I never understood why anyone would choose to be racist or xenophobic when they could simply hate people instead. After all, most people are idiots who do stupid things. Plenty of them spit under people’s windows, no matter what country you’re in or what nationality they happen to be. Or rather, we do. Because I…
A short story of my journey into making a film about childbirth PryNadiyi Blog In 2017, I became pregnant and started this blog because I couldn’t find the kind of blog I wanted to read myself. Writing it helped me get through a traumatic pregnancy, navigate motherhood I wasn’t prepared for, explore the questions that…
I once wrote about the illusion of invisibility. This time, I want to write about the illusion of visibility. Look at This With Me A few days ago, I saw a rainbow. A huge, beautiful one. My son and I spent our walk home running around and taking pictures of it. A man was walking…
Despite having extensive experience — including six years of living and working abroad in the UAE — I still haven’t managed to find a job in Sweden after almost three years. I’m never inactive: I study, work remotely for a Ukrainian organization, volunteer, and endlessly refine my CV. But at some point I became curious…
I am African. Everything that might make me look Latina is just a love for potatoes. It so happened that I was born a white Ukrainian woman, and my destiny with Ukraine is intertwined like a braid, but I understand my origin very well. In fact, our origin. Because if you remove labels like “race,”…
I’m often asked how I manage to get everything done. Damn if I actually do — I barely get anything done, but I do so many different things — this is perhaps what creates the illusion. People like me, Barbara Sher called “scanners” — those whose curiosity stretches across many things. The problem for scanners…
The other day I asked my seven-year-old son: what do you call people who hate other races? The correct answer was “racists,” but he asked, “White?” I laughed, because, as they say, “out of the mouths of babes.” His answer captured patterns in the adult world more accurately than we’re comfortable admitting. Racism as a…
People tend to fall into quick-hatred. The anger accumulated in everyday life — at small everyday irritations, at everything that slips beyond our control — seeks an outlet, and the media narrative often offers a target for it. There everything is explained clearly: there is good, there is evil, evil attacks good and must be…
For a university course on intercultural communication, I recently wrote an essay on Hannah Arendt and the controversy surrounding her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Hannah and her concept of the “banality of evil” fascinated me long before I studied her in depth, and later I became captivated by the idea of using this example to…
We use the word “patriarchy” almost automatically, yet rarely pause to ask where it actually came from — because it hasn’t existed always. At no single moment did a man suddenly decide to dominate over a woman, other men, or entire world. Patriarchy is the result of a long, gradual process that unfolded over millennia….
