By Banshaikupar Lyngdoh Mawlong
While most of the earthlings are locked inside their homes, fighting an enigmatic battle against an invisible enemy, the novel corona virus, the ‘Winds of Change’ is blowing across the United States of America, where Black Americans are once again locking horns against a centuries-old enemy, racism. George Floyd’s ‘I Can’t Breathe’ (henceforth ICB) plead to the police officers set off the fire which soon engulfed the entire United States. The ICB movement, unlike other racial movements in the past, has today assumed universal significance and potential. Equally encouraging is the support it received from people across the political and geographical divide. Across the globe, the world took to its knees against institutional racism deeply embedded in the veins of our society. What started in Minneapolis as a protest over the death of a black American man, has now earned the reputation of a global movement, gaining solidarity from across the world.
This isn’t the first movement that the world has witnessed when it comes to the Black American community demanding fair treatment and recognition. From Lincoln in the 19th Century to Martin Luther King Jr. to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, nothing much has changed for the coloured community. It is the result of systematic racism that has been perpetuated over the years by those who benefitted from it. While physical slavery had been abolished in America by the hard-fought 13th Amendment of 1865, psychological and cultural slavery is yet to be rooted out. Just like the invisible novel corona virus, racist tendency resides in our sub-conscious thought process, invisible to the naked eye.
For centuries, racist ideology was being systematically institutionalised by imperialist powers. We were taught that black (coloured) represents inferiority and white symbolises superiority. Ideas were manufactured, history manipulated and educational curriculum engineered to support the racist agenda of imperialism. As Michael Holding rightly put, “History is written by the conqueror, not by those who are conquered. We need to go back and teach both sides of history”. The entire recorded history has always tried to justify white supremacy and brutality, while wholly ignoring the plight of the so called inferior coloured races. For example, one of the most brutal religious wars of all time, the Crusades, was orchestrated by the ‘Christian’ white race of Europe against the coloured ‘infidels’ of Asia and Africa. It’s an irony that one of the most spiritual Christian hymns of our age, “Amazing Grace, was written by a slave-ship captain (who of course repented for his sins). Then there’s slavery, feudalism and apartheid. The list is endless. In fact, in every corner of the globe, racism is deeply engrained in the society’s philosophy and worldview. It has always been a matter of the ‘superiors’ versus the ‘inferiors’. And in most of the cases, the superior is always the majority of that society who dominates and discriminates against the inferior minority. But as one of Euclid’s axioms aptly stated, “Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other”. Creation or Evolution!!! Whatever the theory of origin, we may believe in, we all came from the same source, equal in spirit and soul.
While it is encouraging to see that the ICB movement is receiving the universal support it deserves, equally true is that there are thousands more ‘I Can’t Breathe’ situations across the globe. Closer home, our ‘celebrities’ have come together to express their solidarity with the ICB movement of America. Their stand against racism in the West is commendable and must be applauded. But the hypocrisy of it all is that these very same people whom we ‘celebrate’ hardly voice their stand against the hundreds similar ICB-like situations in our country. More often than not, they choose to ignore and turn a blind eye to the reality in their own kitchen. One notable exceptional statement came from Abhay Doel when he said, “Now that ‘woke’ Indian celebrities and the middle class stand in solidarity with fighting systemic racism in America, perhaps they’d see how it manifests in their own backyard!”
We have numerous ICB like-situations in India. For instance, women’s lives, who constitute almost half of our population, have not always mattered. For centuries, our patriarchal dominated society had justified the inhumane practices of sati, dowry system, female-child infanticide, purdah system and other forms of discrimination against women. While some of these have been prohibited by the legal system, systematic violence against women is still the order of the day as evident from the rising violence against them. And this institutional violence against women will not go away unless we change our worldview. For instance, we are a society where the length of a skirt decides the character of a girl.
Now, what about the lives of the poor? Years of mis-governance, corruption, resources mis-management and development or under-development has given birth to rampant poverty across the country. As a result, landless labourers and slums are swelling and children forced to toil for a living. But their underprivileged lives do not seem to matter at all. Another ICB group in India are the minorities. For decades since independence, minorities like Dalits, Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribes and religious minorities have been left to the peripheries. The thousand-year old caste system has systematically discriminated- religiously, vocationally and culturally, the Dalits and others lower castes. Tribal peoples of North-East India were being called and mocked, in their own country, by racist comments like ‘chinky’, snake eaters, barbarian, savages, man-eaters, etc. And recently during the Covid-19 lockdown, students from the region were being harassed by the mainland people as ‘chinese’. Why? Simply because we look physically similar to the Chinese where the virus originates.
The current pandemic has brought to the fore another category of ICB, the migrant lives. The unequal development in the country, has forced millions of workers from underdeveloped states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, etc., to migrate to more developed states like Delhi, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, and others in search of livelihood. When the Covid induced lockdown was imposed, they were forced to return home, thousands of miles away, on nothing but their bare two feet. The fact that we celebrated the journey of a teen-age girl who drove her ailing father home on bicycle thousands of miles speaks of the mentality and worldview of our society. The question we must be asking is, why a teen-age girl has to undertake such a long and strenuous journey on her own with no help and support from anyone. Do Migrant lives matter? We do not have the resources to help them, but we have all the funds in the world to buy MLAs in order to topple governments, to fund crony capitalism and to buy LCD TVs for election propaganda.
The last and most important category which deserves mention is the lives of billions other life forms- the plants that creep, the animals that crawls, and the aquatic life that swims beneath the oceans. Their life matters the most. Unlike, plants, humans do not manufacture their own food. In fact, no life-form is more dependent on nature than human’s. However, we shattered everything that was beautiful and good. We broke the world. It is Man against Creation. The land is dying, the lungs of the earth- the forest is sick, ours skies are growing murkier, our oceans filled with un-capped plastic waste from industrial and urban settlement. We have disrupted the sacred ecological balance. Humans did this!
It is apt to remember that while we are caught in our fashionable condemnation of racism in America, we ought not to be blind to what is unfolding in our own backyards. If we are to join hands authentically with the Black Lives Matter movement, we should look inwardly and find a way to bring about change in our own society, our own ICB movement. We have been living in denial for a long time. We must get rid of egoistic attitudes and self-centred mentality. “All life is supposed to have equal value, but some lives are more valuable than others” can no longer be the philosophy of our society. Indira Gandhi, once said, “One cannot be truly human and civilized unless one looks upon not only all fellow-men but all creation with the eyes of a friend”. It’s our humane duty to help the ICB groups- the coloured, the minorities, the poor, the underprivileged, the vulnerable, the oppressed and the other life-forms. We shall not stop until they all say, ‘WE CAN BREATHE’. All lives must matter. That’s the sacred balance of nature.
(The writer is Asst. Professor Union Christian College, Umiam Khwan, Meghalaya and can be reached at [email protected])