Nothing like moral compass to sink prejudices

The bewildering attacks on Africans in New Delhi betray the huge number of prejudices we Indians carry.  We may harbor a humongous dislike of colonial rule but it is extremely doubtful if Indians would be guilty of attacking a set of firangis with white skin.  Seen in that perspective, the attack on Africans is pure racism and we know it, but we have difficulty in accepting it. We rationalise it saying these are aberrations in the land of Gandhi, etc.

Truth to tell, we suffer from a wide range of prejudices – religion, caste, community, colour, education, region. You don’t even have to read the matrimonial classifieds section to know the depth of our loyalties to our sect. The social media also makes it so easy to display such extreme likes and dislikes. It is a sort of golden age for free speech as common voices reach more people. Such freedom, however, also betrays our thinking, our pet likes and dislikes.

Rarely do our racist attitudes break out into violence as it did in the case of Africans in the capital. Whatever be the gulf between Africans and Indians – and a few do exist because of our perception of ‘loud’ behaviour - it can’t descend to a mob attack on a visiting student. We used to tread in fear on visits to Johannesburg, but then what we face there is pandemic violence not directed against members of a particular race. Inner city crime is bred in criminality and mindless violence. The context of racial crime is entirely different.

In a connected world in which smartphones can browse newspapers on the other side of the world in seconds, retaliatory violence in Africa was predictable. News travels in the blink of an eye, so too billions of tweets, Fb posts and blogs. But then violence only begets violence and we know this too well being in the land of Gandhi. It is sad then to be dealing with spiralling hate, fuelled even more by today’s social media, which is a sort of quick grapevine.  

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Microsoft recently signed a European Union pledge to combat racism and xenophobia on their platforms. That sounds an easy enough thing to say but far more difficult to police even with the most sophisticated algorithms. Imagine then the kind of policing we need of our minds to weed out the racism and xenophobia resident within us, there being no algorithm to sort our thoughts into the acceptable versus the perverse.

It seemed so easy to notice the racism resident in others when we came across it. On a London street, it didn’t surprise us if the ‘For Hire’ light on top of the taxi suddenly blinked off if a couple of Asian guys tried to flag it down late night. Or the coffee shop assistant rushing in The City to put up the ‘Closed’ sign if we Asians were trying to wander in just before closing time. You forgave the little racist gestures of the obviously uneducated or ignorant people who could not hide their prejudices.  

To lump whole groups of people into one and classify them in one stereotypical pattern of behaviour is the greatest disservice we do to others. This does happen worldwide like in the obvious racism brought out in the biggest ongoing trial of an Indian couple in Australia where the bank manager says that “because they are Indians they have no moral compass.”  But we can’t lose our compass just because others are prejudiced. Racism is a matter of personal morality and a moral compass in this matter is very vital. It is upto each individual to check that compass and live life suppressing the instinctive prejudices that spring, at first sight as it were.