MY TAKE
SO MANY SHADES OF RACISM
Image credit: JOSH HILD on Unsplash.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario says the government of Ontario must immediately declare anti-Black racism a public health crisis, echoing a call by a coalition of Black community health leaders.
“Anti-Black racism has undeniably harmful effects on Black Ontarians,” said Fred Hahn, president of CUPE Ontario. “We need to name what happens to Black people when it comes to policing, workplace discrimination, the stress it causes, and so much more as a public health crisis requiring urgent and comprehensive action.”
The advocacy of the coalition led to the Toronto Board of Health unanimously voting to recognize anti-Black racism as a public health crisis. CUPE Ontario joins the coalition in calling on the province to do the same.
In recent weeks we’ve witnessed a surge in protests against anti-Black racism. Horrified by what happened to George Floyd, people of all ethnicities took to the streets in many parts of the world, calling for change.
Calling it what it is, anti-Black racism, is a good place to start. Pressing for systemic changes is a tool in our box in this fight. However, it’s just one tool. There is another, more effective one. Because racism will end (or at least diminish) one person at a time.
Legislating it will only result in a knee-jerk response that doesn’t really change anything, just makes the person or organization feel virtuous about having done something. HBO Max pulling Gone With the Wind from its streaming service is a case in point.
The book has long been criticized as not being a true depiction of slavery. The happy-happy slaves as depicted in the book belied the families torn apart and forced to work on plantations under insufferable conditions. But Mammy was one maid in one family, and her relationship with Scarlett was one of affection. She scolded her ward, looked after her interests and stood by her through thick and thin. There were monstrous plantation owners, but there were humane ones, too, and Margaret Mitchell was telling one story, not setting out to rewrite history.
Many of us know families who have a relationship that goes back a few generations with family retainers. Who provide for them and treat them with kindness and caring. I personally know someone who is retired and living on a modest income in India, but putting together a fund with help from other relatives to give her maid a big wedding gift when the young woman gets married later this year. Would telling her story mean I do not support the cause of all the other househelp that are treated horribly?
Some say legislating anti-Black racism will only drive it underground, hide it under polite-speak.
That, instead of pointing fingers, we have to first recognize that we are all equally capable of racism – and casteism, sexism and any other form of discrimination.
In India, where I come from, we see discrimination against the darker complexioned girl whose parents are anxious about her marriage prospects, against househelp that is treated as expendable, against other castes or people of other religions, and shrug it aside. That’s how it’s always been but I am not like that, we might say. But what does it say about us if we witness discrimination and don’t speak up?
How often do we initiate discussion on this? We don’t, because we don’t want to come across as party-poopers, someone always on a soap box. We continue to look the other way. Not realizing that when we turn a blind eye, our children learn that whatever just happened is okay. When we hasten past young men of colour on a darkened street, we teach our children to be wary of the other. We, who are so quick to feel discrimination, who recognize when it is directed at us, often fail to stand up for others.
And so the virus lurks, beneath the surface. We appear asymptomatic most of the time until it is triggered.
I am reminded of the story shared by an editor of the newspaper that I worked in many years ago. A young man, he said, wrote home to his family in India that he had met the woman of his dreams in the US and wanted to marry her. They gathered at the airport to welcome their prospective daughter-in-law, bearing garlands and pooja thalis. Silence fell upon the jubilant crowd, however, when the couple emerged in the arrivals hall. The woman was not the “gori” (White) American as had been assumed, but Black. The “extras” in the play were dismissed and a quick face-saving ceremony was conducted before whisking everyone home. What played out behind closed doors no one knows, but the couple caught the next available flight back, never to return.
When we moved to Canada, I had heard from some who had moved here before us that it was a friendly, welcoming country. A few, however, shared experiences that were hurtful. Like the girl in salwar-kameez who was told by a neighbour that she shouldn’t be out in her pjs.
If my husband and I were at the receiving end, I thought, I might be able to deal with it, tell myself it was a choice we made and that the choice came with good and bad elements. But if anyone was less than nice to our sons, I knew I would find it unbearable. And so I braced myself for whatever was to come. I am happy and grateful to report that our experience was supremely positive. We were welcomed to the neighbourhood and the boys into their schools, there was no shortage of play dates.
And one interesting situation involving “Indians” from way back when Toronto was a lot less multicultural than it is today and we were one of two South Asian families at the school. One day Tapas, then five, came home from school and asked in all seriousness where we kept our bows and arrows.
We didn’t have any, I responded. Nor any guns or pistols, I added in my head, as I was very against any toys that normalized violence.
“Then how do we get food?” was the next question.
“What does that mean?” I asked, stopping my vacuuming. “From the grocery, of course.”
Tapas looked puzzled. “But when I told Jake I was Indian, he asked me to show him my bows and arrows and when I told him we didn’t have any, he asked where we got our food from.”
My husband looked up from his computer, barely able to control his laughter.
“We’re not that kind of Indian,” he said. “And even most native Canadians, also called Indian, get their food from a grocery now.’
The next day I shared the amusing incident with his class teacher.
“Oh, what a lovely learning opportunity,” she said. “I’ll show the children India on the map this afternoon and we’ll talk about where Tapas’s family comes from!”
And so the incident, which could have turned out very differently, had a happy ending.
But racism exists.
In Deep Diversity, Shakil Choudhury writes about a 2009 study with mock resumés conducted by UBC. The resumés had similar qualifications but one key difference. Some were given typically Anglo-Saxon names like Greg Johnson and others were given ‘foreign-sounding’ names like Dong Liu. The resumés with English-sounding names had a 40 per cent higher rate of call backs for interviews.
Are people still being held back because of their names?
Oh yes, says the anti-racist educator who developed an anti-bias curriculum. “It is only one of the ways, but one of the most obvious ways. Mispronunciation is another. ‘Your name is too hard, I’ll just say it like this’. We call these micro inequalities – small things that close the door.”
But these issues cannot be solved with logic alone.
“Racially different people evoke an unconscious, emotional response,” writes Choudhury. “This makes it easier to put people into mental categories like ‘potential threat’, ‘terrorist sympathiser’, or ‘female-hating’, etc. And this is why emotional literacy skills are so important to issues of diversity and difference. If we do not develop these skills intentionally, we risk living our lives on autopilot, our choices and behaviours governed by unconscious habits.”
Mental short-cuts about social groups create problems as Choudhury points out, because important information is filtered out, supporting our already-held points of view and discarding information with which we don’t agree.
David Chariandy has written about lowered expectations from Black males and Choudhury agrees. Where one is placed affects one’s behaviour and thus the outcome of their efforts.
But prejudice and stereotypes are neural habits, “we are born with the bias hardware, while society provides us with the software,” writes Choudhury. And so, habits can be altered. We can build neural pathways by creating a new association between a group we thought of as threatening.
As Bill Bryson writes in The Body, skin colour is not even skin deep, it resides just in the top millimetre or so. “That’s all that race is – a sliver of epidermis.” Book review on page 24.
But if we are all capable of racist thoughts, we also have a coming together in the face of such acts, a solidarity that gives me hope. So long as we take this awakening (re-re-awakening?) forward, beyond taking a knee. Powerfully symbolic as that is, we’ve seen earlier spontaneous combustion of emotions and support fizzle out with time or be hijacked by vested interests.
• Deep Diversity by Shakil Choudhury is published by Between The Lines.