Easterine Kire
LATELY racial hatred has been very much in the news both in the Indian metropolises and internationally. Crimes of race will always continue to make news as long as the human race continues. Ethnic cleansing is a continuous activity. It was there much before Hitler and will be there until mankind dies out.
The rapes, beatings and killings of persons of Northeast origin in Indian cities are undeniably crimes of race. There are just so many articles out there on inherent racism in India. It is not just India. No nation exists that is not racist, no nation exists that does not favour its own people over others. While the Northeast is accusing the population in the cities of practicing racism, those who are non-local and have lived all their lives in the northeast are in turn, accusing the Northeastern states of racist attitudes toward non-locals. There was a long article written by a non-local resident of Shillong where he recounted the local government policy to prevent non-locals from buying land or houses in Meghalaya. At the same time, successful Assamese writer Aruni Kashyap’s article on racism in India has been severely attacked by readers who could not get the irony inherent in his writing.
There will always be two sides of the coin, two versions of the racist story.
Evolutionary psychology says racism is in our genes: “it is a genetic adaptation that helps groups survive by favoring themselves over others.” This statement has come in for much attack. The attackers come from the school that preaches that racism is learned behavior, and is not genetically transmitted. In America, where the police themselves have committed crimes of race on its black population, the statistics show that it is white people who commit the highest number of crimes.
The school that says racism is learned behavior, like to use the examples of young children from different races befriending each other at kindergarten without any sense of racial prejudice. According to them, this proves that we are not genetically racist else children would make friends only with children of the same color and race as them. I like to agree with them more than those who espouse the first opinion.
Whatever the arguments are, it all boils down to this. Racism is a problem of the whole human race. It is found in village after village and tribe after tribe. It exists in varying degrees. It can be the very insidious action of shutting someone out of our conversations just because her/his language is different from ours. Or it could be the more aggressive decision of shutting them out of the work force by legal means. It is the We vs. Them syndrome. Certainly it is connected to survival and the problem of having to share our fast depleting natural resources. At the same time, it is also connected to the unhealthy habit of stereotyping and acting on prejudice. When we turn the searchlight on ourselves, we would have to honestly admit that racism dwells within all of us. This inner racism is fuelled by what sounds like rational grounds, and based on those grounds we let it remain. Is a little racism healthy?
I think this is a long debate. There are no easy answers or solutions. The scary thing is, it is within us all.
We are all capable of racist conduct. It becomes much more complicated when it is no longer an external problem which we can safely view from our comfort zone. To discover that we too are racist is definitely a shameful and dreadful awakening. But that could become part of the solution. I think it is far more dangerous when we are not aware what evil we are also capable of.
