In todays i Yasmin Alibhai Brown writes about British Citizens of Pakistani ancestry and how they regard the grooming gangs. The conclusion was that most people of that background despise them and are distressed by the suffering of the exploited young women but feel they are being identified by them.
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/speaking-british-pakistanis-what-they-think-grooming-scandal-3493697
The people she asked, from students to surgeons, felt they were being stigmatised in a way that white people in the Christian community aren’t given all the scandals of abuse in the church.
The problem is not a British one, its HUMAN
The tendency to label minority groups and then OTHER them is exacerbated by bad politicians who realise that scapegoating minorities is an easy way to get publicity and grow a following. Today is Holocaust Memorial Day which highlights the most horrific outcomes of ‘labelling’. It is sad to observe that even Israeli decedents of some of the victims of the Holocaust are guilty of ‘othering’ when it comes to Palestinians.
The tendency to label groups and put them outside the desired norm has been practiced almost everywhere in the world
In Pakistan, they also do it a lot… any Muslim who is not a Sunni is fair game to some. In its near neighbour, India, caste still blights life. In nearby Myanmar, the majority Buddhists label and often persecute the minority Muslims and Christians. Even where people share a religion and a culture it can be done. In Rwanda, tribal differences were used to justify genocide.
WHY can I write on this subject?
If you watch this short video I made for the launch of Sculpting the Elephant you will understand why.
I often thought that the racists despised me even more than Atam.
How do we tackle this human tendency
Identifying with an individual can help dispel the tendency to group people. That is why I’m a novelist. I want my readers to walk in the shoes of someone they feel is not like them. A distressing story led me to curate Poems in an Exhibition for a charity called Standing Voice which exists to end human rights abuses against marginalised people. My village of Kennington (Oxfordshire) fundraised for development projects. Our intention was to help people help themselves. Each January for 50 years, KOA chose, by vote, one out of three projects. In 2015, we invited a relatively new charity—Standing Voice—to submit a project.
Award-winning British documentary filmmaker Harry Freeland spent six years in Tanzania documenting the marginalisation of people with albinism. During that time he made In the Shadow of the Sun, a film that told the story of their courage in the face of persecution. The film inspired the founding of Standing Voice, a human rights charity that helps people with albinism to claim their rights and stand up against stigma. We were impressed and chose them for the KOA 2015 project funding a skin care clinic to prevent cancer. At that time people with albinism were dying of preventable skin cancer before they were 35.
In February 2017, the BBC broadcast a documentary made by the Standing Voice team and titled Born Too White. And it included film of the clinic we had funded-so I had to watch it. Halfway through this moving film we were introduced to Festo. Aged 7, Festo was badly mutilated with a machete, his teeth and fingers taken for sale to a witch doctor. When the film was made Festo was nine and an inspiration. Using his remaining thumb and a piece of nifty surgery creating one finger, he had become a talented artist. I told his story to an artist friend, Weimin He. We decided to send art materials to Festo and his friends, and Weimin wrote a beautiful letter from one artist to another, and sent Festo a painting especially for him. That painting inspired me to write the poem Born Too White.
Born too White
His neighbours label him as other – not black like them – but ‘Albino’.
Men of cruelty and hate rob him of his teeth and fingers.
Body parts sold to so-called medicine men greedy for gain,
feeding the superstitions of powerful politicians.
His courageous spirit defied the blade.
Beyond survival, the courage of Festo blossomed
to draw and paint.
From the frozen north of Manchuria,
an artist recognised a fellow artist.
Weimin painted for Festo a vase of glowing flowers:
harbingers of Spring and hope.
No need for translation.
Festo’s spirit, not too white
but in vivid colour.
The answer to othering and thence discrimination
Atam’s PhD was in Quantitative Genetics and he taught me that every human being is UNIQUE! That is how we should regard each other. We must relate to each other as individual to individual. Whatever our nationality, religion, gender or colour some people will be kind and some cruel, some filled with love and empathy and others with hate and sadism. That’s the point we are unique by birth and life experiences.
How can we alter attitudes?
If I were in government, I’d campaign to get behind the things that can unite us. They are
Music, the visual arts, literature, poetry, film and drama,dance, sport and experiences together in nature.
In this country the ARTS and sports are good at inclusion and inducing empathy and pride. I ‘d invest in science because we need knowledge and the scientific method to uphold the idea of truth.
The soft power of the arts can improve our economy too so what is happening to marginalise those subjects in state schools is disastrous!!!