01-18-2008, 01:40 AM
I could have psoted in Psy-ops thread but I think this is where it belongs. I was struck by the gnawig fact that something is worng in the Bhaji controversey in Ozzie land but could put my finger on it.
Well here it is. From Pioneer, 18 Jan., 2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The race to transfer guilt
Ashok Malik
Writing in London's Daily Mail after the controversy-ridden Sydney test match, a particularly over-the-top sports columnist said, "Here is the latest news from Down Under. A Black cricketer claims he was called a 'monkey' so the authorities have dumped a black umpire to appease the team accused of harbouring a racist."
Paul Hayward, for that is the writer's name, had more to add: "'Monkey' relegates the object to the animal kingdom and instantly evokes slave ships out of Africa, lynchings in America's deep South and the worst ramblings of white supremacists." The point he was trying to make was that calling a Black cricketer a monkey was different from 'conventional' or even 'legitimate' abuse and sledging.
While he's clearly unknown and unheard of in India, <b>Hayward has put forward an argument that others have echoed too. By allegedly calling Andrew Symonds a "monkey", Harbhajan Singh, they charge, has crossed the Rubicon.</b>
<b>It is the sort of high-minded rhetoric that would leave most Indians completely bewildered. "Slave ships out of Africa"; "lynchings in America"; "ramblings of white supremacists": All very well, but what's it got to do with Harbhajan Singh's Sikh/Punjabi ancestors? The Indians weren't the ones running the slave ships, so why should they be guilt-tripped?</b>
There are some intriguing questions amid the acrid post-Sydney debate. <b>Does racism in sport (or in any field) only become an issue when the cultural commentators of the West -- not to speak of pompous cricket writers in London and jejune cricket captains in Australia -- discover it?</b>
Begin with first principles. <b>After Sydney, the usual hand-wringing has begun among sections of the Indian intelligentsia. They insist Indians live in glass houses and are actually quite racist. For evidence, sales figures of 'skin fairness creams' have been cited. One newspaper has diligently compiled a list of which Indians hate other Indians: From Delhi residents who ridicule students from the North-East to Bengalis who despise Marwaris.</b>
All of this is beside the point. It is nobody's argument that Indian society doesn't have prejudice; that is, regrettably, a part of the human condition. <b>Yet, racism -- in the manner in which it is being discussed after the Sydney test -- refers to a specific political belief that Black people are inferior. It is about the oppression and brutalisation of those of African origin by, predominantly, Western nations.</b>
In this narrow-focus framework India as a society has far less to answer for than, say, Australia or, indeed, the forefathers of apoplectic newspaper columnists in London. Correctly or incorrectly, the Indian establishment and middle class see their country as a strong voice against racism -- a society that backed liberation movements in South Africa and Namibia, for example, and led the crusade against racism in sport when race was really a global problem, rather than the newbie multi-culturalist's hobby horse.
<i>{India spent a lot of money annually to give support to ANC when it was banned by the West. Ask Mandela}</i>
<b>Despite the holier-than-thou nonsense of Cricket Australia's apologists, the fact is racism in international sport is far less of a menace today than it was 20 years ago.</b> It was a fault-line from, roughly, the 1950s, when newly independent nations in Asia and Africa felt White countries weren't giving them their due. <b>India suffered too, if only collaterally. First-grade English cricketers routinely skipped tours to the sub-continent. Between 1947 and 1980, India was invited to visit Australia only three times -- 1947-48, 1967-68 and 1977-78.</b>
Was this racism or merely distance, discomfort and mutual suspicion? It usually depended on your passport.
Africans or those of African descent had a more combustible encounter. Apartheid was a hot button especially when some nations insisted sport and politics could not be mixed. It led to an African boycott of the 1976 Olympics. <b>As far back as 1976, then England captain Tony Greig welcomed the West Indies cricket team by promising to make them "grovel". As Clive Lloyd pointed out in his autobiography, Living for Cricket, this brought to mind images of African slaves in sugar plantations and inspired his team to smash England 3-0. Even so, there was no indignant columnist waiting to admonish Greig, no Ricky Ponting complaining to the International Cricket Council (ICC), no ICC referee who cared a damn.</b>
Since the 1990s, racism has, for the most part, ceased to be an issue in international sport. Perhaps making up for lost time, the moral custodians of Western culture have suddenly woken up to it, and are promoting a war against a phantom enemy. There is a word for this phenomenon -- political correctness.
It is instructive that in the manner in which it is delineated and its concerns hierarchically laid out, <b>political correctness is itself neo-racist -- only addressing those sensitivities the West believes worthy of protecting. There is also an inexplicable universalisation of its postulates.</b> Why else would an Indian, with no slave ships in his family, no Gone With the Wind legacy, be expected to 'atone' in equal measure for Europe's or America's historical maltreatment of the Black man? Has political correctness become a civilisational transfer of guilt?
Such collective amnesia is not limited to racism. <b>Consider how Europe and even the United States have blissfully whitewashed their record of anti-Semitism. Over centuries, European nations regularly demonised Jews. Even during the Holocaust, America was turning back German Jewish refugees.</b>
After World War II, <b>when the monstrosity of the Nazi regime was there for all to see, Europe and America changed their minds.</b> Hitler now became the unmentionable one. Even a rational academic discussion on his relative achievements and failures -- without in any way mitigating the evil he institutionalised in his concentration camps -- became out of bounds.
<b>India's Semitic encounter was very different. Successive waves of Jewish migration -- spread over hundreds of years -- resulted in no ill will. That is why it is sometimes strange when Western interlocutors lecture India on the need to excise even mild mention of Hitler from public discourse. </b>
Indians see Hitler as no different a villain from Nadir Shah or Attila the Hun. The West insists he is in a league of his own. <b>The strict anti-Semitism codes that the West has designed are its attempt to make up for a dubious past. Other countries, those with no history of violence against the Jews, don't understand why they should be spoon-fed these rules.</b> Just like, one supposes, a working class Sikh youth can't understand why he should be a scapegoat for the Slave Trade.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Well here it is. From Pioneer, 18 Jan., 2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The race to transfer guilt
Ashok Malik
Writing in London's Daily Mail after the controversy-ridden Sydney test match, a particularly over-the-top sports columnist said, "Here is the latest news from Down Under. A Black cricketer claims he was called a 'monkey' so the authorities have dumped a black umpire to appease the team accused of harbouring a racist."
Paul Hayward, for that is the writer's name, had more to add: "'Monkey' relegates the object to the animal kingdom and instantly evokes slave ships out of Africa, lynchings in America's deep South and the worst ramblings of white supremacists." The point he was trying to make was that calling a Black cricketer a monkey was different from 'conventional' or even 'legitimate' abuse and sledging.
While he's clearly unknown and unheard of in India, <b>Hayward has put forward an argument that others have echoed too. By allegedly calling Andrew Symonds a "monkey", Harbhajan Singh, they charge, has crossed the Rubicon.</b>
<b>It is the sort of high-minded rhetoric that would leave most Indians completely bewildered. "Slave ships out of Africa"; "lynchings in America"; "ramblings of white supremacists": All very well, but what's it got to do with Harbhajan Singh's Sikh/Punjabi ancestors? The Indians weren't the ones running the slave ships, so why should they be guilt-tripped?</b>
There are some intriguing questions amid the acrid post-Sydney debate. <b>Does racism in sport (or in any field) only become an issue when the cultural commentators of the West -- not to speak of pompous cricket writers in London and jejune cricket captains in Australia -- discover it?</b>
Begin with first principles. <b>After Sydney, the usual hand-wringing has begun among sections of the Indian intelligentsia. They insist Indians live in glass houses and are actually quite racist. For evidence, sales figures of 'skin fairness creams' have been cited. One newspaper has diligently compiled a list of which Indians hate other Indians: From Delhi residents who ridicule students from the North-East to Bengalis who despise Marwaris.</b>
All of this is beside the point. It is nobody's argument that Indian society doesn't have prejudice; that is, regrettably, a part of the human condition. <b>Yet, racism -- in the manner in which it is being discussed after the Sydney test -- refers to a specific political belief that Black people are inferior. It is about the oppression and brutalisation of those of African origin by, predominantly, Western nations.</b>
In this narrow-focus framework India as a society has far less to answer for than, say, Australia or, indeed, the forefathers of apoplectic newspaper columnists in London. Correctly or incorrectly, the Indian establishment and middle class see their country as a strong voice against racism -- a society that backed liberation movements in South Africa and Namibia, for example, and led the crusade against racism in sport when race was really a global problem, rather than the newbie multi-culturalist's hobby horse.
<i>{India spent a lot of money annually to give support to ANC when it was banned by the West. Ask Mandela}</i>
<b>Despite the holier-than-thou nonsense of Cricket Australia's apologists, the fact is racism in international sport is far less of a menace today than it was 20 years ago.</b> It was a fault-line from, roughly, the 1950s, when newly independent nations in Asia and Africa felt White countries weren't giving them their due. <b>India suffered too, if only collaterally. First-grade English cricketers routinely skipped tours to the sub-continent. Between 1947 and 1980, India was invited to visit Australia only three times -- 1947-48, 1967-68 and 1977-78.</b>
Was this racism or merely distance, discomfort and mutual suspicion? It usually depended on your passport.
Africans or those of African descent had a more combustible encounter. Apartheid was a hot button especially when some nations insisted sport and politics could not be mixed. It led to an African boycott of the 1976 Olympics. <b>As far back as 1976, then England captain Tony Greig welcomed the West Indies cricket team by promising to make them "grovel". As Clive Lloyd pointed out in his autobiography, Living for Cricket, this brought to mind images of African slaves in sugar plantations and inspired his team to smash England 3-0. Even so, there was no indignant columnist waiting to admonish Greig, no Ricky Ponting complaining to the International Cricket Council (ICC), no ICC referee who cared a damn.</b>
Since the 1990s, racism has, for the most part, ceased to be an issue in international sport. Perhaps making up for lost time, the moral custodians of Western culture have suddenly woken up to it, and are promoting a war against a phantom enemy. There is a word for this phenomenon -- political correctness.
It is instructive that in the manner in which it is delineated and its concerns hierarchically laid out, <b>political correctness is itself neo-racist -- only addressing those sensitivities the West believes worthy of protecting. There is also an inexplicable universalisation of its postulates.</b> Why else would an Indian, with no slave ships in his family, no Gone With the Wind legacy, be expected to 'atone' in equal measure for Europe's or America's historical maltreatment of the Black man? Has political correctness become a civilisational transfer of guilt?
Such collective amnesia is not limited to racism. <b>Consider how Europe and even the United States have blissfully whitewashed their record of anti-Semitism. Over centuries, European nations regularly demonised Jews. Even during the Holocaust, America was turning back German Jewish refugees.</b>
After World War II, <b>when the monstrosity of the Nazi regime was there for all to see, Europe and America changed their minds.</b> Hitler now became the unmentionable one. Even a rational academic discussion on his relative achievements and failures -- without in any way mitigating the evil he institutionalised in his concentration camps -- became out of bounds.
<b>India's Semitic encounter was very different. Successive waves of Jewish migration -- spread over hundreds of years -- resulted in no ill will. That is why it is sometimes strange when Western interlocutors lecture India on the need to excise even mild mention of Hitler from public discourse. </b>
Indians see Hitler as no different a villain from Nadir Shah or Attila the Hun. The West insists he is in a league of his own. <b>The strict anti-Semitism codes that the West has designed are its attempt to make up for a dubious past. Other countries, those with no history of violence against the Jews, don't understand why they should be spoon-fed these rules.</b> Just like, one supposes, a working class Sikh youth can't understand why he should be a scapegoat for the Slave Trade.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->