Committee: The Peace and Security Council
Topic: Strengthening Ethno –Religious Integration for the Prevention of Conflict.
Today, I’m not going to tell you what the study guide is about. Go read it! However, I will share my reflections on the important issues she raised in it. As I’m certain you can deduce from the topic, the focus of the guide is ethnoreligious conflict. As a Nigerian, this definitely struck a chord because while I do come from an inter-ethnic family, I’m no stranger to tribal prejudice. From the moment I started attending school, those snide comments, (the very ones that we would laugh at in my house) they held weight because these people laughed alright, but they believed every word they said. And that’s scary.
It’s scary that prejudice gave birth to genocide, harassment, oppression; that it is powerful and old in age, and still lives. It lives because we inherit the prejudice of the past generation and reproduce it with equal fervor. Some of us, have never even had the opportunity to prove the premise of the prejudice right or wrong, and have simply taken a generalization about someone’s identity to be the truth. Ultimately, every negative thing you’ve ever thought about someone and internalized as a norm is prejudice. As individuals, we should be asking ourselves the biases that inform our interaction with society, because if we can’t answer that for ourselves, laws and resolutions are useless.
Why? Laws don’t change people.
If it was that easy, racial discrimination should die the moment a law is made to make it illegal, but unfortunately, that’s not how people change.
So how do we get people to change?
Think about it.
Omobolaji Olalere
Director of Press Corps