Racism

Racism

First broadcast on Ex-Pat Radio 2007

It is generally acknowledged that the 20th century was the century of genocide – again and again across the world from Western Europe to China, Africa to Siberia, cold-blooded murder was committed upon millions of people in the name of political, philosophical or just plain racist ideologies.

And although wholesale slaughter can be found on every page of the history book, the 20th century did see an acceleration of the process, a quickening. Of course we look back on this time in horror: few of us would ever call ourselves racist or would condone acts of ethnic cleansing, pogroms, or racial purification. But then neither did our grandparents or those before them and they still happened; great stains across the pages of our shared history. The American colonists, the British in South Africa, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot to name but a few who killed millions, often of their own people, in the fear of the other: the fear of individuality, of difference.

It is as if a conquering nation or dictator wished to create an identikit nation made up of colourless copies of itself: where all difference and diversity had been eliminated: the same character, the same genetic code, political beliefs and the same cruel and cowardly distrust of anyone else who dares, or just happens to be, different.

For sure, dictators as well as many mainstream politicians are dangerous beasts, operating to their own designs where megalomania, mental instability and fear of difference are classic elements. It’s understandable and easy to blame them for our problems. It is also wrong. For the truth is that the fear, racism and the causes of genocide are nothing to do with one man’s personality disorders. For that, I am afraid we have to look a lot closer to home.

The fact is that we all have the capacity for evil. Whatever your definition of evil – from a chemical imbalance in the brain to human weakness in the face of Satanic temptation – we all have it. Freud knew this and so did Jung. However, there is a world of difference in how we deal with these thoughts, feelings, and temptations. Take racism, for example. In some of us - a minority – our fearful attitudes to another race may be so extreme that we may, by cause or omission, come to be the cause of another’s death. Fortunately, for most of us, we would never dream of harming another, least of all because of the colour of their skin. No, maybe not harm them, but fear them … ?

Man has a dual nature: we are both spirit and animal in one. And as we tumble through the centuries, DNA and race memories alike are passed down through the generations. Among them, our ancient, yet now unnecessary fear of the other slops around, deep, in our subconscious, where it normally stays, out of reach and out of mind. But when we give people authority and then allow them to delve around in our primal fears, there will only be one outcome. An illogical distrust, fear or hatred of the other, sparked, for sure, by another’s words but allowed by us a home in our minds, to fester and grow into that powerful thing; the group mind. Of course, defying the group mind is difficult and becoming increasingly so and there have always been many reasons not to challenge it: I am too small to make a difference, for example, I was just following orders, and I have a family to think about. All true, but yet all pathetic in the face of a herd mentality which grows louder and more brutal with every denial or act of personal cowardice.

Just as the pure energy of the sub-atomic particle has the potential to be part of any life form in the universe, so do we, human beings composed of pure light, pure energy. Each thought we receive from another or, more rarely, create for ourselves, begins to shape us and our futures. Your future starts, very literally, with your very next thought. What will that thought be?

There are some of us for whom the very next thought will be of a negative nature: distrusting, perhaps, or fearful of those who are somehow different. But why this fear of a different culture, language or skin colour? Perhaps, for some, the mere presence of difference is disturbing, frightening even, challenging long-held beliefs. In the wish to forcibly remove difference from his life, the individual seeks to restore and thus safeguard his comfortable worldview, even at the expense of his spiritual and mental development, and, more importantly, the other person’s comfort, or life.

Having lived for many years in large multicultural English cities, the presence and co-existence of many races has always been normal to me; part of my world view. To deny the reality of that largely peaceful co-existence would simply have been a pathology, a lie, on my part. And when I first arrived in Poland, the lack of a brown or black face was as surprising to me as indeed the presence of such a face is to many a Pole. Our perception of what is normal, or common, in our lives, comes not from some divine truth or grand mathematical equation. It is simply the sum total of our very limited set of experiences, which exist only in the past tense and which become out-of-date even as we experience them.

But what about the present moment? Will our perception and reactions to new experiences continue to be based solely upon limited, erroneous past experiences, social and political conditioning? Or does each present moment offer the chance for a new way of thinking and perceiving, an experiencing of reality ‘as is’, without prejudice or preconception?

Many of you will know a man called Atma Anur, a regular on this radio show. Atma is a very gifted drummer and a very nice guy with, apparently, an unquenchable sense of wonder and enthusiasm. He’s English but has a mid-Atlantic twang from his many years living in the States. What else? Oh, yes, he’s black. Nothing strange about that, of course, until you come and live in Poland. In Krakow. Which he does. Because he loves it here. And that’s why Atma wants to know why Poles are coming up to him in the street, pushing their faces into his and demanding to know what he’s doing ‘here’ and why he doesn’t ‘go home’. Is it good ol’-fashioned, good-ol’boy hatred of dark-skinned difference that he knows all too well, or is it something else peculiar to Eastern Europeans, a genuine, gawping bewilderment, as if Krakow was London in the 1700’s and Atma a swarthy savage transported from the Indies for the amusement of the people?

Let me first be generous: free travel and cultural exchange both in and out of Eastern Europe is still less than twenty years old: a generation raised on the opinions, beliefs and mis-beliefs of its parents, themselves indoctrinated by Communism. It would be only natural if there was still a degree of cultural ignorance and naivety here in Poland. At the height of Stalinism, children informed on their parents, who were publicly executed for supposedly having voiced anti-state thoughts or beliefs. If human beings can be made to do that to their own fathers and mothers, then their children will have no problem staring and gawping at a negro in the streets of Krakow.

However, there is a limit to my devil’s advocacy. The attitudes Atma and many others experience on Polish streets every day goes well beyond the impolite stare or pointing of a child’s finger. How can a historically-oppressed nation like Poland not be naturally sympathetic to minorities? A nation which has been fought over, divided, suppressed and ripped apart time and time again for centuries? A people who died in the hundreds of thousands, both in the streets and the concentration camps, long before Hitler turned his attention to the Jews? In 1980 and 1981, the word ‘Solidarity’ spread through the country like wildfire and spelt the beginning of the end for an authoritarian, morally bankrupt regime. Now, Poland looks to the future and aspires to be one of the most modern, leading European nations. But to be so, it must not forget its past where any group of people could suddenly be labelled different, inferior, and undesirable.

As a white European male, I never experience discrimination. But as a Krakowian, it is my belief and hope that some Poles’ negative attitudes to other races is a mixture of ignorance and fear of the other, which is present in all human beings, and not just that undeniable hatred which finds expression in some of our less enlightened brothers and sisters. Certainly, as the new Polish Diaspora encounters multiculturalism in England, Ireland and elsewhere, it is to be hoped that their experiences of living and working happily alongside people with brown and black skins will begin to feed itself back into the Polish consciousness.

In the 20th century, Poland was once again torn brutally apart by its neighbours. Now, for the first time in centuries, it has the potential to be great again. If it remembers how it is to be persecuted for being different, then it will deserve to be a great nation. But if, instead, it chooses to forget the lessons of history and encourages suspicion and nationalism, it will be forever a poor country, doomed to infighting and ripe for domination. And what goes for the state goes for me and goes for you. This article will now finish and your next thought will begin.