Racism, colourism are inveterate in human psyche

Before condemning white Americans for being racist and colour conscious, let’s ask ourselves: Aren't we all?

"If nationalism is measles of mankind, racism is plague of it."

The killing of an Afro-American man, George Floyd, by a white cop in the US has again engendered a barrage of disturbing questions like, are whites innately racist? Do they suffer from Caucasian Syndrome (an atavistic hatred for the black skin and irrational admiration for light skin); and many more uncomfortable questions related to race and colour.

The whole world is polarised into whites and blacks, just like it's divided into haves and have-nots. But before dwelling upon this universal issue of skin colour, it's imperative to understand the American psyche towards colour consciousness or prejudice.

The US has always been clearly fractured into white and black ethnic groups. People of African origin are still not seamlessly embraced and interwoven into the predominant white ethnicity. Coloured (I'm deliberately eschewing the condescending term 'black') people in the US have always been looked down upon by the supremacist whites, who still believe that non-whites, specifically people of African origin, are Neanderthals and sub-humans belonging to subaltern societies.

This misconception of fallacious genetic supremacy is so ingrained in the collective psyche of the American white people that even famed genetic biologists have fallen for it. According to Federal Law Studies of the US and Human Rights Commission's report submitted in 2011, in the last 75 years, different states in the US executed 73% convicts of African origin and only 14% of those executed for crimes were whites. The rest were brown-skinned or of Hispanic origin. Lynching of blacks is still prevalent in the US, if not rampant. Till the mid-50s, dark-skinned people could not sit with whites on buses in the US. The Afro-American novelist James Baldwin put it so succinctly in an interview to Playboy in 1966: “The existence of a black in America is further blackened by the blinding brightness of racial prejudice shown by the white Americans.”

Much of the western world is subtly or blatantly scornful of people with dark and brown skins. The diluted form of rabid apartheid of South Africa is still palpable in the western world where even a legend of Sir Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards' stature had to experience racial jibes from white spectators. Richards' best pal Sir Ian Botham descanted upon the widespread racism and colour consciousness in his autobiography, ‘The King and I’. Botham called almost all whites “unconsciously racist” in the book. Yours truly had to hear racial taunts for his brown skin while pursuing his PhD degree at Oxford University, the Mecca of education and enlightenment!

Now, the question is, is this phenomenon limited only to the US? I'm afraid, this is a universal phenomenon. Much more than being racists, humans are basically colour conscious and the whole thing must be analysed from the perspective of colour rather than race.

To encapsulate, colour precedes race and subsumes the latter. The whole world suffers from the aforementioned Caucasian Syndrome. The very name ‘Hindustan’ that the neo-Hindus are going ga-ga over, mistaking it for the land of Hindus, is actually a name given by the Persian-speaking Mughals to this country of “black people”! The word ‘Hindu’ in Persian connotes black: “Agar aan Turk-e-Shirazi badastayad dile-maara/ Bakhaal HINDUash Bakhsham Samarkand-o-Bukhara (I can give away cities like Samarkand and Bukhara in preference to the black – Hindu -- mole on your face), Hafiz Shirazi wrote in Persian. The white-skinned Mughals' disdain for the dark skin of the people of the sub-continent percolated down to the Indian psyche.

Aren't we all colour-conscious? We're and there's no getting away from the fact. Colour stereotypes still regulate our lives and collective thinking. This proclivity, nay prejudice, is so deep-seated in our consciousness that we don't even think of the import of the line often inscribed on a truck or bus: “Buri nazar wale, tera muh kaala.” It doesn't get us thinking because we take it for granted that the colour black is undesirable. It was inculcated in us by marauding civilizations coming from Central Asia and the Arab Peninsula.

The rampant and most exasperating advertisements of whiteness creams don't prick our conscience. Now, even men are going for whiteness cream, debunking the traditional aspiration for TDH: tall, dark and handsome. Even an Urdu poet like Kamal Amrohi wrote in his immortal nazm: “Kahin ek maasoom, naazuk-si ladki, bahut khoobsoorat magar saanwli-si”. Now, look at the words: “Bahut khoobsoorat, magar saanwli-si” (Very pretty, but darkish!). Here, a damsel's beauty comes with a caveat about her colour.

Humans are partial to white complexion. British feminist Germaine Greer calls it humanity's colour blindness. Since humans are still ill-evolved, they fail to comprehend the discrete colour combinations, hues and shades making a mosaic of seamless humanity. The co-existence of separate value systems and ideas of survival as a homogeneous unit despite subtle natural and genetic differences is unintelligible to us. We all must imbibe the spirit of Sahir Ludhianavi's couplet: “Rang aur nasl, zaat aur mazhab/Jo bhi ho aadmi se kamtar hain (Whether colour, race, caste or creed/All are subservient to the individual human).

So long as we live in the quagmire of prejudices and presuppositions, our predilection for a certain shade of colour will remain intact. Before condemning white Americans for being racist and colour conscious, we all must ask ourselves: Aren't we all? We're all tarred with the same brush and need to introspect.