Thread by @SiyandaWrites

Dear western writers; do you ever stop to think: Who am *I* to proclaim a brown country “overpopulated”?

Indeed, who are you? If anything, it is we, of the global south, who consume less + pollute less per capita who should cast our eyes upon western nations with disapproval.

Every time I read the adjective “overpopulated” to describe a non-Western nation, I cannot help but jump to a dangerous conclusion: that the writer has failed to prevent herself being inculcated with genocidal ideas.

Is New York “overpopulated”?
Is London?
Or is it only Bangladesh and Nigeria whose populations deserve our scrutiny?

And pray tell; why is the poverty of non-Western nations blamed on this “overpopulation” thing. What of the rural poor in America? Why isn’t their suffering being met with stern warnings to Have Fewer Babies?

Overpopulated according to whose metric? Sit down for a moment, I implore you. Think clearly and soberly. Who are you to determine how many brown people should exist in the world?

And this isn’t fictional. The French president’s first speech in Africa was to say we Africans have too many babies. Would he tell his own citizens that? What is it about brown wombs that inspires such audacity?

Again, my advice is simple.
When this thought comes: “there are too many people in country X.”
Ask yourself, “To Who?”

If anything, if anything at all, it is we who suffer the brunt of climate change caused by western consumption who have the logical standing to apply the term “overpopulation” to industrial nations.

Look: if African nations got together and said America is overpopulated; do you know how many people would lose their minds? It would be proclaimed a genocidal act. And yet when done to us it is merely “development advice”

They are basically saying the solution to planet earths problems is less brown people. I hate to put it in such outrageous terms but it is, I’m afraid, an outrageous idea.