Embodied Suffering Analysis

Honestly, this weeks lecture for Senior Symposium was kind of disappointing. After a two week dearth of stimulating speeches, students piled once again into the Hall Campus Center’s Ballroom only to be told they would not be hearing a well thought speech crafted specifically for them. Instead, they were told that they would be viewing a prerecorded Ted Talk that was only tangentially relevant to the reading and only moderately relatable to life as a college student in Lynchburg. The real life professors who introduced the video and answered questions did a fantastic job but the whole exercise felt a bit cheap after four solid weeks of excellent lectures in the flesh. None of this, however, means that the topics discussed in this youtube video

Embodied suffering is not sympathy, but rather it is being to directly relate to the suffering of a person, it is placing yourself into a realm of their suffering. By wearing this controversial head garment Hawkins (2016) was able to literally step into the shoes of women who experience intolerance everyday. She was able to experience hate from strangers that she, as a christian women, would have never received outside of wearing the head covering. She left her life of predictable safety and presumed protection by dawning this head garb. This act of going against the common human instinct of actively avoiding danger illustrates beautiful one of the points Peck (1983) makes on the second page of our assigned reading. Peck (1983) states that humans have a special ability, he says that unlike animals humans “are even free to reject what we have been taught and what is normal for our society. We may even reject the few instincts we have, as do those who rationally choose celibacy or submit themselves to death by martyrdom” (Peck 1983). Hawkins attempt at achieving embodied solidarity with oppressed Muslim women may not have been a perfect simulation of what oppression feels like but it was certainly the perfect example of the human ability to ignore

The core of this summation was basically stating that oppression comes from when you start thinking about other people not as living breathing humans but as zombies. Donning the hijab made Hawkins (2016) realize that the people who would show her or those suffering from genocide hatred where those who did not relate her, or them, with being fully human. Her haters didn't recognize or relate to the reasons for which she was wearing the piece covering and thusly they reduced her to nothing more then a walking zombie in a weird hat, not a person equal to themselves. Much in the same way that the Hutus reduction of the Tutsi into zombies was necessary for them to continue feeling justified in attempting to eradicated them. Peck (2016) explains this by stating that it is very hard to unabashedly be mean to someone to whom you can relate and deeply understand. He said it was, in his time, uncommon for white people to attack each other unprovoked, but it was much common for a white man to attack a black man out of the blue, because the white man didn't fully see that black man as human. In the words of Hawkins, the white man in this scenario saw the black man not as a human but rather a zombie, a body separate from it soul. “It’s easier for a white man to lynch a “nigger” than