The Racist Chronicles - I

Racism is perhaps a virulent disease, an ailment that somehow pervades time and space, and strikes every heart, irrespective of its ethnicity or origin. And what is more ironic is that even those who suffer at the hands of another ‘race’ choose to exhibit racial prerogatives, choose to display racial biases and prejudices. Whoever said that only the one who bleeds is the one best placed to comprehend the pain perhaps never was racially discriminated against, nor saw racial discrimination being meted out to fellow human beings.

Racism, to my mind, is perhaps borne out of a deep sense of insecurity, and perhaps a generic inability to comprehend or accept that it is possible for someone coming from a different background than you can be any better than you. If you observe racial laws such as the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany, or the Manusmriti in India, then there is a marked mention about the need to preserve certain occupations, certain privileges and certain prerogatives for certain races/communities at the expense of the rest. And when I mean expense, I really mean it was expensive, considering that penalties for violating such ‘statutes’ of society were often either physical mutilation or death.

And perhaps this is an attitude that pervades even to this day. Previously dominant colonial powers have to face their former subjects outperforming them on all fronts, and actually developing to such a stage, that they have to learn from them how to run a country. Local denizens, who till now have been enjoying the status of first world citizens, are now trembling under the burden of unemployment, their misery something that they attribute to the growing clout of outsourcing and a resurgent Third World. They choose to ignore that they have lost the edge when it comes to the skills required to succeed in this age, that they no longer are the race prima, the primal people, the Alphas and the Omegas of the earth (actually they never were, just that then they had the muscle power to keep the others under their feet).

And this manifests in racism. You feel obliged to insult, to curse and to demean the one whom you blame for your problems, in order to make yourself feel a little bit better. You will call them names, ask them to leave ‘your’ country, which is a supreme irony, because indigenous people rarely if ever have been left pure-blooded, and now no race per se can claim purity of origin, and hence your claims on the land are as ambiguous as that of your victim. You will taunt those whom you know to be better than you in some aspect of life, merely because they happen to come from a different background than you, a background that you know may have assisted in their growth, but which you are reluctant to appreciate, for fear that doing so would imply that you are ashamed of your own background.

This may not always be the case. Even nations who for centuries suffered discrimination at the hands of others indulge in discriminating against others once they achieve freedom for themselves. Uganda stands out perhaps as the best example of this mindset. And this is sad, because it somehow mocks their own suffering, the trauma that they underwent.

The Holocaust and the Inquisition are prime examples of what a racially biased society can be brought about to do, if properly ‘demotivated’. One sees a lot of demotivation going around the place, and maybe this is truly the precursor to the end, the final Apocalypse, when all races will war to the finish, the ultimate finish.