While not West Africa specific, for the past the last few weeks I have been doing a unit on genocide for my Ethnicity and Gender class (it's a multidisciplinary social science course). We have talked about the Armenian, Cambodian, Bosnian, Rwandan and Darfuri genocides in addition to the Holocaust. In the process, I explained the U.S. policy toward recognizing a genocide, how the U.S. intervenes in such situations and the like. On the last day of the unit, I had them take the time to come up what they think the U.S. policy toward genocide would be. They had to think about how they would define genocide (whether or not they would use the UN's standing definition), at what point the U.S. would intervene in the case of a genocide, what the response would be (military aid, humanitarian aid, political sanctions), and whether force would ever be acceptable. Here are some gems from their definitions of genocide:
*I would say a genocide is when 10 people are killed because of their ethnicity.
*I think that a genocide occurs whenever anyone is killed because of their ethnicity.
*The U.S. should only step in when 50,000 people per week are dying.
*A genocide is occurring when 85% of the population is killed.
I'm glad I'm such an effective teacher. To be fair, there were some fantastic answers that included time tables and systematic evaluations of the conflict, but the ridiculous answers are the ones that stick out. *Sigh* The future leaders of America...
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