Event: Genocide in Rwanda (Smith Steeb Glass Classroom)
Date: September 12, 2019
The Genocide in Rwanda event, even though I had heard about the topic before, reinforced and brought the Rwandan genocide back to the forefront of my mind. I learned a few more things than I knew before about it. I thought it was interesting how one of the first questions to get us interacting was a question based on if anyone could identify two more genocides that are recognized widely across the world as having happened in America, but that the United States refuses to recognize themselves. The two other genocides that were talked about briefly were the genocides against native Americans and African Americans.
This event relates to the topic of international affairs because it’s important to know about things that have happened in other places outside of America. The genocide that happened in Rwanda is in itself a historical event that should be not only spoken about but taught about as well. As international scholars, we must be able to understand these relationships within larger cultural contexts outside of our own.
This event also relates to a concept I’ve learned in other coursework, specifically a class I’m taking currently, Rural Sociology. Rural sociology is based upon the concept of the sociological imagination. The sociological imagination is defined in the class as the intellectual ability to see relationships between individual behaviors and attitudes, and a larger societal context. It’s a type of critical thinking that allows people to think outside of their personal experiences. Our community acts as a filter between us and trends, issues, and events in the world. Applying it to the genocide in Rwanda, it happened in 1994 and consisted of a rapid mass killing over the timeframe of about 90 days. Not many people I know, even the ones who were alive at the time, know or have even heard about the genocide against the Tutsis that happened in Rwanda. This is related to our communities filtering how we perceive events. For example, obviously someone living in Rwanda at the time of the genocide has personal experience with it and has in some way been affected by it, but others, like us, experience the event through news stories, without a personal experience attached to it for the most part.
I do have some questions after attending the event. Since learning about the sociological imagination in my rural sociology course, I think it would be interesting to look at newspapers and articles and assess how thorough the coverage of this event would have been, in turn, to see how people in communities like mine may have been exposed to it. I do think, since it was mentioned that the US and other western entities did not want to label the genocide using the term “genocide” as it would have made it so that these entities would have had to do something, that there probably wasn’t very much coverage at all to lend to the effort of escaping responsibility as well.