I was about five years old when Martin Luther King Jr. beautified the world with his “I have a dream” speech. A vibration must have reached me through the ether, and through my father. He was a professor of political science, and his books spilling over in every room formed the stacks against which we children sometimes rested our backs. Pictures of Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Sri Aurobindo, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, Bhagat Singh and such greats adorned the walls of our home. I am certain they gave us some energy and shaped our thoughts.
At 15, when I joined college after matriculation/ grade 10, I was offended when some fellow girl students called the African students in the college “niggers”. I knew it was a racist slur against blacks. My exposure to the black colour, if not race, had happened class six onwards in the form of a lovely visiting English teacher from Tamil Nadu, “Ramakrishnan Sir”. I found his tall and lean physique, chaste English, glowing black skin and snow white teeth captivating. Until I came to Delhi, joined journalism and saw, first in pictures, the villain-like M Karunanidhi, I had a very good feel about Tamil people, thanks to my teacher.
Not all children exposed to the largely fair- skinned people that were Punjabis (who looked down upon dark skins, and still do), are supposed to have such positive reaction as mine to my jet black Tamil teacher. In fact, when I read ‘A Rap on Race’, the classic conversation between James Baldwin and Margaret Meade, which describes the fear white children, still in the cradle, feel when they see blacks for the first time, I learned to forgive the children who had said mean things about my teacher because of his colour. For that matter even adults who can’t see beauty except in fair skin.
Colour prejudice is too widespread in the world and it is no use fretting about it. As long as we act responsibly in bringing up our children, and governments do their best to eradicate it through imaginative ways, especially in early school education, strict laws—also their enforcement, striking fear in the hearts of those who otherwise let loose their tongues on the matter in public and vitiate the atmosphere—it can be handled.
My mother, whose education did not depend upon her literacy level, told me decades ago that the word ‘chuda’ was a slur, and both morally and legally wrong. ‘Chuda’ is the Punjabi equivalent of ‘chamar’, once used to describe the vocation of sweepers, that became a pejorative over generations, and began to be employed as a verbal weapon against the low castes and the dark-skinned. My mother was uniformly kind to all workers at our place, without knowing too much about the caste and racial wars that have been raging in India and the United States for centuries.
Given the rampant colour consciousness in both the developed and developing world, it is hard to understand why the recent statements of Donald Trump, the former U.S. president and current Republican presidential nominee, and Sam Pitroda, the U.S.-based Indian National Congress leader, created a furore. The Congress was quick to snub Pitroda and disassociate itself from him, and the party’s political opponents pounced on the Congress. All Pitroda had said was that in India we have great diversity of form, race and colour.
The people of north east India are closer to the Chinese than to Indians; north Indians, especially Kashmiris and Punjabis, share their height and look with the Arabs, and south Indians have their roots in the Dravidian and Caucasoid race, not the black/negro race as Pitroda had casually said. Basically, Pitroda’s was a statement about the multi-racial and multi-colour population of India. Unless it is wrong to describe diversity in terms of colour and look, the criticism against Pitroda was unfair and nasty. Ditto for Trump.
At the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago a few weeks ago, Trump asked the interviewer as to when his Democratic Party rival in the 2024 elections, Kamala Harris, “became black”. “I thought she was Indian.” Trump was expressing surprise–with a bit of sarcasm, but in no way showing Harris down for her colour. He seemed equally surprised when told Harris was 60 years old. “I didn’t know she was 60, I thought she was younger.” Harris does look younger.
About whether Harris is black, here is the factual story: she is only 25 percent black. Her maternal lineage is Indian and the paternal roots are only partially Jamaican. Her paternal grandfather was Irish married to a local woman in Jamaica where he owned estates. The correct thing for Harris to say, if she must play identity politics, would be that she is of mixed race, Claiming to be black and putting on a black accent as she is doing at some rallies, Harris is only inviting ridicule for her political opportunism. Besides, until the other day Harris was happily and mainly projecting her Indian identity.
Of course, Harris has had good exposure to the black culture through her college, and relationship with two black celebrities, a political leader and a singer, but that doesn’t make her black. Yet she was picked up by Joe Biden as vice president who, by an open declaration, wanted a black and a woman in that position. What about merit? Anyone asking that is seen as sexist and racist. If it is not racism to pick Harris because of her gender and colour, it is certainly not so to think of merit before colour as her opponents are doing. Justifying her nomination as the presidential nominee, Democrats also say it is high time a woman of colour got the top political seat in America.
Meanwhile, it is important to educate oneself about the harm that some liberal and Democratic whites have done to blacks through condescension and false pretences, and the good the Republican conservatives have done to them through realistic and honest appraisals of race. Not long ago, the American polity was not divided into crazy liberals, who claim to be in favour of blacks, against discrimination, and yet terrorise those who follow the science of chromosomes on one hand, and lunatic white supremacists, black-haters, and anti-abortionists, more protective of a foetus than a grown girl or woman, on the other.
It would be instructive for America and Americans, currently entangled in violent, obsessive and degenerative colour and gender conflicts, that redefine the two main political parties and threaten to push the country into anarchy, to go back to their Democratic and Republican roots. Both Republicans and Democrats have done great good to the country and the world. The Civil War and World War 2, were fought—and won—under Republican Lincoln and Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, respectively. Revisiting these people and learning what real wars are, and what courage and ability are needed to fight them, would be very useful.
It might even rekindle the spirit that guided Martin Luther King’s iconic speech. The revival of that spirit is what would “make America great again”.
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