Racism

8 Nov 2015

Stories my Mother Told Me About Family

Teachwell Ethnicity, Humanity, Race Prejudice, Racism 3

This is the third blog in a series (here and here) of posts about my experiences of race and ethnicity.

My parents were old-fashioned in their views on arranged marriages and, indeed, marrying anyone out of the specific group that we belonged to was not something they could contemplate for their children. I don’t want to misrepresent my mum as some hippy liberal. That mum was ignorant and had prejudiced views at times is part of the reason she is of interest here. We are all products of our upbringing but the effect it has on our views and actions is, nonetheless, mitigated by experience.

My Aunt:

My father’s older brother had come to England several years before the rest of the family followed. He fell in love with a white British woman and, knowing my grandparents would disapprove, he decided to marry her before their arrival to prevent them from stopping him. I have no memories of my aunt or indeed my four cousins.

In the end, my uncle’s alcoholism contributed to his inability to treat either his wife or his children well. Social services eventually intervened. My aunt was given an ultimatum to leave effectively with the children or for them to be put into care. After this, she lost contact with my mum. My cousins have made their peace with my uncle to varying degrees but our estrangement from this uncle means I have not met them since infancy.

But let’s back up. Mum recalls my aunt making every effort to try to integrate with the family. She changed the way she dressed, tried to learn Punjabi and did her best to take part in family life. In Indian families, the different members of the family have all sorts of ceremonial roles, for example, during weddings. It is a way of stressing the importance of each member of the family during these important times. Even with the same background, the difference between my parents on the issue of family relationships was highlighted by this experience. My grandmother rejected my aunt and cousins and my father, aunt and younger uncle shared her contempt.

What got to my mum, and even now I don’t think she can understand why is the way my grandmother treated my cousins. She didn’t want to know them and treated them completely differently to children who were ‘ethnically’ acceptable to her, relatives or no. Mum understood the reasons why my gran disapproved but she couldn’t believe that it translated into actions. What kind of person would treat their grandchildren badly? What kind of person would do that because of their ethnicity? At the end of the day, approve or disapprove of ones grandchildren are one’s grandchildren.

Therein lay the difference between the rest of my family and her. For them, it was their white British sister-in-law and mixed nephews and nieces whereas for my mum it was her white British sister-in-law and mixed nephews and nieces. Same words but the emphasis makes a world of difference, as I have learnt in my experiences.

In the end, my parents reconciled but it was hard for mum that my uncle’s marriage broke down, as it meant a source of support went too.

For me, growing up knowing that my family were not some purebred Punjabi Sikh family had a huge effect. None of my other family members ever mentioned my aunt or my cousins – other than it was wrong to marry outside of the faith and culture. Mum alone was willing to tell the truth of what happened and what my aunt was really like, as well as their poor treatment of her and my cousins.

Mum represents the reality of the struggle between wanting to maintain one’s culture and tradition through marriage but also the bonds, duties and obligations that one has to members of one’s family regardless of what group they belong to. It is to the shame of my family that they did not do more to accept my aunt and my cousins. While I would rather have not learnt the importance of family in this way, it is at least one positive to have come out of this my mother’s melancholy experience.

6 Nov 2015

Stories my Mother Told Me (and her Grandparents Told Her) about Neighbours

Teachwell Ethnicity, Humanity, Race Prejudice, Racism, Religion 3

In my last blog, I outlined the way that I was brought up to think about race. In it, I mentioned the stories my mother would tell me and how she has always stuck firmly to the idea that some relationships are simply more important than any social construct.

Neighbours:

Here I think we should start with the stories that her Grandparents told her.

All of my mother’s grandparents and both parents were born in the Punjab, which is now part of Pakistan. I believe that the following is an excellent documentary on the subject.

The trauma of partition is hard to fathom (I mean trauma in a genuine sense of the word, not the way some use it as a means of exaggerating the extent of feeling some level of discomfort or being uncomfortable).

Let’s face it, in any place where people with different ethnicities/religions/beliefs exist there is going to be tension among those who struggle to live and let live. But this does not mean that people can not live in that way or indeed never have.

This is not about the right to self-determination, but more could have been done to avoid the conflict and provide safeguards for those that wanted to stay or leave the newly formed states from all leaders. Instead, chaos ensued. Hidden in all of the tensions and violence were real people who simply found themselves with little choice but to move. Some held out but for others the danger seemed to great, as well as being caught up in the fear that if they stayed their lives were in danger. So they moved, on foot, with as much as they could carry to cross an arbitrarily drawn border.

Amid this chaos were members of my family, who if there had been some real chance of staying, would have never left their corner of the Punjab. For mum, who was born a decade after independence, her views on partition were informed less by biased textbooks than by her paternal grandparents who knew only too well that there was blame on all sides.

Her grandmother was heart-broken and never really recovered. She didn’t accept the new India easily or the idea that she should be happier now that she didn’t live in a Muslim majority region. She missed her home, the tree growing in her backyard, her neighbours – well basically her life. So mum learnt, early on that yes family mattered, but so did your neighbours. Let me reiterate, these were not perfect people with halos glowing, they just cared about their neighbours more than they cared about the religion of their neighbours that’s all.

Later I would hear one of my elderly Indian neighbours (who lived on the same street as us in England) talking about her experiences, how they had to hide their neighbours while a mob burnt their house down and figured out a way to enable them safe passage out of their neighbourhood.

My grandparents adjusted to their new reality easier but were more likely that the local population to still mix and be friends with Hindu’s (there were no Muslims in that part any longer). My grandfather didn’t much care for the tribalistic attitudes of his new neighbours but had an easy way and so went about his business as he chose to. So again mum grew up in a different set up to that of most of her background.

One of the issues I want to explore later on is how race and the emphasis on ethnic divisions seems to do little other than hamper our understanding historically. When Yugoslavia was splitting up, it got to me, the old Serbs in Croatia who refused to leave even at gunpoint, the sheer tragedy of Bosnia and the displacement of people along ethnic lines. I’d heard it all before and felt for those who just didn’t want this. Again nothing beats the following documentary in its explanation.

It was hard not to care about those who, in a different place and time, were forced to move on based on the sectarianism of others.

And so to my mother. Maybe it is her village roots and the proximity of neighbours and community that has never really left her but growing up I knew that my neighbours were important. That some of them were white British wasn’t an issue or consideration. They were our neighbours – end of.

We were expected to be polite, speak to them, treat them with respect and she would try her best to converse with them. Over time, with our immediate neighbours, she would send Christmas cards and gifts.

I am not going to pretend that she was as close to our white British neighbours as she was to the Indian families who lived on the same street but then I think it’s unfair to put this down to ethnicity alone. Most of our neighbours were elderly with children who had long flown the nest. They were at different stages of their lives. It did not help that mum’s English wouldn’t always hold up. Mind you she is especially close to Mary and her elderly mother, who we went round to see on regular occasions because she could not get out much. In the end, I guess we get on with and are close to some people more than others.

My parents now live in a small, old coal mining village and she lives there quite happily among her neighbours of all religions, backgrounds and ethnicities. She has always been naturally friendly and giving. She has managed to get to know them and having the allotment helps.

In all her time in Leicester, there just weren’t any black Caribbean or African families in our area and I did wonder about her attitude towards people from that background. Of course in typical style, no sooner is one of her neighbours a black British man, she relates. It is perhaps a gift now that I think of it. More recently, he has separated from his wife, so mum tends his allotment for him while they as a family sort out what is to happen next. It’s the same as for her white British neighbours who are lucky enough to head off to Goa for six months of the year.

Mum would not pass any test of the PC thought police but then again actions do speak louder than words.

5 Nov 2015

What my Mother Taught me about Race

Teachwell Ethnicity, Humanity, Race Prejudice, Racism, Teachers 4

So the next few posts will be all about race, ethnicity, identity, black history month and humanitarianism. These are based on my experiences, and my experiences alone, they are not intended as generalisations for any group including those which I belong to.

Where to begin?

Let’s begin at the beginning then, with my mother, who like all humans has her strengths and flaws. On reflection, she, more than anyone, shaped my attitudes and behaviours when it came to other people.

She would describe people using many terms to reflect categories including skin colour, nationalities, regions, religions and caste.

‘gora/e’ (white/s),
valethi (English – origin of the word Blighty and what Indian people call folk from England regardless of our origins),
kala (black),
Pakistani,
Indian,
Bengali,
Sikh,
Muslim,
Hindu,
Christian,
Punjabi,
Gujarati,
Jat (caste)
Chamar (caste)
and so on.

So the family down the road were ‘gore’ but they were not valethi because they were French.

It was a mixed up state of affairs alright, but it was the way she would distinguish people. Equally there were apni (our people) who fitted into the exact category as her – Punjabi-speaking Sikhs born in the part of the Punjab that remains in India.

People were grouped in so many different ways based on so many different criteria that the idea of western concepts of race, while there, were not simply not prominent. Not to say my parents were progressive forward thinkers in all matters. They wanted me to marry someone not only from the same religion as them but region and caste (which still unfortunately holds sway).

Yet in defining ‘us’ in such a specific way, it meant that the ‘other’ consisted of a myriad of people who were different due to a myriad of different reasons. It certainly did not fit the grouping of people into categories that European race theory promoted.

Race Theory:

When I taught in London, I worked in a school in which members of staff (some happily and some involuntarily) were segregated along racial lines socially but also in terms of year groups. It hit me that it was assumed that the idea of ‘races’ had taken hold equally across the world. That the grouping of people by colour and categorisation as human and sub-human was as deeply embedded in India as it was in South Africa or the USA. That somehow these ideas of humans and sub-humans based on this were held equally among people around the world.

Yet there is no real evidence of that being true. Indeed, India was, and is, such a vast country that for ideas to take hold takes a long time. This can be both positive and negative (see women’s rights in India, for example). In addition, it is a sub-continent and therefore its internal differences are much more like those found across nations in Europe. To make millions of people believe ideas about humans and categorise them in ways that was alien to them, was never going to be an easy matter in a country with no mass education system. More to the point most Indian people never had any real contact with the British ruling them or indeed their ideas about race and divisions of people around the world. Lets face it, none of us just go around agreeing with every idea presented to us, sometimes we even go along with ideas simply to get by even if we disagree with them.

That is not to say that people from Indian backgrounds are not ignorant, prejudiced or indeed racist, simply that race theory itself did not systematically pervade the everyday beliefs and ideas for all Indian people.

Yet like all people around the globe, Indians are no less immune to ideas of superiority or inferiority or dehumanising others. This ugly aspect of human nature is there for all to see be it race theory or in caste systems.

Yet for all this there have always been humanitarians who have passed on this idea to as a truth among us not a utopian ideal, like perfectionism, that if only we could manage it would great. That strain of thought is just as deeply held as beliefs in biologistic or socially constructed racial groups that are just too fundamentally different to relate to. Just as some may parrot horrible ideas to survive, so others parrot socially acceptable ideas in order to get on. Neither of these are deeply held beliefs and it is only when one challenges oneself that one can truly see what we do or do not belief.

Thoughts and Actions:

Mum is an interesting character. She talked about other people using stereotypes that she had learned or picked up. Having learnt about racism and xenophobia at school, I would often question and challenge her on these and her reply was always the same. She would listen, think about it and then say:

“Well in the end, we are all human and there is good and bad among all people.”

This was usually accompanied by an anecdote or story similar to that of the Good Samaritan – where some Sikh Punjabi had done something awful and where someone from some other group had done something great.

No matter who you were being a good person was the ultimate that any of us could achieve and whoever achieved it deserved respect for what they had done. Because what they had done was an example to all other humans and what we were capable of at our best.

And it is this belief that meant that Mum could not bring herself to treat other people differently because in the end it was a spiritual and moral matter to treat other human beings as human beings. There was always a basic level of respect that one had for other people which could not be disregarded simply because they were different to us in some way. If others treated her badly, that was a different matter and so it should be.

Yet she seemed to be quite capable of distinguishing between someone having a bad day, making an honest mistake, ignorance, prejudice and racism. Too many times I have seen people jump to race/racism and assumptions of people playing race card as though there is simply no other explanation.Equally she was unshakeable in her belief that there were some relationships that were simply more important than any group a person might belong to. My next post will deal with this in more depth.