Assuming
America means the US, in my experience, India and the US are
depressingly similar when it comes to racism. Both have a long shameful
history of deliberately disenfranchising specific groups of people, who
are then socially shunned, economically decimated, and culturally
sidelined, of course after the dominant groups appropriate whatever they
like or want. As well, this history is much longer in India, the group
in question the Dalit,
formerly called Untouchables. In the US, it's blacks and Native
Americans. Process is also depressingly similar, the marginalized are
deliberately segregated geographically, economically, educationally. In
both countries, widespread protest movements galvanized change with
governments enacting laws attempting to empower and enfranchise, through
a variety of Affirmative action
programs. However, ensuing changes are often cosmetic and cultures
stubbornly hold on to the disenfranchising status quo. After all, easier
for the privileged to view their accomplishments as merit-based rather
than feasting off the banquet of generational entitlement, easier to
dismiss the deliberately, systematically downtrodden groups as deserving
of their lowlier fates. Difference is India retains a more visible and
persistent feudal structure that exacerbates caste and class divides.
My
earliest memory of bigotry is from my own family. With India still
stubbornly feudal, everyone worth their salt has servants, now
euphemistically called domestic workers. Change in name, not dignity. We
had a couple, wife for house work, husband the gardener. I was around 3
or 4 years old. Living with us, my widowed paternal grandmother,
conservative, rigid and very casteist. She'd wash her own clothes and
hang them out to dry in the back yard. That day, as she used her long
bamboo stick to hang it out on the back yard clothes line, Katayan, the
gardener, accidentally brushed against her washed saree while weeding a
garden patch. I'll never forget the Tamil cry that burst out from her
lips, 'Dushta, dushta', i.e. wicked, wicked. Striking him once on
the shoulder with her stick, she then agitatedly set to pulling her
saree off the clothesline and ran off with it to wash it again, his
body's accidental brushing apparently enough to 'pollute' it.
Of
course, this was decades back and India has come a long way from such
decrepit and utterly repulsive ideas or so the elite would have us
believe but nothing could be further from the truth. By many measurable
metrics, access to education, literacy rates, per capita income, Dalits
remain marginalized and disenfranchised, entirely by design and not by
accident. Sure, the Indian media often touts tremendous individual Dalit
success stories but the reality is similar to the US. After all, one
Obama in the White House doesn't mean blacks are suddenly equal to
whites in terms of access to opportunities, wealth and power, and
protection under the law, does it? And, lacking even the fig leaf of an
Obama, Native Americans are left out of the conversation altogether.
Years
later, a conference room at the US NIH fills up as people stream in for
a meeting or presentation. Walk in on the tail end of some desultory
conversation about a topical news issue, obviously about blacks.
Shockingly, a senior white researcher, a famous name in fact, says of
course, it's well known that among blacks it's the stupid ones that got
caught in the first place. I'd never heard of such a flagrantly odious
and self-serving theory to explain black enslavement. To hear it at all
was shocking, to hear it stated by someone so highly educated even more
so. That it was said at all in that room only emphasizes how spaces
deemed to represent power in US society continue to systematically
exclude blacks. Of course, that room was filling up with white Americans
and immigrants deemed deserving, no blacks.
My
own experience of racism in the US was less overt, often expressed as
persistent suspicion. For e.g., being asked for my ID when presenting a
credit card at the check-out when those ahead of and behind me, all
whites, weren't. Once is a quirk. Often? That's a pattern. Then there
was that ominous entanglement with a white cop my very first year in the
US. Having written about it elsewhere (1),
the recent, steady drip-drip of news stories of blacks killed in police
encounters underlines in no uncertain terms how lucky I was to not end
up with the same ignominious fate, shot and killed during a police
encounter.
Recently, India was roiled with the high-profile Suicide of Rohith Vemula,
a Dalit scholar at the University of Hyderabad. Didn't make as much of a
buzz on Quora. Inevitably, what I read included commenters unabashedly
engaging in character assassination of a young man who's no longer
around to defend himself. After all, at a time when internet penetration
is <30% in India, no surprise haves would dominate in their access
to it. Meantime, protestors in India are rightfully calling it
institutional murder. After all, Dalits who demand to be seen as peers
are actually perceived as dangerous interlopers and treated as such,
creating conditions not so different from those that provoked the recent
protests at 2015 University of Missouri protests. Why did Rohith's suicide touch such a nerve? The poignance and eloquence of his suicide note (2).
Even birth in penury to a laborer and a seamstress couldn't prevent his
rare and marvelous writing talent from blossoming. As James Baldwin famously seared the American public's conscience in his 1963 interview (3) with Dr. Kenneth Clark on the Negro and the American Promise,
so Rohith's forlorn words reverberate in India today, in a culture that
pays lip-service and doesn't sincerely engage in righting egregious
historical wrongs, whose entrenched elite lack the generosity and
humanism necessary to restore dignity to the ranks of the generationally
oppressed by reaching out, mentoring and nurturing their talent.
Racism
is much more stark and overt for the thousands of African students now
streaming into India for higher studies. As a black American PhD Student
at the Delhi School of Economics wrote in 2009 (4),
'Discrimination in Delhi surpasses the denial of courtesy. I have been denied visas, apartments, entrance to discos, attentiveness, kindness and the benefit of doubt. Further, the lack of neighbourliness exceeds what locals describe as normal for a capital already known for its coldness.My partner is white and I am black, facts of which the Indian public reminds us daily. Bank associates have denied me chai, while falling over to please my white friend. Mall shop attendants have denied me attentiveness, while mobbing my partner. Who knows what else is more quietly denied?"An African has come," a guard announced over the intercom as I showed up. Whites are afforded the luxury of their own names, but this careful attention to my presence was not new. ATM guards stand and salute my white friend, while one guard actually asked me why I had come to the bank machine as if I might have said that I was taking over his shift'.
Be
it Caste Hindus in India or whites in the US, bigotry goes underground
following laws ostensibly banning it. Enacting laws isn't the same as
implementing them. Entrenched power doesn't give its hegemony away. It
has to be wrested out of cold dead, usually male, hands. Meantime,
institutionalized bigotry cleverly engages in tokenism to gain the cover
of plausible deniability, something B. R. Ambedkar, Dalit architect of India's constitution foresaw (5).
Obvious symbols of tokenism, when blacks and mixed race sporadically
rotated through my NIH lab, systematic lack of structural support and
thoughtful mentoring ensured their inevitable failure. Self-fulfilling
prophecy in place, such tokenism also gestates the far more dangerous
seed of resentment within the easily self-satisfied and less self-aware
among the privileged, yes, the same ones quick to myopically complain
about oppressive levels of political correctness in society.
A quote often attributed to Gandhi advises, 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win'.
Yet the process isn't so conveniently linear, tying itself in the
pretty bow tie of victory at the end. All too often, initial victories
are pyrrhic and the persistently disenfranchised need to cycle back
through the process. So, be it India or the US, we're cycling back to
the 3rd stage. In both cultures, pressures from such an abhorrent and
unsustainable form of institutionalized apartheid are now again coming
to the boiling point. Maybe a course correction, maybe some more laws,
some more tokenism, ending with marginally more power to the Dalits and
blacks. Dare we ever hope for better than this?
Foot-notes
2. Rohith Vemula's suicide letter published by the Times of India, Jan 19, 2016. Full text: Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula's suicide note - Times of India
3. James Baldwin interviewed by Dr Kenneth Clark, 1963. WGBH American Experience
. Bonus Video
. Bonus Video
4. Outlook India, Diepiriye Kuku, June 29, 2009. 'India Is Racist, And Happy About It'
5. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Interview by BBC Radio, 1955. Round Table India - Dr Ambedkar Remembers the Poona Pact in an Interview on the BBC
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-differences-and-similarities-between-India-and-America-when-it-comes-to-racism/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala
As always wiht your other essays, very well written. Racism exists no matter where you go! I recall how even professional Keralites visiting Gujarat in 80s were treated by local Gujaratis. I personally have seen how neighbors treat boys who knock doors for contributions for their school activities. I do not why but the color of skin and ethnicity matters no matter where you go. Even among Dalits there are sub groups and they treat each other differently. Only way to rid the curse of racism is to educate our own children to treat everyone equally - by our own action. Our own fear and lack of self esteem is what drives bigotry.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing. I keep writing in the hope that somewhere it resonates with someone so feedback like yours helps to keep me going.
ReplyDeleteBeing raised in a particular reality is where it starts, the one that creates the insularity that in turn creates the exclusion, the entitlement, the privilege.
Yes, pervasive insecurity is often the impetus for seeking to prove oneself superior to someone else. There's a moment in the video (Reference 3) where James Baldwin famously asks 'What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it.', really, this goes to the heart of discrimination, of every sort of attempt to discriminate, to 'otherize'.
Problem is not enough of the ones who otherize others seem to reach a place in their lives to ask themselves this most crucial question. And so the perverse cycle continues on.