Gupshup Opinions
By Zakk
“Thank God I don’t live in a racist European country” said the American Desi. A comment I’ve heard in the past praising the level of acceptance American society has towards South Asians.
Whats more is that facts back these comments up, the South Asian community in the US is far more upwardly mobile than their counterparts in Europe. They have achieved substantial financial success, a higher proportion have learnt English and a lesser proportion live in cultural ghettos.
So does that mean North Americans are more tolerant and more accepting of people of a different ethnic/skin colour?
Not exactly, to understand complex issues of racism and intolerance towards ethnic or religious groups one has to look at a greater historical context. What are the origins of racism in a society? The term “Paki” has a distinctively different meaning in Britain compared to the US, it probably has more in common with the n word in the US.
That hits upon the crux of issues regarding race and intolerance. You have to compare like with like, South Asians have no historical association of occupier or occupied with north America the way they do with Britain and it’s colonial past.
To stretch the example further, France has a historical association with North African Arabs. The bulk of social cohesion problems are with Arabs and not with Pakistani’s, this is despite the fact that Arabs from the Maghreb speak fluent French (in some cases as a first language). Similarly in Germany the Turks are discriminated against by the larger society because of Germany’s dominant position with reference to the Turks in the last 19th and early 20th century. If we were to take the example out of a Western world correlation we have a classic example in Darfur of how racial intolerance is often driven by the baggage of history.
Similar examples abound across the world, all of which leaves us with one basic reality, it is not that one place is less intolerant than the other, but that racism is rarely universal, often selective and almost always carries the weight of history with it..