It has taken me decades to gain some understanding as to why so many members of the human race fear and detest their fellows merely due to the hue of their skin or their belief system, because I was brought up to believe the world is my oyster and we are all brothers and sisters under the skin.
Spending my teenage years in a multi-cultural area of London was one of fate’s greatest gifts; it taught me a valuable lesson. Whatever we look like superficially has little to do with who we are inside. Moreover, ordinary folk from all ethnicities and religions share similar hopes and dreams. We all want to succeed in our chosen fields, live lives that are productive—and nurture our children to be the best they can be.
So many wars have been fought over territory, many millions of lives lost or ruined—and for what? God didn’t create a world with borders. Every delineation is one that’s been arbitrarily made by mankind. Why do men (and women), who profess to be devout, feel it’s okay to murder, rape, plunder and enslave “the other”? What I really find distressing is that rather than evolve with education, greater knowledge, and the ease with which we can exchange views with our peers on the other side of the world via the Internet, humankind is becoming more intolerant rather than less.
Unfortunately, this trend cannot be U-turned by laws alone. Even in countries, such as the US, whose constitutions mandate equal rights for all citizens, the divides between ethnicities and faiths are widening. One of the factors rests with our innate need to feel special which often translates to a desire for superiority—ours is the best football team, our town the most charming, our country the finest on the planet. There is nothing wrong with those sentiments in themselves, except when we start to believe that anything otherwise has no value.
Another component of bigotry and racism is self-righteousness. Our way of living and beliefs are infallibly right. We hold to them so that must be so; then all others are either inferior or plain wrong. The principle of “live and let live” has been virtually binned.
A third cause of racism is social and economic status. We naturally gravitate toward winners and tend to fear or look down upon those in dire straits as potential criminals. The US and the UK would no doubt insist they have dealt with institutional racism, which is true on paper. But no legislation can control the discriminatory instincts of individual policemen, judges or juries. Ferguson has brought the plight of African Americans to the fore along with the preferential treatment the system affords whites, albeit unofficially. Human rights officials from the United Nations have now woken up to this disparity, calling upon the US to stop law enforcement disproportionately targeting black Americans and criticizing two grand juries for failing to indict police officers who killed two African-American men.
Black Americans are ten times more likely than others to be stopped and searched and receive on average 20 percent longer sentences than Caucasians who commit similar crimes. Furthermore, the employment rate related to black Americans is twice that of whites. The UK is no paragon either. A recent study, conducted by British scientists, Dr. Nabil Khattab and Prof. Ron Johnston, found that Muslims suffer serious discrimination in the job market, far worse than other ethno-religious groups. White British Christians are up to 70 percent more likely to find employment than British Muslims, which Khattab puts down to Islamophobia.
But discrimination isn’t just a white-black issue. More than 165 million people in India are discriminated against because of their caste, despite laws, which prohibit inequality. And, according to the Hindustan Times, “Africans living in cities across India” face problems of “not being allowed to enter” certain leisure venues and are “encountering difficulties in finding decent accommodation because landlords are “suspicious” of Africans.
Historical injustices, real or perceived, also play a role in fueling race hatreds. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but there was a time when Arabs and Jews lived side by side in Palestine as good neighbors and colleagues. Geopolitical interventions injected hate into Sunni-Shiite relationships in Iraq where there was none. Armenians are suspicious of Turks after their ancestors were massacred or expelled in the early 20th Century. The list is long.
Unless racial hatred, bigotry and discrimination are tackled at root so that future generations escape infection, the future of our planet looks bleak. How long must we go on destroying one another just because we are born with different facial features and come in shades of white, honey, olive or brown or simply because we worship a creator in different ways? What a dull, grey world ours would be if we all looked and thought the same. Parents and educators should teach children that diversity should be celebrated. As the Fijian statesman, Josefa Iloilo once said, “We need to reach that happy stage of our development when differences and diversity are not seen as sources of division and distrust, but of strength and inspiration.”
Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.
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Live and let live
Posted on December 11, 2014 by Linda S. Heard
It has taken me decades to gain some understanding as to why so many members of the human race fear and detest their fellows merely due to the hue of their skin or their belief system, because I was brought up to believe the world is my oyster and we are all brothers and sisters under the skin.
Spending my teenage years in a multi-cultural area of London was one of fate’s greatest gifts; it taught me a valuable lesson. Whatever we look like superficially has little to do with who we are inside. Moreover, ordinary folk from all ethnicities and religions share similar hopes and dreams. We all want to succeed in our chosen fields, live lives that are productive—and nurture our children to be the best they can be.
So many wars have been fought over territory, many millions of lives lost or ruined—and for what? God didn’t create a world with borders. Every delineation is one that’s been arbitrarily made by mankind. Why do men (and women), who profess to be devout, feel it’s okay to murder, rape, plunder and enslave “the other”? What I really find distressing is that rather than evolve with education, greater knowledge, and the ease with which we can exchange views with our peers on the other side of the world via the Internet, humankind is becoming more intolerant rather than less.
Unfortunately, this trend cannot be U-turned by laws alone. Even in countries, such as the US, whose constitutions mandate equal rights for all citizens, the divides between ethnicities and faiths are widening. One of the factors rests with our innate need to feel special which often translates to a desire for superiority—ours is the best football team, our town the most charming, our country the finest on the planet. There is nothing wrong with those sentiments in themselves, except when we start to believe that anything otherwise has no value.
Another component of bigotry and racism is self-righteousness. Our way of living and beliefs are infallibly right. We hold to them so that must be so; then all others are either inferior or plain wrong. The principle of “live and let live” has been virtually binned.
A third cause of racism is social and economic status. We naturally gravitate toward winners and tend to fear or look down upon those in dire straits as potential criminals. The US and the UK would no doubt insist they have dealt with institutional racism, which is true on paper. But no legislation can control the discriminatory instincts of individual policemen, judges or juries. Ferguson has brought the plight of African Americans to the fore along with the preferential treatment the system affords whites, albeit unofficially. Human rights officials from the United Nations have now woken up to this disparity, calling upon the US to stop law enforcement disproportionately targeting black Americans and criticizing two grand juries for failing to indict police officers who killed two African-American men.
Black Americans are ten times more likely than others to be stopped and searched and receive on average 20 percent longer sentences than Caucasians who commit similar crimes. Furthermore, the employment rate related to black Americans is twice that of whites. The UK is no paragon either. A recent study, conducted by British scientists, Dr. Nabil Khattab and Prof. Ron Johnston, found that Muslims suffer serious discrimination in the job market, far worse than other ethno-religious groups. White British Christians are up to 70 percent more likely to find employment than British Muslims, which Khattab puts down to Islamophobia.
But discrimination isn’t just a white-black issue. More than 165 million people in India are discriminated against because of their caste, despite laws, which prohibit inequality. And, according to the Hindustan Times, “Africans living in cities across India” face problems of “not being allowed to enter” certain leisure venues and are “encountering difficulties in finding decent accommodation because landlords are “suspicious” of Africans.
Historical injustices, real or perceived, also play a role in fueling race hatreds. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but there was a time when Arabs and Jews lived side by side in Palestine as good neighbors and colleagues. Geopolitical interventions injected hate into Sunni-Shiite relationships in Iraq where there was none. Armenians are suspicious of Turks after their ancestors were massacred or expelled in the early 20th Century. The list is long.
Unless racial hatred, bigotry and discrimination are tackled at root so that future generations escape infection, the future of our planet looks bleak. How long must we go on destroying one another just because we are born with different facial features and come in shades of white, honey, olive or brown or simply because we worship a creator in different ways? What a dull, grey world ours would be if we all looked and thought the same. Parents and educators should teach children that diversity should be celebrated. As the Fijian statesman, Josefa Iloilo once said, “We need to reach that happy stage of our development when differences and diversity are not seen as sources of division and distrust, but of strength and inspiration.”
Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.