TO THE EDITOR:
When I was younger, my father frequently accused me of having “selective hearing.” When he asked me to sweep the basement steps or scrub the tub, I couldn’t quite hear him as well as I could when he and my mother whispered about having dessert or not.
Reading a recent MSNBC article about sex trafficking at the Super Bowl in conjunction with Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” in my southern literature class got me thinking about selective sight. According to the MSNBC article, pimps trafficked thousands of underage prostitutes to the Super Bowl to capitalize on a wealth of prospective clients. In the article, a Texas attorney general deemed it one of the “biggest human trafficking events in the United States.”
From what I have learned in studies done about these “underage prostitutes,” they are actually young women, usually foreign, who have been sold into this sex-slave industry at a young age. Yet, as I watched the game that Sunday, I “saw” a limited definition of the game: players, coaches and the field. The game is more than those three elements. It’s the whole event – every type of interaction surrounding and supporting it. This means that as viewers if we approach common events like the Super Bowl with selective sight, we cannot recognize underlying problems and therefore cannot address them.
Virginia Thomas
Junior
American Studies
