In 2008 a
unique and incredible history was made in the United States when Barack Obama
was elected President. His mother was a white woman of the US and his
father was a Kenyan, but Obama is widely seen as a black. Credit for his
election didn’t belong to his qualities alone, and was equally shared by the
whites of that country. Anyone will see why.
White
Americans make up about 72.4% of the US population and African Americans,
12.6%. Obama’s chief opponent in the 2008 US Presidential election was Republican
John McCain, a white American. If a great majority of US white men and
women had a mindless disdain for African Americans as a community because the
latter were once slaves in that country, they could have voted in droves for
John McCain and defeated Obama. After all, racial feelings within their
country could override party preferences, like caste sympathy could stand in
front of party affiliations in India. But Obama’s election proves that whites
did not, standing as a class, have such a negative mindset. Many whites
voted for Obama since they felt he was good, like other whites voted for John
McCain considering him good.
Don’t
stop with crediting whites for Obama’s victory. From a long time before
the 2008 election, US laws have been responsive in removing one by one
irritants in race relations. New laws they made to ban discrimination in
employment practices and public accommodations (Civil Rights Act, 1964), to
restore voting rights (Voting Rights Act, 1965) and to ban discrimination in
sale or rental of housing (Civil Rights Act, 1968) did their part to check
discrimination. Through time it was ensured that a law or the absence of
a law did not set the stage for confrontation between the white Americans and
African Americans. Then the white and the black races of the present day had only to deal with their conscience and spirit and take themselves out from
a degrading past, as much as they can. That too not from their personal
past but from an era lived by their forefathers. And both the races see
that the whites of today are not responsible for a slavery imposed by their
ancestors. So now the whites could neutrally look at Barack Obama, the
man, and join in entrusting to him enormous powers as President of the United
States.
Would
whites in large numbers have voted for Barack Obama in 2008 if US laws had
mandated reservation of jobs for African Americans in all government and
semi-government establishments in that country and had also reserved seats for
them in its professional collegiate courses – even at 12.6% – pushing aside
merit? Most probably, and naturally, they would not have. With the
law strictly standing neutral between both races, the whites have shown that
reconciliation was working on the ground, not just once but again in 2012 when
Obama was reelected.
So
reconciliation to this extent between white Americans and African Americans in
the US has been possible. Yes, there would be mutual suspicions and occasional
skirmishes between them, and stray police excesses on African Americans.
But these incidents pass off by themselves or are easier to handle and are
unlikely to fester into anything alarmingly serious. That is because the
law stands neutral on every major front and the guilty ones are booked and
tried, sending reassuring signals to the affected community. India is yet
to look honestly inward and learn these principles and benefits of lawmaking,
or of law enforcement.
Times
past and present show us something more. Men and women among the same
African race did and are doing exceedingly well on the soil of United States
after abolition of slavery, but very little on their original African land
around the same time. Some of them who made great strides in the US are :
Booker T. Washington – he was born into slavery and rose to become a prominent
educator and racial leader of the late 19th and 20th centuries; Heart surgery pioneer
Daniel Hale Williams, Inventor of the blood bank, Dr. Charles Drew; Harvard Law
Review Editor Charles Hamilton Houston, US Supreme Court judge Thurgood
Marshall, US Representative to the UN, Andrew Young; Oscar winners Sidney
Poitier and Halle Berry; Male and female Grammy Award winners Count Basie and
Ella Fitzgerald; Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powel who later became
Secretary of State; first female Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Nobel
awarded Toni Morrison, for literature; Ivy League President Ruth Simmons
of Brown University (Time named her as America’s best college president, in
2001); television host Oprah Winfrey; and many outstanding sportspersons
including Jesse Owens (stunning 4 golds in Berlin Olympics, 1936), Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Arthur
Ashe, Carl Lewis (4 golds
in Los Angeles Olympics, 1984 - like Jesse Owens), Michael Jordan
and Williams sisters.
Do you
believe that if these high achievers had been born and living in their
ancestral African countries they could have scaled the heights they did in the
US? Here the persons are the same, only their social environment and
geographic settings have been changed by history. What the US gave them,
and what most of the African continent cannot give to their people, are a good
education, secure living conditions and equal opportunities to grow as part of
a well-organized society. Also a law not discriminating between different races
or groups of the population and enforced among them fairly impartially.
Even if they fail to benefit themselves fully by a good education in their
early life, African Americans could, if they are gifted, still pull themselves
up and flower in their later adult life, aided by a neutral and protective US
environment.
It was
President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 of March 1961 that used the term
‘affirmative action’ for the first time. It directed that US
government contractors “will
take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that
employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed,
color, or national origin". As Terry H
Anderson put it later,
the administration was "not
demanding any special preference or treatment or quotas for minorities"
but was rather "advocating racially neutral hiring to end job
discrimination". But exactly its opposite sense is the meaning of that
term when used in India – here the government permits and imposes discrimination among its citizens which mostly fuels estrangement and calls it ‘affirmative action’.
So all the revised US laws and
regulations mean an opportunity as well as a challenge to African Africans who
now have to work
in competition with the talented performers among the whites of the US, and
that brings out the best in them as individuals - the law neither propping up
nor favouring the African Americans so as to hold down the whites. That
is the difference a country can make in its efforts to help out a disadvantaged
group without hurting any other group.
Have a
closer look at what is going on in India.
(Continued)
* * * *
*
Copyright
© R. Veera Raghavan 2015
Very good summarization of what US feels like. You should travel there to see for yourself!
ReplyDeleteI have been in the US for more than half my life and I have lived in India for a substantial portion of my professional life, gone back to US and come back. I can tell you that US is a much better place to live for both personal happiness and professional fulfillment. People are genuinely honest. Almost no one is out to cheat another person. This is true of the US at large, irrespective of their ancestry. It was only possible because the people in general are law abiding. It did not turn out to be this way always. It was a rough place in the 19th century. Goodness prevailed. Courts became active. People woke up. The law enforcement became honest enforcers of the law. No one was spared or given the leeway.
I will digress a bit to highlight how bad the society has become. In this day and age of information it does seems like the citizens of India are oblivious to change (at least as a percentage, if you account for people who know, but don't care). People are happy milking the system to the last drop and have stuck to the divide-and-rule of our India's pre-independence masters. Indians forgot everything good the British brought with them, but are happy to keep the one rotten policy. See what the British built -- the Victoria Terminus, the Rashtrapathi Bhavan, the Hooghly Bridge, University of Madras and so on. They still stand today. The ones built in the last 50 years can't seem to stand straight! How did this happen? Then compare this to the large population of Indians outside India that thrive as entrepreneurs, researchers, Nobel laureates etc. There is a direct correlation to the brains leaving the country and country not getting its act straight. Unless the political class decide to wake up from their pretense nothing will change. We all understand vote bank politics, but that cannot be at the risk of denigrating a society.
I am eager to read the continuation.