Voters in Liberia

Here in America we take voting for granted. The right to have a voice in your government is one that far too many people do not have. For the Liberians in this photograph this is only the second presidential election since the end of their civil war. For them, voting is a rare privilege that I'm sure they appreciate fully.

But for us Western (mostly white) people, these voters are matter out of place. To put my racist hat on: Africans don't vote. We vote. I think that the American reaction to this image is not that these people are gaining a voice and becoming empowered, it is that they are becoming more like us. It's true that some people really get into these issues and understand everything that is going on, but the average person will think "Oh, those 'others' are getting to vote, that's how we do it so that's good"

When I saw this picture I thought of all of the other pictures of "first elections" that I have seen. None of them are of the middle class voters in cities, they are of poor people with a poor looking background, in this case the ratty clothesline and the paint falling off the building. We don't care that the middle and upper class people are becoming more like us, they were already kind of like us. I'm sure that the photographer could have framed the picture in a way that had a much more flattering background, but that wouldn't have conveyed the same message

It is really hard to talk about this subject without sounding racist or overly-stereotyping, but I think that this way  that people view things like this is generally true. Does anyone disagree?