A Race We Can All Win- Part 3 of 5

At the beginning of 1998, I decided it was time for me to move on from the country of my birth to seek new pastures, as my parents’ generation had done. I wanted more out of life in a place that was English-speaking and progressive, and most importantly, where my ethnicity would not be a barrier. What can I say - other than that I was young and naive. I spent almost a year engaged in research looking at different countries and comparing various statistics on the economy, climate, politics, pollution, crime, social mobility and so on. After much deliberation, I settled on Canada, which branded itself as a multicultural mosaic at the time, and I applied through their skilled worker program. After applying I decided to travel to Vancouver and spent six months volunteering in a couple of organizations to immerse myself in its culture.

I really enjoyed the time I spent working at the First Nations House of Learning (the ‘Longhouse’) at UBC, and got to learn a little about the indigenous peoples and cultures of Canada. Concurrently, I was also a mentor on the ‘downtown east-side project’. My rose-tinted view of Canada was changed during this time.  I realized after many conversations that these people had suffered great discrimination in their own country, had been marginalized by the European settlers, and had suffered many injustices along the way.

Immigrant communities also suffer systemic racism in Canada, though not as overtly as I had previously experienced. I witnessed a fair amount of prejudice directed at Asian people in particular. The default complaint I heard was about Chinese people, but it could easily apply to any other race. Canada was still much more progressive than the UK, America and the other choices I was considering, so I emigrated there. During my time in Canada, I was only called a ‘Paki’ twice.  Progressive, right? Most of the time I was described as either a Brit (by my accent) or East-Indian, which was strange, as it revealed the mindset of the people who were defining me. I had never been called East-Indian before, and assumed they must have thought I was from the Eastern part of India.

The origins of the label ‘East-Indian’ are connected to my own migration route in an abstract way, so bear with me as I connect the dots. The East India Company was the colonial entity that first traded with India; after a series of wars with the Mughals, it then ruled India from 1757 to 1858, before the British Crown took over until India’s independence in 1947. My parents migrated from India to Britain, where I was born. I migrated to Canada, where I was again an ‘East Indian’, and then to the United States, which has a flag based on the design of the flag of the East India Company! Benjamin Franklin said to George Washington, "While the field of your flag must be new in the details of its design, it need not be entirely new in its elements. There is already in use a flag… I refer to the flag of the East India Company."

The Flag of the East India Company (1801). Credit: Wikipedia

When I questioned the East-Indian label, it was explained to me that they had to distinguish between an Indian from India and one from North America. Columbus thought he had arrived in India, so the name stuck for the indigenous peoples of North America, instead of the names they used themselves. Now there is an official recognition in Canada of First Nations people, to relieve some of this cognitive dissonance, so there has been some progress.

Tribal Nations of North America. Credit: Mapsontheweb-maps.com

A white person generally doesn’t need to deal with this issue, since in Canada they are a Canadian, and in America they are an American. Everyone else tends to get hyphenated (sounds painful!) regardless of their own preference. National identities are all social constructs anyway, and we should be allowed to choose our own. The trouble only becomes obvious when we think about the debate over gender identities, but the common denominator is the identity a person wishes to use for themselves. I am sure that over time, the hyphenated names denoting ancestry will disappear with each progressive generation as their origins will become less important.

 

White people do not have a monopoly on racism and prejudice. Anyone is capable of inflicting the same behaviour on others, even if they suffered from it themselves. Amongst many colonized and oppressed people, there are victims who became the perpetrators, and recycled the prejudice and hate that they received. I am also well aware that prejudice exists in every country to different extents, both in terms of ethnicity as well as religion. To reiterate, I am writing about my own experiences in the places I have lived, I am sure that others may have experienced it differently and I appreciate those views are equally valid. As Malcolm X had acknowledged near the end of his historical journey, ‘Whiteness’ is not a prerequisite for racist behaviour.

As for white people, being ‘white’ is not a choice they made themselves. They did not choose their own socialization or conditioning, and therefore they should not have to feel guilt, unless they know the nature of the world around them and are not doing anything about it. Of course, the same goes for all of us. I have always made a clear distinction in my own experiences between malicious intent in behaviour, and ignorance or lack of knowledge about race and culture. Although they are connected, I would treat each very differently. Generalizations and stereotypes based on anecdotal and individual experiences are dangerous. I recall having a discussion with other white colleagues in the publishing company, Pearson Education, the first job I had landed soon after my arrival in Canada.  I was the only visible minority amongst hundreds of colleagues. One evening, over dinner, they were telling their own travel horror stories about their trips to Africa and Asia. Many of them were based on generalizations that concluded with casual racist observations. I tried to give some context, from my interest in cultural anthropology, but it was a very difficult discussion. How do you deal with an anecdotal experience that a person believes is the norm? Everyone’s own subjective experience informs their world view, but are they aware that the views of others, also from limited subjective experiences, may be equally true?

In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, referenced in the ancient Sanskrit texts of the Upanishads, all reality is subject to different interpretations. This premise is the foundation for an objective or universalist perspective.  A group of blind men were told that an elephant would be visiting their village. They were very excited to find out more about this creature, so they went to the village market to experience what it was. Since they were blind, they had to feel with their hands what it might be. Each man only felt a part of the elephant, as they did not know that there was more to it. One felt its trunk, another its leg, ear and so on. They each believed they had each experienced the elephant in its entirety, even though they had only experienced one part of it.  Then each man described the specific part they had felt to the others, as this was what each individual believed the elephant actually was. As they couldn’t see the whole creature, they fell into an argument, and began to fight each other calling each other liars. In the Sufi version of this story retold by Rumi in his Masnavi, the men were in the dark and not blind. His version ends with him stating, “If each had a candle and they went in together the differences would disappear.”

So many disagreements on race and culture are ultimately down to the different perspectives drawn from our own individual experiences. They may have some truth to them, but they do not represent any objective truth. Understanding how we come to know things, and separate fact from opinion, is a real struggle. Epistemology is a subject that really needs to be taught in school, particularly in this age of information, where knowledge is power. People are overwhelmed by having so much information at their fingertips and thus have to rely on trusted sources that often have their own political agendas. Education, and understanding the methods of learning, including critical reflection, can help to unify what we know about each other and the world around us. It can guide us to make better decisions with robust outcomes.

The Blind Men and the Elephant. Credit: D.C. Heath and Co.

I did try to address the issues of racism while living in Vancouver. I went to many talks at the University of British Columbia and at the Vancouver Public Library to listen to speakers on a range of subjects related to discrimination and pacifism. I saw a connection between the dehumanization of people and their culture and conflict. I was a member of an anti-war group, and protested the invasion of Iraq and other military conflicts. The first step in the dehumanization of people is to see them as an ‘other’, something distinctly different from ourselves. It’s ‘Us and Them’, like the track from the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon. Not only is war hell, it’s insane as well. The song was about war and the contributory conditions which lead to it, including colour prejudice and effective infrahumanization, that potentially drive us to ultimately kill another human. ‘Infrahumanization’ is an interesting word. It isn’t exactly the same as ‘dehumanization’, but more nuanced. It arises when people view their ingroup as different in essence to the outgroup which they then deny the same humanness, the ability to feel the same way, the same joys and pains. Roger Waters once stated in an interview, “We can either pool our love, develop our capacity to empathize with others and act collectively for the good of our planet, or we can remain comfortably numb.”

Movie poster of Us and Them . Credit: Trafalgar Releasing

I spoke on an anti-racism panel at the University of British Columbia as part of the ‘Not on Our Campus’ campaign. During this time, I shared an apartment with a writer, who taught me about the history of Canada from a Cree perspective. He told me one day about how he had called the police to his house after he’d seen a stranger in the garden from the window and been concerned about his family. He stood outside on the lawn waiting for them to arrive, and when they did, an overzealous officer used a taser on him, even as he was telling the officer that it was he who had called the police in the first place. To add insult to injury, they took him away in a police car and put him in jail. He was later released, with no apology or any form of compensation. I was incensed, and urged him to write about this to the local paper. He told me that this kind of thing was so common it would not change anything.  Unfortunately, Larry was right. This is a common occurrence in Canada, where indigenous people, to this day, are systemically discriminated against by police and the society they live in. Historically this has occurred since the first settlers arrived in Canada and the foundation of the Hudson Bay Company, the acquisition of land and resources, and the residential schools that separated families from their children and re-educated them. The list of horrors goes on until the present where they are ‘managed’ by a system that deprives them of their humanity (click here to hear Sheila Wolfleg talking about her residential school experience). To be fair, there are many progressive Canadians who regularly campaign against this discrimination and are trying to change society for the better. This gives me hope.

Canadian Senator Justice Murray Sinclair. Credit: CBC

I recall an interaction one day with the building manager of the condominium where I lived, on Robson Street in Vancouver. He saw me pass by the café where he was sitting reading a newspaper, and called out to me. I had always been polite with him, and would chat whenever I saw him. As I sat down, he showed me the headlines in the newspaper about Chinese immigrants who had stowed away on a boat to smuggle themselves into Canada. He just went off for almost an hour about Chinese people: how they are taking over and don’t speak English, about illegal migration, and then the Indian Act. I had never seen him so animated about any topic. He said a lot of racist things, telling me (while he was saying them) that he was “not a racist, but…” I listened to him patiently, and when he had finished, I told him, “Yes, I see what you mean. I wonder if this is how first nation peoples must have felt when they were invaded by Europeans?” He just stared back at me blankly for a minute and went back to reading his paper. I got up and migrated away.

I got married in 2012 and moved to Philadelphia a year later. My observation on racial identity and culture from living in Philadelphia was like experiencing déjà vu. I had seen this movie already: the plot was the same but the characters had changed. This version also had a lot more gratuitous violence.

There are many good things about the United States and its people that I really like and enjoy, but one of the major issues holding American society back is that same issue of racism and prejudice - and to an even greater extent than my previous experience. Fear of the ‘other’, and the prevalent gun culture, do not help the situation. Levels of racism vary depending on where you live, but the main difference is, that racism is palpable in the way so many American cities still have areas divided by ethnic lines and communities, many of whom simply do not mix. I have seen more overt discrimination towards Black people than any other race, even though Hispanics and other ethnic groups also suffer it. Fear has a huge part to play in this. Americans are courageous people in some ways, but paradoxically also shackled and divided by these age-old fears and mistrust.

Genocide and slavery were the midwives at America’s birth. The pains of labour can still be felt: the wealth and power of this country was based on slavery, after the genocide that removed and displaced the native American population. A large part of the indigenous population died from the lack of immunity to the ‘old world’ diseases, though there is evidence that a some were subjected to deliberate infection with what we would now call biological warfare.

The transatlantic slave trade was a horrific chapter of human history and enriched the mostly European nations that indulged in it.

 

L’amour – slave ship called ‘Love’ commemorated by a glass brick in Nantes at the Museum of Slavery

America was built on this foundation and the economic disparities it produced. African people were abducted from their native lands and transported in the most inhumane conditions; many died on the voyage and sold into a terrible life of slavery.

Stowage of a British Slave Ship (1788)

This was forced migration: these people did not consent to or want it, and it was not for their own economic improvement, but rather for the economic empowerment of their ‘owners’. Even after 1865 and the Emancipation Declaration, African Americans were still not truly free; they were then subjected to the continuing injustices of the racist Jim Crow laws, lynching, imprisonment, segregation, discrimination, and poverty. These words do not adequately describe the true horror of their predicament. Imagine a human being (who looks like you) beaten bloody, young children raped, men incarcerated in small spaces, sometimes for years, hung by their neck on a tree and burnt while still alive. All these vile and horrific things happened to African Americans specifically because of their race and this needs to be fully understood to appreciate why so many years later this is still etched into the psyche of so many people. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, right up to the present day, there has still not been any real reconciliation between the way that African Americans are treated, though there have been efforts made by States across America to educate people about these historical injustices. Some people feel frustrated and angry that they should not have to pay for what happened ‘hundreds of years ago’, and cannot understand why Black people are so sensitive to the way they are treated or why they demand respect. There is a huge disconnect between large parts of the population and what they feel responsible for and entitled to. It is too simplistic to blame just one group of people for this or that, since all our choices and decisions impact each other in ways we do not see. This is partly due to the way our communities are structured. We still have a kind of segregation based on the zip code or area that people live in, where schools, crime, amenities and wealth are all interconnected. Where you live often dictates outcomes for your health, education for your children, employment, and encounters with police. It’s interesting that the safest communities do not have the most police, but they do have the most resources. The company people keep outside of work also generally tends to be within the same racial groups. Many people do not get a chance to interact with people socially who are different from themselves. Doing so would bridge a lot of gaps in understanding.

For example,  African Americans make up about 43% of the population of Philadelphia, yet it remains one of the most segregated cities in America. Many people do not understand that this is a result of legislated segregation and poverty; it is not purely by accident, but by design.

From the 1930s the federal government encouraged mortgage lenders to withhold credit from older neighbourhoods, immigrant communities, and particularly areas where African Americans or other people of colour lived. This process was known as ‘redlining’, as banks and federal agencies literally used red ink to define the areas that would be disinvested. North Philadelphia, and many other urban areas across America where African-Americans lived, were choked off from the investment they so badly needed.

                    Redlined areas of Philadelphia. Credit: National Archives and Records Administration

The reality of being black in America is that there are major obstacles that white people generally do not face. There is no comparison when it comes to statistics about discrimination.

 

Experiences of African Americans n=802. Credit: NPR / Harvard School of Public Health 2017

“What is portrayed in the daily news about racial discrimination in America corresponds to the very real personal experiences of Black Americans today, particularly in the areas of employment, interacting with the police, and housing,” says Robert Blendon, Professor of Health Policy and Political Analysis at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who co-directed the survey. The resulting anger and frustration in the African-American community ends up contributing to the confirmation bias of whites and other communities that ‘they’ are the ones with a problem, and that’s partly why things never change.

The current political climate is so divisive that a US president could hold a rally in Tulsa, the place where one of the largest massacres of black people occurred in US history, the day after ‘Juneteenth’ or Emancipation Day. This is mind-boggling. It shows the lack of empathy and demonstrates the huge rift in this country, even after the national recognition of the murder of George Floyd. One of the president’s closest advisors, Stephen Miller, has documented relations with white supremacists as well as being involved in the propagation of conspiracy theories.

The abuse of power by the police is symptomatic of a much deeper racial problem that results in officers disproportionately targeting young black men. In “officer involved” shootings, they are shot and killed at more than twice the rate of white men under the same conditions. This power dynamic represents the concentration of power within our society.  Admittedly, other immigrant communities have also suffered from this abuse of power, but none as much as the African-American community. My friend Kamil worked at a gym part-time, while also running an IT business. He told me of a very different reality of living in Philadelphia, and not in the old city neighbourhood where the gym was based. He had lots of stories about racism and the issues that black people face in Philadelphia. I also saw how he was treated by some of his colleagues and did not think it was fair. His attitude was to keep his head down and work regardless. He was very stoic about it and he needed this job so he accepted an imperfect work environment. We would share some solidarity, and I regret that I never opened up about my own struggles with racism, as I was so focused on commiserating with his. It is so important for people to build unity with each other in the struggle for change. Through solidarity comes strength.