Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day. Of course, Facebook has a way of ‘super’-highlighting that which is already important, thanks to the fact that most people check their News Feed more times than they scratch their bums in any one day. This Monday, I was treated to some of the most stimulating status updates I’ve read in a while, proving that my friends aren’t just people who love to complain about swerving past slowpokes on the highway or spending the day covered in their own coffee thanks to lunatics on the road. My friend Jeff poignantly echoed Mr King’s dream of a world without oppression, which earned him some skeptical responses. The wager came up that racial stereotypes would probably become far less prevalent the longer the world continued mixing; a theory once purported by comedian Russell Peters to bring about a one-shade, unified race of…well, beige people. (Oh, take that sorry look off your face, it’s supposed to be a joke.)
All jokes aside, it got me thinking about how people treat things they don’t understand. The adage goes that ‘we fear that which we do not understand’; this is certainly true at a root psychological level when it comes to the meeting of two or more cultures. As a 7 year old staying at a friend’s house in Hertfordshire, I was approached by two white teenage boys in a nearby playground who called me a ‘paki’ and punched me. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that racial slur used against me, nor was it the first time I’d been bullied for being another race. This was 1987; and given that I was visiting just outside of London, those boys couldn’t have seen very many different races in their short lives at that point. To them, I was brown, not white, meaning that I was some sort of problem that needed erasing, irrespective of the fact that at the age of 7, I stood at 140cm tall and came up to their knees. Side stepping the needless violence for a second, if you take a close look, all factors point to ignorance. Not just that it’s fairly obvious to most people that I’m not Pakistani, but that someone different by any standard should be a figure of blind hate. Perhaps governing authorities in London and the South East would like to claim that we’ve overcome that kind of thinking today. But overcome in what way? Overcome expressing what some people continue to think? The point is that even in our multi-ethnic, global 21st century, where all countries touch at the click of a mouse, button or touchpad; where the world is supposedly so close to being ‘beige’, there are still people walking the earth today, who think like those boys.
It’s rather sad that many societies, particularly Western ones, are quick to formally declare themselves free of racial oppression altogether when it isn’t the case. It is however, an admirable goal to strive toward in the pursuit of holding onto civilization. The desire to see racism wiped out is motivated by the clarity and perspective that comes with understanding someone who is different than you. Once the mind can understand another person’s reality; a third, fourth and fifth, leading to the thirst to know many more; like a canopy of thunderclouds a great shame hangs over the time of ignorance…a shame which humans hope to fig-leaf over as quickly as possible with unifying statements about race. The truth is that racial oppression, though largely eradicated on the wide screen, is definitely still alive in Western civilization; it shows up in erratic blips and episodes all over the world like bad acid reflux after a heavy meal of multiculturalism.
Culturally we’re already trying so hard to be a shade of beige, eating each other’s foods, infusing each other’s music and blending each other’s customs. But I think the of idea totalitarian beige-ism at a pandemic level is what scares people. The idea that nobody would ever be different ever again, that everyone would be the same, marching to the same mantra, ingesting the same formulas like unthinking lemmings, becomes a frightening morphosis to imagine. It is this surreal morphosis that encourages us to laugh at our racial stereotypes with an endearment, much in the way that Russell Peters’ stand-up comedy reinforces. How does an Canadian-born Indian man get away with cracking jokes about Koreans in front of a laughing multicultural audience?? How does he do it?? Because although nothing’s weirder than your own family, the paradox goes that we’re actually not that different when it comes to our stereotypes.
I don’t think Martin Luther King wanted to do away with just racial intolerance, although he succeeded with much of that vision during the Civil Rights’ Movement. I think he knew that accepting and appreciating our very differences would be a much harder long-term goal, because we’re still struggling with that now. For now, though, we can only hope that everyone won’t eventually, be…beige. I certainly don’t.
