In terms of racism and racist rhetoric, I mean, here’s a tale about racism from Russia. A Russian Newsweek reporter and blogger, who is ethnically Kazakh, was attacked in Moscow by four young men.
Here’s an excerpt.
Most likely, it was an accidental attack by the neo-Nazis. Today, it may well be considered a routine crime ), or maybe not. Funny that on this very day I finished a piece on the [United Russia party] members who now have to love the “Russia for the Russians†slogan. A piece with some interesting bits on [the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, the DPNI].
What’s most interesting to me are the comments. They sound so very similar to what I hear regularly about Haitians. Most interesting is the go-back-home theme that keeps recurring.
… in your Motherland, an ethnic Russian journalist exposing local nationalists wouldn’t have survived even a couple of publications. And you go on living and exposing. So everything is fair and logical. And then, if you are such a fighter against Nazism, why don’t you do this in your homeland? And we’ll deal with nationalism here ourselves …
No one is keeping you here. You can move and live somewhere in Turkmenistan. Because it doesn’t make any difference whether there are Russians around or not. But to many people it does matter, and the Russian people mainly want to live in a country where there are 80-90 percent Russians, and not 10 percent. […] So 20 million Kyrgyz come to Russia, and 50 million Chinese, and 10 million Azeris. And they multiply. And as a result, only 10 percent of Russians will remain in the country. And this won’t be Russia anymore. All our history will have to be crossed out – what for have we been building the country for? […] The thing is, in a normal state, the state itself would’ve been involved in immigration policies.
Whenever the topic of Haitians in The Bahamas is raised, the rhetoric becomes predictable. It’s predictable because it’s the very same rhetoric that is used by all racists to justify their perspectives on people they believe don’t belong among them. The following comments are usual:
- “They” should go home to their own country
- “They” shouldn’t complain about what happens to them here because “they” are immigrants (usually the word illegal is added here)
- “They” are using up all the resources “we” pay for
- “They” multiply faster and more than “we” do and “they” will soon outnumber “us”
I’m not debating the truth or lack of it about any of these statements. But I am pointing out that they are not unique to us. They are not special to Haitians. They are remarkably identical to the kinds of statements made anywhere in the world by people whose environments are changing rapidly and whose reaction to that change is to blame the Other, rather than to adapt and move forward. The language, and the rhetoric, is fundamentally racist, and that is true of whether the person who is making the statement is white, black, orange, yellow, or pink.
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My “job” is to teach boy scouts how to sail for a week at a time in the Abacos. These kids are almost all as white as can be, and they come from places like Minnesota. One of the things I often tell them is “If you want to learn that racism has nothing to do with the color of your skin, watch how black Bahamians treat Haitians.”
It’s a good lesson. I wish they didn’t learn it here. But they do.
I wouldn’t put it in exactly that way, Bob — that racism has nothing to do with the colour of your skin. I identify myself as a “black” Bahamian because of the political reality of this country (my parents and my grandparents were excluded from places of privilege because of the colour of their skins) and because the way I see the world is not the same as the way that people who identify themselves as “white” see the world. But because my skin is fair enough to “pass for white”, I know very well that there is a difference between the way in which people like me are treated and the way people like my brother (who could never “pass”) or our cousins (for whom there is no ambiguity about “race” at all) are treated. The likelihood of experiencing racism still depends very much on the colour of your skin.
The irony of the situation, though, is that the colour of your skin doesn’t preclude you from being racist yourself. And by that I mean not only the kind of racism that many white people have experienced since majority rule, which is a kind of reverse racism and which still tends to come more from a position of insecurity than from superiority, but also — as happens with Haitians in The Bahamas — with the application of the very same rhetoric of superiority and inferiority against other black people that was once used against you.
Racism has a whole lot to do with the colour of one’s skin, or — perhaps more to the point — one’s heritage, one’s ancestry, one’s descent from a place other than Europe. These places are still all ranked hierarchically in the popular imagination according to a kind of ladder of “evolution” (whether one believes in evolution or not), and the ranking goes like this: Europe, East Asia, Oceania, Africa. Or, as the hymn goes, “red and yellow, black and white”. And no matter how you arrange the middle, white is always at the top and black at the bottom. This is true globally, so that no matter where you go in the world, if you are white, you will occupy a place of privilege in that place, even if that privilege is a skewed one; when things get really really bad, you are likely to be evacuated by whatever major army comes into that place to take the “civilized” people out. And if you are black, no matter where you go in the world, you are more likely than anybody else to be on the receiving end of discriminatory practices — even when the people practising discrimination are as black as you are.
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