Is discrimination our birthright? Our five fingers may tip our hand: not only their inequality setting up the premise for discrimination, but the opposition of the thumb to the other four fingers also predisposes us into a dialectic trap, breeding biases (even though, without the opposing thumb pressure, we would not be able to hold too well or write at all). Strengthening that predisposition, how boys and girls get treated differently right from the word "go" ingrains gender interpretations, with all its twists and turns. We not only come in varied colours, shapes, and sizes, thus setting up other future battle fronts, but in how we get trained, and the values inculcated within us, not to mention shaping our belief-system and mindset, also leave us as sitting quacking ducks of multifaceted discriminatory actions.
Endowments such as these, unfortunately, constitute only one part of any discriminatory landscape. The atmosphere around us (call it the environment, society, nationality, even the family), imposes its own forms, such as becoming patriotic or imposing sanctions, or complicating/perpetuating others. Atmospheric-induced discrimination even shows high and low intensities, as in a cyclical pattern: note how the "giving peace a chance" mindset of the rhythmic 1960s, which ferociously battled the very authors and institutions of war literally unarmed, contrasted with the blind-sighted nationalism of the 1930s, which translated into fascism, nazism, or military authoritarianism, eventually producing the century's worst depression and the most brutal worldwide war. Such is discrimination!
More elements of the 1930s than of the 1960s grip our attention today. Note how, as immigrants and refugees push the European Union to a breakpoint, anyone looking like an immigrant/refugee automatically invites discrimination of all sorts. This, even without invoking the Islamic fundamentalist or terrorist threats also rocking the continent sporadically, independently, and irretrievably beyond rational expectations.
Another fountainhead of discrimination became headline news across the English Channel, carrying some of the above-mentioned ingredients, but adding newer components too. For example, though Brexit (Britain's exit from the European Union) was about the precise issue of separating from Europe, ostensibly because Britain was paying more for continental integration than receiving commensurate benefits, in actuality the vote reflected reactions against the so-called "Polish plumber" symbol: as a 2005 Charlie Hebdo caricature depicted, it represents cheap Central European workers swarming West European countries. A "darker" and more fearful version of this encompassed all the non-European immigrants swarming England (and Europe). Every alphabet of discrimination glowed with that vote, as if.
Matters were not far different across a far wider body of water. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Donald J. Trump rode into the Oval Office (or will ceremoniously do so next month), on an election platform parrying Muslim terrorists, Mexican rapists, Chinese swindlers, among a host of other uncharitable and discriminatory epithets. Not only was discrimination pushed to a higher threshold, but a string of very penetrating cases may be making high-dosage discrimination irreversible.
To unload any discriminatory gun, one must first distinguish between the various types. Taking Trump's litany to illustrate, we can identify economic discrimination (directed mostly at China); social-cultural discrimination (encapsulating "rape," as Mexicans or Hispanics thrust upon Anglo-Saxon victims, with the degree of ethnic/racial discrimination determined by how brown, black, or white a Mexican/Hispanic actually is); gender discrimination (reflecting profuse misogynistic comments made by Trump himself); as well as socio-religious (Muslims being banned from US entry evoking a religious litmus test) or socio-political (dubbing them as "terrorists," thus inviting a socio-political barometer).
Though Brexit and EU discriminatory policies also fall within these same cleavages, ethnicity demands sharper relief, given the Polish plumber syndrome: since he might be as white as any member of the English royal family, for instance, racial overtures get shifted to other arenas, religious challenges extract minimal mileage, even if he may be Catholic in a Protestant country, while economic discrimination simply lacks the punch to match the agitated mindset of the discriminating persons. Ethnicity becomes a more salient discriminatory medium, extending discrimination into invisible cultural quarters.
One must not discriminate geographically (that is, based on nationalistic yardsticks) to make an argument on discrimination. These three examples (Britain, Europe, and the United States) have dominated global headlines more than many others in recent months, though even worse forms of discrimination unfold routinely elsewhere: between Shias and Sunnis in Yemen, Rohingyas in both Buddhist Myanmar and Bangalee Bangladesh; Christians and Muslims in BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) India; Muslim Brotherhood, a popularly-elected group in Egypt, against "establishment" Egypt (of the military, mainstream, and so forth); Uighurs and Tibetans in China; drug-addicts/peddlars/gangsters in Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines; a PAN (Parrtido Accion Nacional)-supporter amid a PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional)-administered government in Mexico; and so forth.
In short, wherever we look, we notice different stripes and shades of discrimination, some of high-intensity, others of low. Yet, which form is most/least damaging, how do we disentangle them, and what can be done to nip an aberrational mindset from deteriorating?
What we "see" often defines the depth or base-line of discrimination. For example, we "see" gender and racial differences even before we begin to analyse them, though analysis has the power of deepening/diluting discrimination. Since we "see" them, it is not by chance that gender and racial discrimination just happen to be the most stubborn to reform: we "see" them from as soon as we open our eyes in our childhood, then the depth of our senses is determined by the preaching of others, or practices during our upbringing. Small wonder, then, that the discrimination the US Civil war sought (and fought) to eradicate, slavery, is still alive in the most virulent forms of discrimination against Afro-Americans today (partly necessitating the "Black Lives Matter" movement), for instance, or the shameless side-swiping of the 44th president just because of his skin colour (Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's "fatwa" unsuccessfully demanded he be made "a one-term president" from as early as October 2010), and reviving the Ku Klux Klan (as both its open participation in the 2016 US elections and activities since suggest).
Even though women got the right to vote almost a century ago in the United States (and at similarly distant moments across Europe), and in spite of the symbolic "you've come a long way, baby" Virginia Slims advertisement caption of the 1990s referencing women advancement, gender discrimination remains bedrock: in misogynistic references of US presidential candidates; work wages in as women-friendly a continent as Europe; the continued prevalence of "suttee" across India (an ancient female funeral practice of joining a deceased husband in the pyre; though outlawed in 1829, renewed preventive measures enacted in 1989 expose how it is still practised); and, of course, the forceful Muslim inhibitions upon women, whether in clothing, working, or civil-society engagements.
Base-line discriminations such as these worsen when coupled with other forms of discrimination. A sagging economy adds another discriminatory layer, and we behold the black, brown, or yellow, or woman worker, whose endogenous disqualifiers (race, gender) must now grapple with exogenous disqualifiers (the economy). In its worst form, China, for example, has become the sacrificial lamb for the discriminating US mindset only because of a US recession or stalled US economic growth. Sure there are valid reasons why China must be brought to the dock for manipulating its currency and trade, but the US mindset seeks more than the dock: it seeks to stamp a permanent "black sheep" marker on China for all time and all viewers, a marker less likely to evaporate if China mends its own discriminatory economic policies than if the US economic growth hits a surge itself. It was the way previous adversaries were subdued: indigenous people were dubbed "red" (as in Red Indians), but so too the Russians after the Soviet military challenge (with "red" now meaning communism).
The same is true of the brown-skinned Mexican "rapist." He comes to life more often in sagging economic times amid a presidential/congressional election than in reality; but once established as a marker, very much like the Polish plumber, the discriminatory mindset makes far more mileage out of Mother Nature's marker (race or gender) than the social counterpart (economic, ethnic, and the like).
At the extreme, they culminate in policies like Adolf Hitler's "Lebensraum" ("elbow-space" for pure Aryans, that is, Germans), or promises like Donald Trump's (building a border-wall with Mexico; scrutinising Muslims entering the United States; entering a nuclear arms build-up until the "world comes to its senses"). Note the discrimination pyramid common to both: the starting point, or base-line, being a visible form (race, religion, gender). For Hitler the Aryan race was the superior race, for Trump both misogyny and stoking white-power (support for policemen battling racial violence, labelled the "Blue Lives Matter" retort; white supremacists; and so forth), then capitalising on the concurrent national mood.
Both instances sprang from economic hardship. For Germany, this was the post-Versailles, post-reparation period; for the United States the stubborn global challenges led by China. The most efficient route out of this exogenous challenge includes, of course, reforms and restructuring; but these take time and impose public hardships. The easier way out of these circumstances is to recharge nationalism. No wonder, then, that Hitler could use Lebensraum to overthrow the Versailles order that militarily contained Germany in the west, and explore eastern windows all the way up to Moscow (since communism was just as antithetical to his Nazi ideology) and the Caspian Sea (illustrating one of the most frantic early searches to get oil).
Trump made equally significant splashes: promising a border-wall with Mexico on the basis of supposedly spiralling undocumented migrants (and above all, its projected consequences like raping, stealing, and other criminal activities), identified an incorrect cause of the US malaise (the actual cause may be swaying economic competition); conflating the war on terror by feeding a public mindset gripped with Islamic State (ISIS) brutalities with the most draconian anti-Muslim measures, exceeding those that greeted the even more draconian Islam-based terror incident in September 2001; and poking fun at the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) alliance for free-riding US military, political, and economic capabilities, as if the US fall from the pinnacle of each of these fronts stemmed from opportunism.
The shift from visible discriminatory forms (race, gender) to the invisible (economic, social Darwinism, and so forth), suggests why discrimination thickens over time, and when that happens, ripples across a wider domain. Solutions must then begin not just on all fronts in order to demonstrate the intolerance towards bigotry, misogyny, racial hatred, and economic protectionism, but to also pay greater emphasis to eliminating the invisible forms first. In their presence, visible discriminatory forms refuse even more stubbornly to yield; without them, as was evident in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act in the United States, those visible forms can be contained, thawed, and hopefully reversed incrementally through a mixed policy-making approach utilising carrots (the US Affirmative Action programme exemplifying "positive" discrimination), and sticks (penalties).
One other factor caused by the discrimination cycle deserves attention: the ripple-effect. Visible discriminatory forms usually portray a domestic attitudinal/policy-making discontinuity, agenda, and scope, though, when couched under such labels as Lebensraum, Anglo-Saxon fortress, Slavic identity, or Islamic Ummah, spill far beyond the domestic realm, and disturbingly so. Invisible counterparts trigger retaliation abroad, becoming the perfect vehicle of the spread-effect, which snowballs as visible discriminatory forms jump on-board.
Behind any national policy or mood lies a tussle between the emotional and rational forces within every human being, in turn, generating a paradox: containing and correcting both visible and invisible discriminatory forms requires rational heads and policy-making, yet the conjunction of economic hardships and stoked visible discriminatory forms expose emotion-capitalizing leaders extracting every drop of a draining national mood. Rational policy-makers have no choice but to be flawless in character and policy-making preferences capable of withstanding the emotional outburst. Hillary Clinton failed this test (with Benghazi hanging as her Damoclean Sword), as too David Cameron (by unnecessarily invoking a EU referendum in a national election, which unsettled another emotional trip-wire), Matteo Renzi (calling for a constitutional reform referendum, which he soundly lost, also because it fed an emotional live-wire), and perhaps Angela Merkel (by underestimating the national mood caused by her refugee policy approach, she may face her most daunting election in 2017). François Hollande conceivably decided not to seek re-election in France because of this slippery emotive slope, and his possible replacements have far less visibility than National Front's Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, thus retiring the rational option from the electoral equation, as elsewhere across Europe.
It is no different across the world: with Brazil's Michel Miguel Elias Temer Lulia (a post-Dilma Rousseff saviour until similar corruption charges pinned him too), Egypt's Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (a military general diminishing democracy's precepts), India's Narendra Modi (who ignores explicit fanaticist actions of his party's extreme faction, the RSS, or Rashtriya Swamasevak Sangh), the Philippines's Rodrigo Duterte (murdering drug-traffickers point-blank with a democratic mandate), Russia's Vladimir Putin (whose secret service drives an ostensibly democratic country, while his collusions abroad challenge the prevailing global order), or South Africa's Jacob Zuma (another vehicle of open-ended corruption). Our world today is littered with leaders bent on reducing the space for rational policy-making: pumping emotions or lacing national interests with unnecessary urgency, the discriminatory playing-field is only being widened without restraints.
If this is how 2016 must end, the future awaits either another brush with cataclysmic events, as in the 1930s, or a string of sagacious leaders to turn the tide, of which we have proportionally fewer candidates now than in the 1930s (when a Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others, valiantly stood up against all odds). So far, if democratically-held elections have failed to enhance the latter option, we, in just about every country, must face the former plight with increasing alacrity and inevitability by galvanizing collectively on larger scales than smaller, and soul-searching more deeply individually than superficially.
Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain is Professor & Head of the newly-built Department of Global Studies & Governance at Independent University, Bangladesh.
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