Our Racist Secrets

Do not be lulled by the banal lack of spectacle in our bigotry, warns NAVDEEP SINGH

Illustration: NAOREM ASHISH

THERE’S A negro outside”; my sister-in-law runs in, a little out of breath. She’s barely arrived a few hours before from Delhi to visit us in an old Southern California suburb. I peek out of the window to see one of my neighbours washing his car in his yard. Yeah, he’s black. He’s also a doctor. Not that that should be important but, you know. “Is he dangerous?”; she asks, still wide eyed. I’m not sure what to answer. On the operating table, maybe.

“That’s not racism, that’s ignorance”; intones a friend whom I’m recounting the incident to, years later, on a Mumbai terrace. But racism is ignorance.

Every group of people has its share of racism and racists. We do too. Though ours is a little complex (as everything Indian always is). It’s largely an insidious, throwaway racism. It’s blackface in Bollywood films played for laughs. It’s the easy use of ‘chinky’ for Northeasterners. It’s the scraping and bowing to white men. And the pawing of white women. The casual nature of our racism tends to encourage denial. It’s ‘ignorance’, It’s ‘curiosity’. It’s never racism. Not us. Never us. We don’t have the KKK, do we?

I suspect the absence of organised racism is only because we don’t have that many visible ‘outsiders’. There’re plenty of organisations preying on minorities of other sorts; religious, regional or linguistic. If the population of Africans in Mumbai dinumbered anything like that of ‘north Indians’ in the city, you could probably stand back and watch a thousand senas bloom.

It’s the same people who deny our racism who always seem to get their panties in a bunch when Indians abroad face it. There’s a sense of righteous indignation – an underlying ‘How could they? We’re not black people’. Most middle class Indians grow up with a sense that White > Indian > Black. (For some reason, East Asians aren’t competing)

We often nominate ourselves as honorary white. And that whole Aryan thing, remember? Sometimes it’s easy to be lulled by the banality of the form in which racism manifests itself in our country: The African student refused accommodation, the Northeastern girl molested in the street, the bigoted uncle. While reprehensible, these don’t have the tinge of the spectacular.

Not unless you count the dalits. The treatment of dalits is a form of racism, whether we acknowledge it or not. It’s possibly the longest surviving system of dehumanising oppression in the world. Yet, surprisingly, not enough of us genuinely express the shame that it truly is. We make the right noises and there are state programmes to correct the historical imbalance, but it’s our national blindspot.

It’s our racist secret.

Singh is a Mumbai-based filmmaker