Discrimination, denial and #BlackLivesMatter

The killing of a 46-year-old black man – George Floyd in Minneapolis has sparked protests across the United States and the world at large. It brings into question the police brutality, discrimination faced by people at an institutional level (direct / subtle) or in the society. The protests have sparked strong reactions from those who back the protests and otherwise – both on social media and in the real world.

While the incident that sparked the global movement took place in the United States, no society in the world is free from discriminatory behaviour today. A dominant group often consciously or sub-consciously engage in discriminatory acts; in this context, I would say that the soft power that the US asserts is being used well by other countries in the world – to make people conscious of their acts of discrimination. (how long would this soft power last is a question if the disaster of Trump being a two term president becomes a reality)

I would like to flag off right now that this article is not an ‘academic’ work citing research papers, but is going to focus more on observations and my personal opinions (I would try my best to substantiate sources for some of the contents in the article – refer to the footnotes).

Social media – hashtags

The rise of social media has enabled us all to have the feeling of being an activist. Initially it meant writing on social media on an issue you feel strongly about. Then came Twitter with its hashtags where desperation to make an issue ‘trending’ began. The same is visible in Black Lives Matter – where to express support, a random tweet with a hashtag or an Instagram post with a black background (and the hashtag) gives you the satisfaction that you have done something towards emancipating the oppressed but in reality, all it does is pollute the hashtag from people seeking genuine information or opinions on the subject.

I fell victim to this myself – where I made a ‘chain story’ on the Instagram page of this blog but eventually felt that if I claim writing to be a passion of mine – the least I can do is write on it.

Social media hashtags do not make one an activist – write on the issue along with the hashtag, read on the issue and in your own personal lives – eliminate your sub-conscious acts of discrimination and challenge those in your circles who engage in such acts.

The situation in the United States and around the world

If there is something that I acknowledge without engaging in modesty, is that I am politically aware – of the situation where I live and around the world at large. Across the world – people have been oppressed for centuries by means of race, class, ethnicity, caste, etc. These were sometimes at an institutional level and sometimes, practices that have existed in the society because of existing prejudices for centuries or authority from other sources (eg. Religion).

It is true that the murder of George Floyd is not the only case in the US where the police have acted brutally against a member of one group nor is US the only country which has this problem. However, considering the soft power that United States holds, an event in the US sparks reactions across the world and it is a good opportunity to use this moment to raise awareness on prejudice, institutional discrimination and recognising privileges that individuals have (including you and I). Where I live now had a similar case of custodial death of a black man (re: Adama Traoré – refer notes) which sparked massive protests then, protests after the acquittal of the police officers and now, after the George Floyd incident.

Talking of privileges, today the differences in wealth between white and black communities in the US is such that an average black household income is only 1/10^th of an average white household (refer article in notes). While one could defend it by saying that it so happens that it emerged that way based on individual abilities – which might have been true if opportunities available to every individual was fair.

However, equal rights are a recent concept (at best a century in Europe, less than that in US and other parts of the world) and wealth multiplies based on your existing assets. For centuries, a group of people in the society were more equal than the rest, owned property and have passed on this wealth (wealth often earned by exploiting the less equal people, on the basis of slavery, colonial subordination, ethnicity, etc.). Thus, at the time when every person got equal rights – the people who were ‘more equal’ still held the institutions, wealth and power leading to indirect suppression of the people. To this day, inheritances could explain almost 23% of the wealth gap between blacks and whites in the US (refer article in notes).

Talking of institutions, the difference in treatment is apparent, when a senior politician – Michael Gove, currently a minister UK could brag about having taken cocaine in the past. His supporters say that he was young, this happened long ago, and he has not committed any ‘crime’ since then. But for the same drug related offences, several years old with no subsequent criminal records to follow up, UK has had a history of deporting people to countries where the deportees have no contact (refer article in notes).

In the US, it is known that schools in black dominated neighbourhoods have less funding on average (refer article in notes). These poor schools leading to low academic attainment feeds baseless stereotypes on how blacks are unemployable and hence resort to crime. This stereotype is acted upon by other institutions such as the police, often leading to disproportionately higher detentions / wrongful indictments of black people than others

I could go on about institutional discrimination around the world – but that is precisely the objective of the protests and the voices that it is to raise awareness, at an individual level, an institutional level and ultimately to the state and the world at large.

Passive / sub-conscious acts of discrimination

We have created a binary when it comes to discrimination – that it is bad people discriminate and good people do not. As a result, any discussion on potential discriminatory behaviour becomes questioning the person’s moral character – leading to defensive and finally, being in complete denial of the whole situation.

It is often perceived that racists are those in Ku Klux Klan, members of neo Nazi parties openly spouting their ideas (or any supremacist organisations which I find across countries, like India, Malaysia, etc.). Thus, it is easy to overlook passive or subtle acts of discrimination which has a large impact.

I am going to make some generalisations here, people in general have cordial relations with based on social standing, and more often than not, colleagues are not discriminated against on this basis of colour / ethnicity at an individual level. But the dominant group tends to see these people as ‘exceptions to the rule’ rather than being the norm.

This manifests when people consciously / sub-consciously prefer people from the dominant group; be it to hire a person for a job, renting out property, etc. In France, a government study found that seven major companies, including Air France and Renault – were less likely to hire someone with an Arab sounding name even if they had all the required competences for the job (refer link in the notes – document in French). Similar studies have been conducted in US and the UK yielding similar results. The same could be said for renting property where minorities often have difficulty in finding a house for rent – in Europe, for instance, 15% own 70% of the property, meaning a select group have abnormal power to segregate communities (these inequalities are more in other parts of the world). In India, where such inequalities are more, often have caste / religion-based restrictions when it comes to renting out property.

Such passive acts are true in education as well, and in India – a study found that on average, teachers gave significantly lower grades to lower-caste students when they knew the names of students and the grades were higher when the identities of the students was kept anonymous. This behaviour was observed also among teachers from the so-called lower castes. (source: Poor Economics by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo – Nobel laureates for Economics in 2019)

The issue here is that any person who were making the decisions that provided data points for these studies are likely to refuse that they are racist / display discriminatory behaviour and would start justifying or normalising their actions (including myself). Typical examples of it include – this is banter, I chose what was appropriate and not out of prejudice, etc. It might be true to the extent that most of them were not intending to act with prejudice and might reject such ideas on the outside, but the society has conditioned us to act in a certain manner and these sub conscious acts are what requires urgent attention from everyone.

Diversionary tactics

Whenever these topics are brought up, we are always diverted. The first is the nonsensical ‘all lives matter’ argument. Please note, I fully agree with the statement, it is the use of the statement as an argument / the counter that I consider nonsensical. To start with, if you stand for a cause, it does not mean that you inevitably are against every other cause. While all lives indeed matter, when one set of lives are systemically discriminated against that their mere survival is a challenge; clearly, the statement all lives matter is not true – black lives clearly do not seem to matter in the United States (and discriminated communities in other countries around the world). To those who scream all lives matter, if you believe in this statement, it gives you all the more reason to march in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement or similar movements fighting for the rights of discriminated groups in your respective regions.

Black Lives Matter has been a largely peaceful protest across the world but nonetheless, in a freely assembled protest, it is impossible to monitor every participant – though the same argument does not hold for an institutionally organised police force or governments. However, instances of violence are not what the opponents of protest detest, rather seem like they were waiting for them to happen so that they can invalidate the protest, the injustices to discriminated communities, inter alia. ‘What about the looting, what about the damage to property’ is a standard argument to divert all your attention from the elephant in the room (note that all of these groups tend to glorify the French Revolution where all of these and more happened).

I was avoiding political references to the extent possible, but I cannot help but bring in, that in all these countries, the right wing and the conservative politicians are most resistant to any discussion on race or discrimination. I can even understand where these sentiments emerge, be it in US, France, UK, Germany, Italy, India – these groups talk of a ‘glorious past’ which they wish to bring back. In US, the great periods that Trump refers to are those where civil rights were denied, the founding days till the mid-19^th Century when slavery was legal (with the southern economy built on slavery); in France, UK or Italy – the days the far-right refer to are those glory days created by exploitation of colonies; in India, these glory days are when the upper classes had complete command over the lower classes and built their wealth by exploiting them, etc. One cannot invoke glory days and ignore the inglorious acts of those days – reject this classic diversionary tactic of the conservatives.

There are several other diversionary tactics that I have seen being employed – where the dominant class claim to be victims of affirmative action – though research in the US suggests that the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action were white women (refer notes section). The other tactics include whataboutery – a strange argument that any injustice against a black person (or the discriminated group in the region) is normal because of a similar incident against the powerful class. Yes, the injustice against any person matters, but the underlying point here is that the discrimination against one group is significantly higher than any other group – it exposes a systemic bias which needs to be exposed.

What should we do?

First, recognise your privilege if you are privileged. We all love to believe that we are self-made, and we made it through in life despite all our struggles. Sure, even the privileged have their own struggles – for instance, if you never had to worry about your next meal, your family not depending on supplemental income you could potentially bring, had access to school and higher education – with availability of credit to support your goals, you are privileged. There is nothing wrong in privileged but at the same time, there is no shame in acknowledging it either – it helps us recognise that we have had a head start on this race and provides us with sufficient empathy to provide similar privileges to people around us who lack them.

Next, recognise that consciously or sub-consciously, you might have indulged in discriminatory behaviour. Whenever a person points it out to you, listen to them completely – we often lack an understanding of their personal experience or their historical struggles; owing to which something that seems innocuous might have been profoundly offensive. Then introspect and if you identify any automated behaviour within yourself, work on correcting yourself.

Then, challenge the people around you when they indulge in discriminatory behaviour – both in terms of language or action. These should not be normalised as banter or a joke or ‘their thinking is in line with their times’. It is not easy, and you might not succeed, not immediately anyway. I have tried to confront and it never ended well, but that is not going to stop me, and at every given opportunity, I would challenge the people around me and if you wish to do the same, focus on what happens at home and your circles. If your circles are not that diverse, try to engage with more people to get a glimpse of a multitude of experiences (during better times, hopefully after a vaccine is invented – in any case, I do not expect anti-vaxxers to have gotten this far in this post of mine).

Finally, try to get experiences through arts, music or literature from other groups / cultures to understand their experiences. Being a reader, I did a check on my own lists, works I have read from writers of colour or discriminated background in their place of origin is very low; of course, I have read writer like James Baldwin on this very specific subject but not for mainstream fiction. I have not read a single work that has originated from Africa – these are aspects I need to improve on my own reading lists.

A recommendation if you have the time and courage – participate in protests and always raise your voice for a fairer society.

All these are applicable to me, and in all likelihood, to you the reader as well.

Conclusion

Discrimination is present since time immemorial, for multiple reasons. Are we better than before? Of course. In fact, we live in perhaps the most emancipated era in known human history. But is this enough? Certainly not, we are still far away from reaching the fair society that we all thrive to achieve. But the fight must go on, the death of George Floyd or anyone else who died in the face of discrimination should not be in vain – play to your strengths; if you like to write, make films, talk to people, or just listen, do all of those and bring awareness to everyone in your circles to counter discrimination across the world.

Have a nice day,
Andy

 

Notes:

1.       Mortd’Adama Traoré : une nouvelle contre-expertise met en cause les gendarmes (Le monde : Death of Adama Traoré – article in French)

2.       The power of protest and the legacy of George Floyd (The Economist: wealth disparity in the United States)

3.       The black-white wealth gap is unchanged after half a century (The Economist: wealth gaps from inheritance)

4.       Michael Gove admits to taking cocaine on 'several occasions' (The Guardian)

5.       Jamaica deportation: Home Office flight leaves UK despite court ruling (BBC: ‘many of those who were scheduled to be deported had committed non-violent, one-time drugs offences’ –David Lammy MP)

6.       NON-WHITE SCHOOL DISTRICTS GET $23 BILLION LESS FUNDING THAN WHITE ONES (Pacific Standard)

7.       Discrimination dans le recrutement des grandes entreprises (French Government study : Translation : Discrimination in the recruitment process of large companies)