By Gitanjali Marcelline
Colombo, June 20 (newsin.asia): For those who revel in what’s ‘in’ today, racism is clearly the “in” thing, given the frenzy one is seeing across America over the murder of Black man George Floyd by a White cop on a Minneapolis street.
But racism is by no means new, having been in our midst since the time we learned to hate.
Law enforcement is very much ‘in’ these days. Somewhere in the US, a group of White policemen thinks up ways to effectively terrorize Blacks or anything that might taint their Whiteness, pure as driven snow.
The Blacks, in fact all non-Whites, are not unblemished either. They too are banding together to raise racial consciousness in the garb of racial integration and equality through the civil-rights movement.
Having been at the receiving end for centuries, the Blacks now hope to change the picture with Black as the dominant color and White in the fringes, if not completely out. With the “people of Color” clearly in the majority now, this is not exactly dreaming an impossible dream.
If there is a point to all this; it is that racism is no longer what it used to be. The hate virus has spread to all races and social groups – young, old, the poor and the affluent.
I used to think that racism is exclusively nourished by the belief that one race is superior in intelligence and cultural potential compared to another. But it seems that the parameters of fiery viciousness and prejudiced thinking have expanded while I was not paying attention.
But whatever form racism might take, the main ingredient fuelling racism is hatred – hatred directed at a person or a group of like-minded persons who are perceived to have qualities that are deemed undesirable. The trouble with hatred is that it does not lie dormant for long. In one way or the other, it gets expressed in action, predominantly in the form of violence.
So, if one wants to understand racism, prejudice, bigotry or simply hatred, the best way is to look at its external or physical manifestation, which is violence, as violence is the high point of racism or any form of hate for that matter.
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