Cute but offensive

Once in a while I do something that makes me feel like I have served my people. Here is a letter I wrote to a Bay Area paper that implied that all Nigerians were into SCAMS.

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Dear Editor,

At one point or another, we’ve all opened a news publication to find stereotypical, demeaning, and culturally insensitive material. Last week it was in your pages. Although your use of “Nigerian scam” to draw our attention to Peralta’s alleged scamming of a Nigerian gentleman was somewhat cute, it was outright offensive and condescending to Nigerians and Africans in general.

I don’t know if it has been definitively established that the e-mail scams you spoke of have their origins in Nigeria, but even if you were correct, it would be unfair to call the fraud Nigerian. There are people from other countries who engage in similar scams.

Two years ago in Nairobi, Kenya, I sat in an Internet cafe behind a man composing one of those e-mails. He had $15 million worth of gold stuck in Kenya and was looking for help smuggling it out. And long before the “Nigerian scam,” American senior citizens were sending out their life savings after being deceived to think they had won millions of dollars in sweepstakes.

Nigeria is a nation of 150 million people and most of them are honest people. You don’t believe me? Look in universities across America and you will find that some of the most distinguished professors hail from that country. To associate these exceptionally intelligent people with fraudulent schemes run by a minority of their countrymen exhibits inter-cultural incompetence of the highest order — the kind we expect from mainstream media.

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