Okay, I am now opening a Pandora’s Box, but I hope that it generates some introspection on both sides of the fence.
I just read this piece called My Racist Encounter At The White House Correspondents’ Dinner in The Blog.
I also went through the entire section covering 2419 comments which took me a while to understand various approaches to the reality of racism.
I wrote a comment ” Balderdash Lady, stop whining and exercise an option that you have. You don’t have to live there. Go live where you are treated with the dignity that you think you deserve. No one is forcing you to live there. It is their land, their home and their own value system that is on display. You don’t have to accept that.” On reflection I decided that it is best left unpublished and deleted it without publishing it.
Having been at the receiving end of racism in the West, Australia and also strangely enough, from a couple of white persons in India, I can relate to Ms. Jeelani’s angst, but and that is a big but, as I wanted to convey to her, she has a choice of living in a place where she will not be exposed to that. Her own land of origin from where her parents had emigrated, presumably one of my subcontinental countries.
What she would find in that sub continent will not be any different. Though it may not directly be racial, she can most certainly experience other forms of prejudice from poorly educated people doing unskilled jobs like Security detail. A classic example could be linguistic. In my home state for instance, if you do not understand and speak Marathi, you will receive a similar treatment from the cops and watchmen and other low level employees who savour such moments to exercise power over someone, in their eyes, superior, but different and fair game. If she is from Pakistan, which is most likely, and if she is a Shia or a Christian, she can expect worse. If she is from Bangladesh, if she is from one of the two main stream political parties, the other party will most certainly give her worse treatment than she received in Washington.
Grow up lady. This is the world. This is humanity. Ask yourself how you treated your fellow country of origin people when you last visited them. Would you like me to tell you how without ever having met you?