They are artists and sportspeople or public figures and yet they are barely noticed. Finkapé has partnered with Rotondes to help restore the balance and improve the visibility of the prominent afro-descendant figures who help put Luxembourg on the map through their work, creations and local and/or international presence. And it all starts with Wikipedia.
During this edit-a-thon (from “to edit” and “marathon”), participants become fully-fledged contributors to Wikipedia after having received an introduction to editing, updating and publishing articles on the online encyclopaedia. The aim is to counter the under-representation of BIPOC on this platform, which is mainly maintained by white men in their thirties.
It’s an established fact that Wikipedia is no neutral space, something New York lawyer Alica Backer has been trying to dismantle since founding AfroCROWD in 2015. An initiative intended to “rectify Wikipedia’s lack of articles about black history and black culture” and which has inspired many others in the US and elsewhere.
This lack of representation is obviously not without consequences, including in Luxembourg. It creates racial bias and erases the presence of Afro-descendants from the national landscape. While Luxembourg’s cultural and ethnic diversity seems well established, the visibility of Afro-descendants remains painfully limited. Furthermore, racial bias tends to perpetuate a negative image of the people concerned, to reinforce the current dominant world vision and to blur our small Grand Duchy’s real diversity.