Approach of fighting Racial Abuse needs to be relooked
Nongmaithem Meghanath *
Protest at Malviya Nagar Police Station, New Delhi on Mysterious death of Reingamphy Awungshi in May 2013 :: Pix - Deepak Shijagurumayum
I am not a social scientist nor an expert/Analyst on "Racism" and I may lack in understanding the entire dimension of what Racism means. My intent is limited to looking from the purview of a general people who is exposed to the risk of being a victim and how do we live in such an environment. Further I am trying to make an attempt of looking it from a perspective away from the conventional way of protesting with candlelight and other means which seeks the very people who have committed it to accept us as one of them without really knowing how would they shred that hatred and accept us as one of them. We have been shouting, rallying, following people whom we trust would bring change, unknowingly or knowingly politicizing it, building oneness among the northeasterners as victims, drawing sympathies and empathies, Supporting people among us to grow as leaders in the process, building the fighting spirit, propagating further Racism among us and so on.
Well, we are humans and each of us is genetically ingrained to keep up with the socially established beliefs and principles, however somewhere those beliefs and principles are created by us and it is very important that we understand what are we building up for us to follow it with our heart. The effort and the approach of fighting racial abuse needs to be relooked and certainly cannot continue to be looked from a generic angle as every move we make adds to how things shape up at a bigger picture and drives the outlook of the whole things to a certain extent that could influence the resolution to the issues. It is a critical situation and much more sensitive than it looks hence it is imperative that treatment is not just limited to protesting and law amendments or else it is leaving a big gap without control to be further abused at every opportunity available to the opportunist which we all know is prevalently present both outside and within our own community.
If you delve inside the reasons of why we get abused, it is not certain if all of them are just racially targeted. I have been a victim in many occasions and certainly carry the bitterness of the experiences yet, I am of the strong opinion that the key is to understand the "why" minutely before we jump into building solutions and driving the whole thing with a shout of assumptions and politicizing it (this is required to a certain extent but not overdoing it). We humans have a tendency to be either the conqueror or be loved and we make all attempts to make it short and easy by assuming and forming perceptions that best help achieve what we want out of the other guy.
Needless to say we all (no matter where we are from any part of the country or world) jumps into our assumed conclusion as that is the easiest way to remove uncertainty we have from something we want to drive. It is quite a known fact that people take seemingly strong people seriously but most of the time ignore and disregard those who seem weak and inconsequential. We should know the fact that we have been sending social signals which somehow is getting profiled up to a character depending on how the social taxonomies works in that environment and unfortunately we are dealing with a social environment where power and strength is given higher values than the warmth and mutual respect for each other. Strength and power is where we as a community lack and we are being perceived as people who are less important and easy targets to vent out social frustrations. While all the above reasons are not justifiable from a code of human conduct however we all know the reality is where we live.
Now the question is what should we do? Focus equally on the development that would command respect as a community? The current focus looks more of a post mortem treatment for people to be punished and show that we are protected as a weaker section and maybe create a fear psychosis of the consequences. While it is important that we make sure that people understand Racism is not acceptable and fear the consequences, we need a long term remedy not a temporary protection where the shield can be shred down anytime or lose it effectiveness. Let's realize the fact that we are different and we are in places where the society is not so developed for us to expect an equal treatment considering the fact we have been positioned at the worst end of the segment by the virtue of our capability demonstrated and not by choice though. The survival fights are extreme in this segment and people are less educated to accept a boarder horizon of social thinking outside of their century old beliefs and hence we normally find our shouts getting lost in their strong thick heads. The good news is this segment doesn't differentiate your face when you have the empowerment and power like their own superiors.
For instance, in the last 1 decade most of the service establishment have been leveraging the Northeast resource pool as they are less expensive, less ambitious for growth, easy to dealt with and certainly more loyal. The result is you would see us everywhere now and the major chunk of the employment is being taken over pushing the Northerners' and Southerners out of the competition. What do you think would these segments of people think about us, love us? Knowingly or unknowingly we push them out with a competition which they cannot digest and we have been spreading with people going up the chain. It is not surprising that our Northeast early birds who are up in the power chain have gain the respect they deserve, however the not so good traits is we are not so serious people and we are quite content with what we get and hence the climb and the competitive spirit for someone to take you seriously has been a challenge for majority of us.
The metros are a place of cut throat competition and it is a jungle painted with civilization and everyone here is for survival and they would do anything to survive here and in the process everyday becomes a day where success are marked with the outcome not on the fairness of the process and we all know how less important is fairness check in a society like ours. While some of you may be doing fine however as a community we are somewhere in the lower end of the human value chain of respect and power and the defense line is quite weakly projected from a power and support system perspective and quite prone to abuse with limited skills of survival in such an environment.
We are here to survive for best reasons known to us and somewhere in our head we know that whether we like it or not we have to be here for a while till we get fed up, till our patience and hard work pays off or for some wonders to happen and head back home. We got to adapt in the survival game and we cannot fall flat on the first inhibitor and declare ourselves as weak. We are victims because we are easy preys who haven't been able to position ourselves at a level where we deserve respect on the basis of our ability to demand it, if not as equal rights of human. Somewhere we have to draw a line of pushing ourselves out of the thought of being "the victim" and be responsible to develop the skills of mitigating situational scenarios to boost your self confidence.
At the end whether you are a victim of a racist act or a personal attack the damage is irreversible and the better option is always to built up your wisdom, no law or rule prevent a insensible man from an act. When you stay in a jungle you can't ask the wolf to be sensible, you got to tame them and you certainly can't be projecting yourself as a weak sheep who needs help where we are not even certain if we are asking help from one of them. I could write infinite pages of what is so hurting about being a Northeasters in the other part of the country and possibly write a lot of things which are so bad about the Northerners and Southerners etc.. but I think our circle of influence is more stronger in our internal development and there are lots of low hanging fruits that we can leverage to turn things around.
So what is important here is, "What do we project of ourselves to the Mainlanders?" and what is more important is "what do they want to assume, and why do they want to assume?" Is that assumptions or perception, if given a choice won't they want to do that to everyone considering the fact that it is always done to show superiority? Why does it become so easy for them to build that perception on us? While it is always wrong to build a perception without knowing the facts but are we helping them build such perception about us knowingly or unknowingly? Are we skilled enough in our social dealings to handle such environment? Are we not too much relying on the hope of such people development for us to be treated fairly?
While few of my questions would invite deliberations and criticisms as expected, however it is important to call out so that there is some introspection done with a logical thought knowing who we are. The idea is to understand, is it just the looks and our food habit being targeted or are we adding reasons for the stereotyping to gain strength on the negative side? The general sense which is quite true to an extent about our youngster's lifestyles and attitude towards life needs a great review not for curing the issues of alienation but to develop the vision of what we should look for during this time of our life and in the process reduce the stereotyping of being people who are easy and can be taken for granted.
We are simple and happy go lucky people who take life as it comes but somewhere the downside of it is hurting our community image possibly because we become so independent and carefree when we are out and in the process change and project our culture differently to a lenient loosely knitted less controlled cultured people. Let's face the question and this applies mostly to our young people though not to all "Do we lead the same lifestyle and the behavior we exhibit outside in our own home? Do we abide by the social core values of what our culture teaches us when we are out of our home?" The intent is not to say that we should be stiffed cultured but the idea is to know how much some of the things that we do hurts the self respect and the community as a whole unless we care less of what the onlooker's comments.
While being independent is the best thing for those who knows what value it can bring in life but we see that there is a lot of misuse that is certainly not right which are outside of the acceptable norms partly because we are individuals who always have been living with the fear of stringent social reactions in our own home or maybe we are not yet equipped with the knowledge to handle such sudden independence and wanted it all without knowing what consequences it would bring. My point is somewhere we are sending out a wrong signal and showing what we are not. I am wondering if it is because we don't want to acknowledge the fact that we are in another society from where we need respect to coexist.
The recent attacks and the series of hate crimes are not acceptable and we should make sure that they are heavily punished to send out a strong signal. My heartfelt appreciation to those who are leading the fight tirelessly. We all pray that we sail through the hard times together and we make it a point that we run the internal effort of true development and give equal effort and leadership guidance. My earnest request to those emotionally charged up leaders, brothers and sisters to support the movement in the right spirit and not become one of those who we are trying to cure. There is a lot more for us to improve to be more forceful in our existence here. There is a dire need for a social knowledge and a cultural awareness drive not to imbibe or assimilate but to understand how and where we can leverage our motive of gaining respect as a community from these social set up. Let's be fit and strong, held our heads high, extend support to each other in the development and kick some……
* Nongmaithem Meghanath wrote this article for e-pao.net
The writer can be reached at meghanath(dot)nongmaithem(at)gmail(dot)com
This article was posted on October 27 , 2014.
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