THE cafeteria of London University's Institute of Education is where students affiliated to various political, humanitarian or naturalistic parties regularly meet, express themselves, and clash. For the active student union of the day, it is a convenient place to shower us, whenever we sit down to a meal or coffee, with announcements and news of its many activities. One o'clock in the afternoon is when things bubble up in this throbbing heart of campus life, when most lectures are suspended for lunch and students line up patiently to pick up already-made tea with milk and a cold or hot meal depending on one's budget. For me as a girl from the Orient with its conservative political and student-related practices, every happening in the cafeteria offered a true lesson. Who speaks, what is spoken, how long the speech – we learned how to be accurate, specific, and clear without being too long. We learned the culture of that heated environment. What drew my attention the most was the nature of the thorny issues raised, notably the discrimination against the non-whites in Britain, particularly those of African origin. A student would stand up boldly and slap us with accusations of groupism and raise the issue of our discriminatory and convoluted feelings towards him through our everyday acts or through what he faces on the street. Many were the times when a ‘colored' girl like me would be yelled at and asked bluntly whether we felt the same unflappability when sharing the elevator with a dark skinned and non-white person – despite the rising crime rate even among the whites. What struck me was that these worrying questions made us self-conscious, as they were interwoven with our social upbringing and our resultant convictions. To be honest, at the outset, I felt that they were blowing things out of proportion. As a girl from the Orient unaccustomed to addressing such worrying issues, I found myself repeating with the crowd: “We are alright and our values communicate to us many concepts and practices that deprive us of feelings such as these, or at least make us refrain from admitting these feelings to ourselves.” Yes, I would tell myself, we have many personal biases towards certain parties but time is likely to lessen these feelings without necessarily bringing them out in the open as they wanted. But why were they seeking to intentionally expose their wounds? I went on to graduate and as the years passed the quantum of discriminatory feelings around the world heightened as a result of many tensions. As Amartya Sen says in his beautiful book ‘Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny', the fact of the matter is that the world is increasingly seen, even if only inherently, as a federation of religions or cultures, which leads to shunning any other way in which people see themselves. This perception stems from a strange assumption that people in this world may only be classified according to an individualist and global system, Sen says. Cultural or religious divisions lead to schismatic comparisons of human identities, which isolate people into groups – based also on nationality, class, ethnicity, color, etc. Such divisions have led to conflicts that are tormenting and tearing up the world as peoples strive to be unique, the best and the most powerful by creating a certain charm around their claimed identity which purports to eclipse and flatten out all other affiliations. Claiming to have a unique identity gradually leads to cultural hegemony and the judging of others accordingly. Therefore, all that is not endorsed by the dominant culture is deemed unnatural, unfathomable, irresponsible, inexplicable, less enlightened and primitive. This can be easily noted in our judgments of those who do not act like us in the way they eat, drink or dress up. This was precisely what was faced by the Filipina nurse who was in the news recently over her bitter experience of daily discrimination against her – whether as a non-Saudi, as part of a minority group, or as a woman. What has become of us and why do we take this stance against ‘other' non-Western nationalities without the least fear of being accused of discrimination or without even pausing to think about how we see others and how others see us? I am appalled at some of the messages and jokes I receive on my cell-phone from people whom I thought had exemplary humanitarian values but who clearly disppoint by showing racial discrimination instead. I state with confidence that we have grown so accustomed to putting down other nationalities that we fail to see our stereotypical behavior. What is more, this notion is promoted even by television ads. In the case of a popular beverage brand advertised on our television, we see a strong player at the supermarket kicking a ball. The ball hits the chubby cashier who belongs to a certain nationality and who acts stupidly in line with the prevalent discriminatory notion about his nationality. Many are the morbid general ideas we harbor about other cultures in our midst, and many are the morbid behavioral patterns with which we slap them in the face each day when we meet with or deal with them. What is happening? We are stereotyping and building up distorted mental images with irrational feelings about a gender, culture or a person, and then generalizng and applying it. We would say that a certain nationality is stupid, another is lazy, a third likes to consume, etc.. Are we the only ones like this? No, most cultures are the same. The stance exhibited by the Americans towards Hispanics (Latin American immigrants) or the Germans towards immigrant Turks is similar to our stance towards expatriate workers each day, no matter whether the person acting superior is a layman, policeman, or child. Cultural dominance takes place when social, political or religious groups in any culture, by virtue of their being the most influential and powerful, adopt and impose the notion that their values and behavioral patterns are superior to those of others and so should be expected in practice, in the relationship between man and woman, in dress code, in food habits and so on. Consequently, any behavior reflected by the minorities – whether expatriate labor, women, children, dark-skinned individuals or even individuals from other areas within the country itself – that does not espouse the values and behavioral patterns of the dominant class, would be termed as erroneous and the persons deemed guilty of erring would be termed as stupid, failing to understand, etc. Discriminatory classifications that we hand out generously to others around us make us feel culturally superior and make them feel culturally handicapped. Our notion that our culture is superior in its values and behavioral patterns is what leads gradually to adoption and proliferation of discriminatory behavioral patterms without our even being conscious of it. Have you ever reflected on how you see your housemaid or your driver or the grocery store owner or even the woman whom you married? We will naturally scream out a loud denial and many of us will say that we are all Muslim and equal, which is theoretically true but which is also something we fail to envision in our day-to-day behavior. Just look at how the layman, whether civilian or policeman, deals with expatriate laborers on the streets and you will understand what I am trying to communicate. – Translated from the Arabic article originally published in Al
