Hath not a _____ eyes?

“Hath not a Jew eyes?” asks Shylock in his monologue to Salarino and Salanio in Act 3 Scene 1 of  Shakespeare’s classic: The Merchant of Venice. “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer…If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.” 

The past week or so have had me in a ponderous and yet agitated reflection on racism and discrimination, as I am sure it has had on many other people given the recent and ongoing events in the US and the militant and tyrannical display of the American authorities in their response.

I am not black. So I do not know and cannot truly know the prejudice and bigotry that black people face on a daily basis. All I can do is comment and reflect upon my own experiences of discrimination as a person of colour. 

I migrated to the UK in 2001, and I’d be lying if I said haven’t experienced my fair share of macro and micro-aggressions since then. Of course, the audacious form of discrimination that I used to experience when I was a child, growing up in mostly white neighbourhoods and going to mostly white schools has definitely abated, and that is surely for the better. Back then though, I did not know what I was experiencing was discrimination. I thought it was the norm. After all how could I? All the people I was around as I was building my social skills and forming a personality were white. I am no expert on race relations, so I don’t know whether the fall of outright racial slights is a product of growing up and the increased maturity of the people I meet, as my social bubble has widened, or if it is due to a cultural shift in British society as a whole. I optimistically hope it is the latter. 

Général Toussaint Louverture

Toussaint Louverture, Général and Leader of the Haitian Revolution said: “In overthrowing me, you have done no more than cut down the trunk of the tree of liberty - it will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.” He said this upon realising that he had been tricked by the French into getting arrested and deported to a prison in Metropolitan France. 

I cannot help but reflect upon these words. Here is a man, born a slave, and rose to become one out of three men of African descent to lead European armies to battle as their General (The others being Thomas- Alexandre Dumas and Abram Petrovich Gannibal). 

And numerous and deep the roots are. The consistent indignity that is obligated upon people of colour for no other reason but their skin cannot last. This is a battle that has been fought and will continue to be fought, so long as there are those who seek to undermine the simple and just right of a person of colour to exist freely and without hindrance to their path to success.

“For too long we have borne your chains without thinking of shaking them off, but any authority which is not founded on virtue and humanity, and which only tends to subject one's fellow man to slavery, must come to an end, and that end is yours.” (Again by Louverture to the general assembly in 1792). And while slavery in its most overt and brutal form has been thankfully extinguished in the legal sense, by socioeconomic principles, the oppression continues. In its subtle forms it deprives coloured people their liberties and subjects them to a most insidious debasement. Authorities, which seek consent of governance and derivation of power from the people; which should be founded upon virtuous tenants and benevolence in humanity, have within them, institutions that have been infiltrated and scarred perfidiously by years of a culture of racial ignorance and, more maliciously, a history of discrimination. What is more, we are living in a time when the popular movement seems to be intent, either through malice or just general disregard, on degrading civil liberties and democratic institutions that were built to scrutinise and balance the dictatorial nature of executive governance. 

In the US today, we see the extreme of this, (although we are not exempt in the slightest), and we can only really watch from afar (apart from pressurising our own MPs and leaders to speak out) and hope that the good, and true Americans who live by their own founding principles; principles which are universal to the essence of humanity, overcome their repression as they have done so many times before. “Truth is on the side of the oppressed” said Malcolm X. Whichever way the chips fall across the pond with our ideological brethren: Satyameva Jayate. Truth alone Triumphs. 

But there is work to do at home, both on the national and individual level. I could write a manifesto’s worth on policies and agendas, from education (Why do we stop history at the English Civil War and skip to WWI,  exempting our history as Great Britain? Is it that we only want to laud our achievements in the abstract and silence our own atrocities? Skeletons which can be found in most nations’ closets?)  to police to business and defence etc. however this is a magazine article, not a magnum opus. 

But the main issue, in my opinion, is a personal one. For the most part, we have won the fight on the legal front. There are very few laws, if any left, that actively discriminate on the basis of Race (although gender is another story) and many laws which actively seek to end discrimination and provide all with equal opportunities to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. As it should be. But when it comes to systemic racism, it is a multi- posited issue. One based off of adherence to the law, to execution of it by public and authority figures and finally, the subconscious prejudice that has seeped into our culture as product of a history riddled with the pestilence of discrimination and exceptionalism on the basis of race. 

I choose to believe, that the majority of people in this country are good. That they don’t actively seek to discriminate nor oppress their fellow human, but rather are exploited by opportunist sycophants who seek power, and they are frustrated with the lack of progress in the betterment of the quality of their lives, and their own societal adversities. And I feel that the latter of my list, the subconscious prejudice, has been exacerbated due to fear mongering by those who speak with seemingly sharp and eloquent tongues, which only serve to veil their malevolent, selfish objectives. So we must speak out when we see this, using the democratic institutions and civil procedures that have been paid for in blood by so many over our history, to fight against them and echo the voices of the downtrodden and the silenced. These institutions are there specifically to allow for peaceful change, and they have been used for this purpose before, even in their imperfection. 

When we consider our own personal efforts to end this unconscionable injustice of systemic and surreptitious racial discrimination, we must consider this: the subconscious prejudice. No matter your own race, caste or creed; It is pervasive and ubiquitous against those who we consider different from ourselves. It is up to us personally to hold ourselves accountable and aware of it in our dealings with each other, no matter whether you are white or coloured. It will be difficult. It will take years, to decades. Self improvement has its cost. We will all stumble and make mistakes. But “Stumbling is not falling” (Malcolm X).

What is important is that we, as a collective, are working together, to better ourselves and overcome several millennia of racial discrimination. And in doing so we may realise that most magnificent dream: to paraphrase MLK, that people will no longer be judged by the colour of their skin, but only by the content of their character.

View from the Lincoln Memorial toward the Washington Monument on August 28, 1963, the day MLK gave his famous I Have a Dream speech