Privilege and Equality

Years ago, I was absolutely delighted with a statue that my grandma's town had installed in the town's center.  A statue of Vanchi.  The freedom fighter from the village who shot dead the British administrator for that region.  As I noted in this post a while ago, "The old teenage emotions on colonialism and anti-Britain have never gone away inside me."

Of course, the bastard Raj ended more than seven decades ago.  But, the scars are always there.  

The George Floyd protests are echoing in European countries and reminding them about their horrific colonial pasts.  Statues are being defaced and even thrown into the waters!

It is a time for all of us to think about our relationships with our own individual and collective pasts. Our lives today are not independent of the historical events. In fact, in many instances, our lives today are very much a result of historical events.  The contemporary lives of Native Americans and African-Americans today, or the lives of the Dalit, are continuations of an unbearable past, how much ever some might want to pretend, or even believe, that looking back does not do any good.

We have no choice but to engage in difficult conversations.  When my father asked me about the protests, I told him, "it is a white problem; not a black problem."  If there weren't a white problem, we would not be witnessing protests and riots.

It is easy to claim that we are not responsible for atrocities committed in the past.  But, that is a pathetically weak argument for so many reasons; the biggest of all is when our current fortunes are largely possible because of those atrocious practices.

I have often examined this in the blog. I have voluntarily looked at how the Brahmin supremacy of the past has made my awesome life possible.  I even dragged into this discussion my sweet dead grandmothers.

I have blogged about universities that profited from colonialism and slavery. I have written about the white supremacist winston churchill--they make yet another movie that glorifies the bastard and the movie wins awards too!  I didn't leave out Thomas Jefferson either.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of people in powerful positions who deny these.  They shrug their shoulders. They actively engage in denying the past, and refuse to acknowledge how such practices continue in the present as well.

But, some of us continue with such examination anyway.

When privileged, it is easier not to talk about the troubling issues.  It is easy to not even think about problems.  What problems? Where?  Why don't they all eat cakes?

Further, as Charles Blow writes, will the privileged liberals walk the talk?

We will have to come to see and accept that this system of oppression has been actively, energetically designed and deployed over centuries, and it takes centuries of equally active and energetic efforts to dismantle it.

We must make ourselves comfortable with the notion that for the privileged, equality will feel like oppression, and that things — legacy power, wealth accumulation, cultural influence — will not be advantaged by whiteness. ...

How will our white allies respond when this summer has passed? How will they respond when civil rights gets personal and it’s about them and not just punishing the white man who pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck? How will they respond when true equality threatens their privilege, when it actually starts to cost them something?

I hope it is really different this time around.