It is quickly becoming a pop culture phenomenon to dig into the hidden racist. The recent Borat movie and the ruckus about the Big Brother TV episode come to mind immediately. I find this phenomenon extremely irritating.
Ofcourse, what else would you expect from people ? Give them a break.
What’s more concerning to me is how these kind of cultural analyses always miss the bigger picture. In the long run, it doesn’t hurt the society if a fat redneck thinks that black people are ugly, or if he thinks Chinese people are evil.
What really hurt the society are economic policies. The current world order is so skewed in favor of the western countries that this should sound immediate bells of alarm.
In today’s world, massive trade barriers impede producers of the third world countries from selling their products in the rich western markets. Not only are western consumers sacrificing a huge diversity in their markets (and simultaneously paying much higher prices), but they are also breaking the back of all efforts towards industrializing the third world.
In today’s world, capital can move freely across borders but labour cannot. Even if one is desperate to work and earn some food to save oneself from starvation, one cannot do so.
In today’s world, millions of children go uneducated, thereby condemned to lives of perennial poverty. Millions of people die of preventable diseases because they cannot afford the prices dictated to them by the health-care corporations. In today’s world, millions of people consider exploring their creativity as a luxury, as they are forced to fight the immediate battles of survival.
None of this makes any kind of sense. The only reason why this situation persists is because of intense and pathetic racism. It is the feeling which perverts a person and prevents him from acknowledging the simple fact – that all human beings on this world are equally capable of doing miraculous things, and thus deserve equal opportunities.
What is racism ? It is judging a person of what one is capable of based on the details of one’s birth.
This feeling is a viral disease which can infect any ideology, however great it may be, and corrupt it to the core. Every person who wants to be strongly vocal about any ideology that he possesses needs to take this litmus test.That ideology can be religion or politics or whatever. This is an important preprocessing step before any ideology can be applied, whether related to immigration laws, affirmative action or trade barriers. It can be left-wing politics or right-wing politics. It can be Mel Gibson’s Christianity or Bal Thakeray’s Hinduism. If it doesn’t pass the preprocessing step, it will never lead to the intended results.
It doesn’t matter if Jade Goody calls Shilpa Shetty a loser and asks her to go back to the slums.
What does matter is intelligent people not thinking twice before they subscribe to ideologies which deny the equality of opportunity for fellow human beings. There in lies the hidden racist.
[...] Where’s my hidden racist ? [...]