CHILDREN AREN’T BORN RACIST, THEY LEARN TO BE SO FROM ADULTS

By DR VICKI BISMILLA

I was recently watching Margaret Hoover on Firing Line (PBS) as she interviewed Bakari Sellers, attorney and author.

Like so many leaders and activists since George Floyd’s murder, he, too, was asked about his experiences as a Black man in America.

As our readers have seen, protests and marches for a stop to the murder of minorities continue, which of course he discussed eloquently.

But the piece of the interview that struck me as starkly impactful was this, when Hoover asked him what it was like to be Black and a father.

He talked about his teenaged daughter who has just acquired her driving permit.

“The overarching premise is that she can be unapologetically Black, that she can be prideful in who she is, but I also tell her things about how to stay alive. She has a permit now and so when you are driving, you know, make sure that you call 911 if the sun is going down and the police are behind you. And don’t pull over unless it is a well-lit area. Don’t reach.”

The power of these words is in the visceral fear that resonates as this father speaks them.

How does one even begin to appreciate the intense level of stress for parents who are filled with fear for the safety of their children, not only from the everyday dangers faced by all citizens, but from the fear of social structures designed to serve and protect that repeatedly fail minorities?

We have seen here in Toronto the tragic loss of life of people who called for help but instead were silenced permanently.

Those extreme cases of deathly prejudice fill the pages of our news media. They are numbing reminders that this world is not a safe place and especially unsafe for minorities.

In her column, So Many Shades of Racism in the June issue of Desi News, Shagorika Easwar succinctly illustrates not only anti-minority racism but also power structures that discriminate against less-fair-skinned groups within minority communities.

In a more hard-hitting column in Toronto Star, titled Dear Brown People, Shree Paradkar  sets out, she says, to “wash some dirty laundry” about us South Asians and our prejudices. Whether or not her self-flagellation of ourselves as South Asians is an effective anti-racism tool is debatable.

The scourge of racism permeates every society in every country around this world. Racist ideologies are actually written into and enshrined into the laws and policies of many countries like the white supremacist laws of South Africa before Mandela; Israel’s anti-Palestinian laws and Myanmar and its “resident aliens” laws.

India’s caste system is still practised despite Article 17 of the Indian Constitution which abolished “untouchability” in 1949 and dalits continue to suffer today.

Canada’s Indian Act and its Indian residential school system destroyed lives of Indigenous children until as recently as 1996 and continues to impact adult Indigenous people.

The United States’ anti-Chinese racist laws were enshrined into the constitution of California; Indigenous Americans are marginalized through reservation legislation; southern Jim Crow laws discriminated against Blacks and minorities and its spirit still permeates the highest levels of government; and anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism permeates the criminal justice system across North America resulting in unforgivable brutality.

The United Nations expends more resources toward the elimination of racism than any other form of discrimination, yet racism is deeply rooted even now in modern times (see Dimensions of Racism, ohchr.org).

How can we as a society-at-large confront racism that has been destructively present in every human community for centuries? Can we begin by trying to understand and apply a human rights lens to all humanity?

Canada has well established human rights legislation and codes that lay out what one can do when one has experienced discrimination.

But that is after the fact.

The difficulty is to educate entire populations about the rights of all citizens to be respected up front, to be treated as fellow human beings with equal human rights.

When a child plays with another child in the schoolyard what do they see? They probably see a mirror of themselves, a child like themselves who wants to play like they do, who likes to be funny, who likes to laugh, run, climb, rattle off rhymes, kick a ball and who shows concern when friends fall and scrape their knees.

Children who play with other kids regardless of race, ethnicity or language are human rights experts.

They are all equal. So when do they become dumb, cynical, racist and cruel?

When they grow and unlearn their true worth and turn instead to believing the destructive advice from racist adults and are lured by the seductive images of skin-colour-power in media.

• Dr Vicki Bismilla is a retired Superintendent of Schools and retired college Vice-President, Academic, and Chief Learning Officer. She has authored two books.