Oma Child - Thoughts on Toothism and Racism

Are some children born cursed? A scene from Oma Child.

Here in the United States, it’s Martin Luther King’s birthday, so I thought I’d ruminate on racism and other forms of collective insanity.

 

I recently watched an excellent documentary called Oma Child: The River and the Bush. You can find it here: https://omochildmovie.com  

 

In a certain society in Ethiopia, the belief existed (and for some people still exists) that certain human beings are “Mingi.” 

 

Cursed.

 

Their mere existence threatens to bring drought and destruction upon their entire family and tribe.

 

One of the ways that you can tell if a child is Mingi is whether their first tooth starts on One side of the mouth or the Other. (I can’t remember and don’t care which side was which).

 

Because no family wants to be cursed, parents or grandparents kill Mingi children as soon as their “evil” manifests. Because no village wants to be cursed, if the parents themselves refuse to murder the toddler, other villagers will kidnap a Mingi child from recalcitrant parents and murder the babies.

 

They drown Mingi children in the river or take Mingi children out to the bush and shove dirt into their mouths.

 

This is horrifying. But it’s also stupid.

 

You see, there is no value apart from what is real or not real. If the mere existence of a Mingi child truly were a valid threat to the whole community, perhaps these murders would be an understandable sacrifice. Tragic but necessary...

 

If you don’t believe you would ever think so, just look at how people responded to the Unvaxinated (therefore possibly infected) population during Covid. To some people, the mere existence of Unvaxxinated were risking the spread of a deadly contagion to the rest of the community, and any extreme, including lockdown, loss of rights, imprisonment, even execution, was justified to stop such risk. The more dangerous one believed the spread of Covid, the more dangerous an Unvaxinated person was believed to be and the more their rights were “justifiably” denied.

 

As it turns out, the authorities grossly overestimated the dangers of Covid to those without co-morbidities, but suppose an Unvaxxinated (therefore presumably infected) person could have driven an entire town to extinction just by existing. That would justify such an extreme reaction, wouldn’t it?

 

This is why it’s so important to not “trust” science, but to actually DO science. 

 

Truth matters.

 

This is why racism is morally wrong; racism is factually wrong. It’s stupid and illogical to prejudge a person by collective attributes, such as skin color, that have nothing to do with anything important.

 

This is also why the only way to combat racism is to be ethically color-blind, that is, to consider the individual before outward shallow identifiers. This is not to deny that people participate in larger communities, which include clan and kin (who often look alike), or share cultural markers (food, song, common history). But those markers are only relevant in their specific contexts, and not outside them. 

 

There’s a prevalent theory, pushed by post-modernists, that we should counter racism with racism, sometimes couched in the Orwellian Newspeak that claims one can’t be racist against a “privileged” race. 

 

This is simply false. Look at history.

 

The worst genocides of the Twentieth Century were all committed against a so-called "privileged” race: the genocide against the kulaks by the Soviet Communists; the genocide of the Ukrainians by the Soviet Communists; the genocide against the Jews by the National Socialists; the genocide against the “landowners” by the Chinese Communist Party; the genocide against the “capitalist running dogs” by the CCP during the Cultural Revolution; the genocide against the urbanites by the Khmer Rouge; the genocide against the Tutsis by the Hutus.

 

All of these groups were held to be “privileged” (as a collective, of course) by those who murdered them. To agree that one can’t be racist or oppressive to so-called privileged identities is to celebrate the past mass murder of millions upon millions of people... as well as to set yourself up to cheer on or even abet some future genocide.

 

If you’re an evil person, who enjoys murdering innocents, or who hates humans and wants to reduce the world population, this is no doubt a very useful definition of “anti-racism.” It’s a definition that lets you be racist and murderous while cloaking yourself in virtue.

 

If you’re a good person, don’t fall into that trap.

 

The documentary Oma Child, despite its heart-breaking topic, is inspiring, because one man stood up against the practice of killing the supposedly “cursed” Mingi children. He found others in his society who felt the same way; together they stood up to the practice; they first saved individual children by adopting them and ultimately, by showing that these children weren’t cursed. Their lives were precious, as all human lives are precious.

 

Imagine if, instead of saving the "cursed" children, he had argued that to make up for the murder of thousands of Mingi children, over generations, it was necessary and justified to murder NON-Mingi children for a few generations. 

 

You know. Just to even things out.

 

So now, instead of kidnapping toddlers whose teeth came in on THIS side, the group would murder any child whose first tooth appeared on THAT side.

 

Keep murdering thousands of children, but this time, in the interest of FAIRNESS, let’s murder the “privileged” children. 

 

That’s pretty stupid, isn’t it?

 

And also, awful. Because of course it completely misses the point.

 

As you walk around today, look at everyone you meet and realize there’s no chance of you being prejudice against that person for being Mingi, because you simply don’t know what side their teeth came in. It’s never mattered to you and never should matter to you. It’s irrelevant to your important relationships with other human beings.

 

You’re “tooth-blind.”

 

You may think you can’t be color-blind in our society, but I guarantee you were born color-blind to race. I know because I watched all four of my children go from being color-blind to race to being indoctrinated into racism by the school system, which was supposedly trying to teach them to be “anti-racist.”  Believe me, if the schools had spent hundreds of hours trying to “teach” children “not” to be “toothest” against Mingi children, we would see an explosion in toothism in our society.

 

Fortunately, reality doesn’t change even when our ideas of it do. Our emotional reaction toward this or that identity comes from our thoughts about it. If we spend a great deal of time categorizing people by race, mentioning it constantly, dwelling on conflicts over it, etc., those thoughts will drive our emotions, both consciously and unconsciously. 

 

However, we can change our thoughts. By changing our thoughts, we change both our conscious, and, eventually, our unconscious emotions. 

 

Racism is not innate. It is learned. What is innate is categorizing and conceptualizing group identities. Obsession over involuntary collective identities is unhealthy, but celebrating volitional identities is healthy and a great part of being human. Nor should we ignore the “lived experience” of individuals. For the children in the film, being born Mingi, surviving to adulthood when they weren’t “meant” to survive, thriving despite being Mingi—that will always be an important part of their identity and lived experience, because it’s real, it’s part of what they had to endure just to live.

 

But ultimately, the true curse of the Mingi, dividing and judging people as Mingi or not in the first place, won’t vanish until people learn to be tooth-blind and focus on what’s really important.

 

Martin Luther King knew what that was: the content of your character.

 

 

 

 

In The Unfinished Song, Book 2, Taboo, the heroine Dindi journeys to the Blue Waters tribe. They believe that that certain people are born with the wrong kind of magic, which makes them cursed and diseased. The tribe Shuns them. The Shunned become diseased, just as the tribe predicts... but were they born that way or was it the hate and loathing directed against them that transformed them?

You can buy Taboo or request a free review copy. (Note: the series should be read in order.)

 

You can also read about the Shunned in the stand-alone free novella, Shark River. 

 

Read Shark River free here.