The casual racism of the liberal newspaper of record

The New York Times never fails to astonish me with its casual, unthinking racism. It seems that the journalists and editors employed at the Times either have no training in the appropriate use of words, or are simply incapable of associating the word “people” with blacks, be they Africans, African-Americans, or as in this case, Haitians.

This is from the front page a few days ago. Check out the caption below the picture:

It’s not the first time that I’ve come across poor people of color being described as “scavengers” by the Times. Yes, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us of one of the favorable uses of the term. “Scavenger,” in this favorable sense, refers to: “one who labours for the removal of public evils.” But surely, that’s not what the caption under the picture here is implying. The connotations of the word “scavenger” are overwhelmingly negative, not positive. The OED includes, among its definitions of the word “scavenger,” the following:

One who or something which removes dirt or putrid matter. Applied to various animals that feed on decaying matter, esp. the scavenger beetle.
One who collects filth; one who does ‘dirty work’; a dishonourable person.

Remember this, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?

"Looters" and "Finders"

Déjà vu all over again. And again.

But these instances point to a larger problem: the fact that, over the last two decades or so, our understanding of the place of language in social change has gone backwards. When I first arrived in the U.S. in 1992, I learned very quickly to use words more self-consciously than I had been accustomed to. This was when the so-called “culture wars” were still raging in academia and in the public sphere. The attack on “political correctness” had gathered pace, but the legacy of the 1960s had not yet been erased. Thanks to my left-leaning grad student friends at Syracuse, I soon learned that women did not appreciate being called “girls” or “ladies,” any more than gay people appreciated being called “pansies” (yes indeed, my political awakening was rather belated).

I remember reading a socialist pamphlet called What’s Behind the Attack on ‘Politically Correct’? by Lance Selfa, and getting my first clear understanding of the battle lines in these “culture wars.” Where liberals and leftists were being accused of “policing language,” there was something much larger at stake. The right-wing backlash against the gains of the 1960s was the cultural counterpart to the “employer’s offensive” that sought to turn back the clock on the wage- and benefits-gains of the postwar decades.

Lance Selfa’s useful pamphlet is, sadly, out of print today. I think it is perhaps more relevant today than it was in 1991 when it was published, because each day brings me new reminders of just how much the Right has succeeded in pushing back against the progressive thrust of “political correctness.” Indeed, the phrase itself has morphed into a slur. Small wonder that my students, many of whom were toddlers when Selfa’s pamphlet came out, scoff at my discomfort when they refer to women as “girls,” or when they casually toss around words like “bitch” and “bitching.”

We are long overdue for a new political and cultural upheaval that will push us to look forward into the future rather than backward.

The sheer brutality of colonialism

In my seminar on Politics and Literature of Postcolonial Africa, we have been discussing Aime Cesaire’s classic Discourse on Colonialism. For Cesaire (and several other radical Black intellectuals like W. E. B. DuBois), the emergence of fascism in Europe was not an anomaly, not an exceptional moment in European history.

Popular discussions, withing academia and without, encourage us to view the mass slaughter of millions of Jews under Nazi rule as an abnormality, an inexplicable deviation, in the onward march of European cultures and societies towards Progress, Reason and Enlightenment. So students are taught, very early on, to refer to “the Holocaust” in the singular, capitalizing the word to render it as a proper noun.

Cesaire argues, instead, that to view the emergence of Nazism in this light is to erase from historical memory the sheer brutality of colonial wars of conquest that have been the defining feature of European history in the modern era. In a brilliant passage (a favorite of mine), he demolishes the notion that European Nazism was an anomaly or deviation, and insists that we recognize the continuity, in cultural if not in political and economic terms, between European colonialism abroad and the Nazi atrocities at home.

I’ve been waiting a long time to quote this passage in full somewhere, and here’s my opportunity, finally. Cesaire writes:

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated”, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but sulrey, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind – it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.

The relevance of Cesaire today is not hard to understand. Think Abu Ghraib. Think Guantanamo. Think of the U.S. soldiers who have recently been accused of killing Afghan civilians “for sport.” Think of the manner in which a viciously racist campaign against Muslims and against Islam has led, in recent months, to mosques being vandalized and attacked, Muslims being physically assaulted, and Muslims as a group being blamed for the bombing of the World Trade Center.

In my seminar discussions, I often find that my students can accept all of this as true, as real, and applaud Cesaire’s polemical indictment of European imperialist culture, but balk at the political conclusions that this critique leads to. In particular, while they might learn to love Cesaire, they find the writings of Cesaire’s most famous student, Frantz Fanon, difficult to swallow, especially when they find him condoning, and indeed glorifying, violent, armed resistance to colonial rule.

One has to be reminded, time and again, of the utter savagery of imperialist domination and conquest. Absent this, it becomes difficult to comprehend the violence that resistance movements typically employ.

In this context, check out the latest blog post from ScarletGuju, a close friend and comrade of mine who is currently researching the Indian struggle for independence from British colonialism. If you ever had any doubts about the brutality of colonialism, take a look at this post, and the picture that accompanies it.

And then ask yourself what would you do if an occupying power brutalized your families, your friends, your neighbors in this manner, all for the crime of demanding the very liberty and progress that the occupiers held up as their “ideals.”

Related Articles

• Colonialism and the ‘scramble for Africa’ (cnn.com)

Deepa Kumar on Islamophobia and the War on Afghanistan

Okay, yes, this is someone I know rather well, but that’s not why I’m recommending this video. You simply have to watch it and listen to the talk all the way through if you really want to understand why it is that Muslims and Islam are being victimized, vilified, and slandered, not just in the U.S., but around the world.

I’ve spoken with friends and family in Delhi and Bangalore recently, and all of them speak to me worriedly about how difficult it has become to defend Muslims and their rights. The term “Muslim appeasement” seems to have entered into people’s vocabulary, and a friend of mine recently asked for some theoretical and historical “ammo” to arm himself with so he might more successfully take on the rampant Islamophobia that’s been building in India for years now.

So, check out Professor Deepa Kumar outline the history and politics of Islamophobia:

Related Articles

• Deepa Kumar: Islam and Islamophobia (isreview.org)
• Islamophobia on the Rise? (talkingpointsmemo.com)
• European Islamophobia Finds A Home In The US (npr.org)
• Phyllis Bennis: Is Mosque Hysteria Being Ginned Up to Bolster Support for the Disastrous Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Sharon Smith: Women and Islam (isreview.org)
• John L. Esposito: Islamophobia: A Threat to American Values? (huffingtonpost.com)

Prejudice, desi style, and its context (2)

In my last post, I talked about the current social and political conjuncture in the Indian subcontinent. Here, I want to develop this further by examining various elements of this conjuncture in detail.

It makes sense, I think, to begin first with some basic economic observations and presuppositions, particularly as they pertain to the Indian economy. I am no economist per se, but I can navigate my way through a few concepts, and I would like to throw them open for discussion, particularly among progressive desis. In other words, let us begin a genuine, collaborative debate across the continents (that’s what blogging is all about, anyway).

Prejudice, desi style, and its context

Krish’s excellent post raises some very important questions that often get silenced in desi circles, regardless of the continent on which they occur. Why is Indian culture so incredibly intolerant these days? Anti-Muslim prejudice, casteist anti-dalit blindness, anti-Pakistani sentiment…. Racism and sexism run rampant in our society today (and Krish might have included homophobia and prejudice towards transgendered/transsexual community).

A small example of such intolerance can be seen in the knee-jerk objections that are raised against even a mere passing reference to Hindu fundamentalism in an excellent recent blog post on the Lal Masjid crisis.

Troublingly enough, many of these forms of intolerance that Krish outlines are weaving themselves into the fabric of Indian and Indian diasporic commonsense, particularly among the urban, educated upper-middle and lower-middle classes, but not excluding well-paid BPO and call-center workers who see…