I am a racist
Saturday, September 12th, 2009 September 12th, 2009 S Kalyana Ramanathan|
I think one of the best movies that ever came out of Hollywood was the 1968 classic — Stanley Kramer’s “Guess who’s coming for dinner”. It is a popular favourite among movie fans. It is a movie about love, about good parenting, class differences and above all about racism. In fact it is a movie about colour-blind love to be precise. I have a favourite line in that movie. It’s the scene when the white mother tells her white husband that their white daughter is in love with a black man. And the mother played by Katherine Hepburn thus goes: “It’s not just that our color difference doesn’t matter to her. It’s that she doesn’t seem to think there is any difference.” That is the beauty of the golden oldies — the dialogues. They were precise and conveyed serious meaning with no trace of ambiguity. Well this is not a belated movie review. My point is that something more current but related to the issue the movie deals with. For all practical purposes I am a black man. OK brown to be precise. Hues and shades don’t matter here. The point is I am non-white. I don’t feel inferior about it. Neither do I have a misplaced notion of being an underdog. This is just the surface. The truth a bit deeper and its quite unsettling. I find that I am constantly reminding myself of my skin colour. I did not have this issue for 37 years in India. But in a country like the UK where the whites out-number other skin colours, I seem to think that I am a minority. Not a victim, but just a numerical minority. It has been nearly a year since I came to this country. With absolute certainty I can assure you that neither me nor any of my family members have had any experience that suggest that our skin colour is alien in this country. Yet, I constantly judge. Every normal experience I have is evaluated by my notion of racism. I find that before a white takes a seat next to me in a bus or the tube, he or she scans for other vacant seats. When there is no other vacant seat, they unwillingly sit next to me or sometimes prefer to stand. Or so I think. When me and my visiting Indian friends were made to wait for a bit longer in a Pizza Express outlet before our order is taken, I refused to tip and mumbled something about the white waitress being a racist. Another day, I found myself in a new neighbourhood not very far from home while trying to catch a bus home. Two buses went by and did not stop despite my hand-signaling. A black lady who was waiting with me said it was a bigoted neighbourhood and white drivers will not stop when they see the stop has only blacks waiting. I turned around and noticed that it was an all-black crowd at the stop. Well may be the lady was right. I have met the sweetest white man on the street who took me on a ‘Jack-the-Ripper’ walking tour and the rudest black man in the bus elbowing me for more standing space. I have been cursed by an old white lady for looking at her weird dog for a few seconds longer and have had the most interesting conversation on Christianity with a black cab driver. I find that racism is not about skin colour. It’s just about people and their stupid prejudices. And more importantly it’s not just about white against black. In can be as much the other way around too. Extreme cases of race hate is easy to notice and write about. They are obvious and don’t demand a terribly intelligent mind to comprehend its existence. It is the inherent and deep-seated notion about race that worries me more. Personally I would feel free from this mental baggage when I stop noticing the skin colour. Until then I will consider myself to be racist. It does not matter if doesn’t manifest itself in a prejudicial form.
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