Saturday, June 04, 2016

Searching for the Humanity in the Other

 
The term refugee is thrown around frequently these days, as more individuals continue to flee their homes in search of safety, freedom, and a better life.

Unfortunately, when most of us (and the mainstream media) refer to refugees we use dehumanizing language, reducing these people to numbers and statistics. Rather than seeing them for the individuals that they are, we instead refer to them in bulk, describing them in terms of quantity and the amount of resources it will require from us to “accommodate” them.

In hopes of reminding us that these refugees, like us, are real people who have families, friends, dreams, goals, and stories, Amnesty Poland conducted and filmed a social experiment in Berlin.

In the experiment, refugees and Europeans were partnered up and given the simple task of making eye contact for 4 minutes.

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