa almost always feature black Africans as victims, and white foreigners as their saviors.” Kristof responded: “If this is a way I can get people to care about foreign countries, to read about them, ideally, to get a little bit more involved, then I plead guilty.”
Kristof also does not shy away from finding extreme examples of victimhood. Amanda Hess wrote in 2014 about how Kristof feels lousy when he has to “cut somebody off and say, ‘It’s terrible that you were shot in the leg.’ Meanwhile, I will go off and find someone who was shot in both legs.”
He does this, too, because he hopes it will make Americans want to help — to donate money, to volunteer, to maybe even travel to countries like CAR.
But does writing about a country by using extreme examples of victims and saviors encourage people to help in productive way?
Volunteering in the developing world often creates more harm than good — and some of the charities Kristof has specifically encouraged Americans to donate to in the past have turned out to be fraudulent, which Hess also wrote about.
FFew journalists can claim Kristof’s dedication to reporting on the developing world, and Kristof is no hack — he’s a Pulitzer-Prize winner and a Rhodes scholar who has traveled to more than 150 countries. His reporting on issues like sex work in Cambodia and unclean drinking water in India has encouraged many Americans to think differently about foreign aid, even if it’s sometimes with a less-than-dignified lens.
He’s blunt about his strategic decisions to make Americans care about a place like Central African Republic. “One way to engage an audience in complex development issues,” writes Lawrence MacDonald of the Center for Global Development about Kristof’s work, is to present “problems as fundamentally tractable.”
It’s a powerful tool, but when you present problems as fundamentally tractable, and too often with Western-oriented solutions, you may run the risk of endorsing simplistic, and even damaging, solutions — like peacekeepers being the heroes of CAR.
As this debates evolves — and Kristof doesn’t seem to — it might be time to finally ask whether getting Americans to care, at the expense of accuracy and dignity, might be the wrong gamble entirely.
