I have never - never ever ever - seen an image like this before in my life. To my shame, it wasn't until I looked at this image that I realized I've never seen one like it before.

It turns out that somewhere in the world, there is a black person helping white people! It's not even an ad campaign for Benetton! It's real! I've reproduced the image here (from US Prospect magazine*.) It would be amazing if anyone out there could supply maybe just one more. It could turn out that potentially two black people in the world are recorded as helping out those poor white people who can't sort their own problems out.

It's such a classical image of the UN soldier with the cute kid, swapping berets and looking off into a distance that offers Hope and Happiness and Peace, and all the things that are promised through military interventions around the world. But seeing the role reversal between black and white, I am reminded that we never do see the role reversal between black and white. It is always white soldiers or at minimum Western-looking soldiers (who we can identify with) swapping berets with black kids (who are clearly 'poor' and who we can't identify with), and so the endless void between them and us is reinforced over and over again, on the news, in the papers, everywhere. So seeing a clearly African soldier doing the whole "I bring you Peace, Hope and Happiness" thing, with clearly European recipients, is a juicy little challenge to the void in my brain between them and us...

*http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=hope_against_history