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If you consider kalu to be an affectionate nickname and not a slur, you need to examine your internal prejudices and the systems that support it writes Sambit Bal in Cricinfo
What should we feel, and I ask my fellow South Asians this, having heard Daren Sammy raise the issue of being called kalu by his IPL team-mates? Horror and shame?
It is easy to imagine the befuddlement among some of his former team-mates. That was racist? Weren't - and aren't - we all buddies? Wasn't someone called a motu and someone else a lambu? What about all the camaraderie, and where was the offence when we were all having a jolly time?
How horrified and ashamed are we, really? Have we not thought, even in passing, that this could be a case of dressing-room banter being conflated with racism? And can we, hand on heart, say that we are completely surprised the things Sammy says happened did happen?
Once we have played all these questions in our minds, only one remains: how do we not know that this is so horribly wrong? It's not about whether Sammy knew the meaning of the word; it's about what his team-mates didn't know.
To address this, we must first widen the scope beyond Sammy and Sunrisers Hyderabad. We are at an extraordinary moment in history where a black man being publicly choked to death by a figure of authority has not only sparked worldwide mass outrage, but has also created a heightened sense of awareness about discrimination on the basis of colour, and led to the re-examination of a wide range of social behaviours.
To find the explanation for how it became okay for a group of international cricketers to address - in terms of endearment, they may add - a black West Indian player as kalu, we must face one of the most insidious practices in South Asian culture: colourism.
The elevation of whiteness is not a subcontinental phenomenon. The idea has been seeded over centuries, through religion, cultural imagery, and most profoundly, language, that "white" connotes everything pristine, pure and fair (consider the word "fair" itself) and that "dark" represents everything sinister. Watch Muhammad Ali take this on with cutting simplicity here.
But to understand how this idea originated and grew in the subcontinent, which suffered over 200 years of colonial subjugation and still suffers caste-based discrimination, one must sift through complex layers of sociocultural conditioning based on the regressive dynamics of class, caste, sect and gender. The hierarchy of skin colour is all pervasive in the region, and it doesn't strike most as odd, much less repugnant, that lightness of complexion should be so deeply linked to ideas of beauty.
This idea has been reinforced over decades through popular culture. You need to look no further than mainstream cinema in India: how many of our successful actors, especially women, are representative of the median South Asian skin tone? In the matrimonial pages, fair skin is peddled as a clinching eligibility factor, and consequently, ads for fairness creams position them as agents of salvation and success. So organically is this drilled into the mass subconscious that the obsession has ceased to be offensive: it is merely aspirational.
Add to this another subcontinental abomination - the practice of addressing people by their physical attributes - and you have a recipe for something utterly toxic. These terms of address are demeaning but normalised by a coating of endearment: jaadya or motu for the heavy-set, chhotu or batka for the short, kana for those who squint, and quite seamlessly, kalu or kaliya for those with skin tones darker than that of the majority.
This would perhaps explain Sarfaraz Ahmed's mild bemusement at the outrage over his "Abey kaale" remark to Andile Phehlukwayo in Durban last year. Ahmed, then Pakistan's captain, was speaking in Urdu, so it was apparent that he didn't expect Phehlukwayo, the South Africa allrounder, to understand the sledge, and that anyone familiar with the culture in Pakistan would have understood that he did not intend it as a racial slur.
But it can't be emphasised more that racist utterances are no longer about intent, because intent is so organically and inextricably loaded into the words themselves that it is no longer acceptable to explain them away with "It was not intended to be racist, or to cause hurt or offence." It's for all of us to internalise, more so for public figures: offence not meant is not equal to offence not given or received.
The silence of victims mustn't be misread. It does not mean willing acceptance. In most cases, they have no choice. They often find themselves outnumbered in social groups - or in dressing rooms - and choose to belong, rather than to confront. Former India opening batsman Abhinav Mukund brought this to light a few years ago with a poignant post on Twitter about how he had to "toughen up" against "people's constant obsession" with his skin colour. In a dressing-room scenario, where the eagerness to conform is far more acute, and where a culture of bullying isn't alien, the compulsion to grin and bear these "friendly" jibes is even more severe.
It doesn't have to be. It might take years, perhaps generations, to reform societies, but sports can do it much more easily through sensitisation and education. In Ahmed's case, it was staggering that a captain of an international team did not understand the enormity of using those words against a black South African cricketer. Cricket boards and franchises now have elaborate programmes to educate players about match-fixing and drug abuse, and in some cases, media management. Adding cultural sensitisation to the list would be a small task but a big step.
Calling somebody kalu in the subcontinent might not feel racist in the way the world understands it. But even without the scars of slavery and subjugation, colourism carries some of the worst features of racism; it is discriminatory, derogatory and dehumanising.
The right response to Sammy is not to question why he didn't raise the matter at the time. He has already explained that he didn't understand what the word meant. It is not even about establishing guilt and punishment. The whole episode must lead to an enquiry into our own prejudices. Cricketers are not only role models and flag bearers of the spirit of their sport. They are also, more than ever before, global citizens, and ignorance shouldn't count as an excuse or serve as a shield.
Honouring the man once known as Lord Vulture is a testament to British ignorance of our imperial past writes William Dalrymple in The Guardian
The statue of Robert Clive stands outside the Foreign Office. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
When Robert Clive, who established British rule in India, died by his own hand in 1774, he was widely reviled as one of the most hated men in England.
His body was buried in a secret night-time ceremony, in an unmarked grave, without a plaque. Clive left no suicide note, but Samuel Johnson reflected the widespread view as to his motives: Clive “had acquired his fortune by such crimes that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat”.
Clive’s death followed soon after two whistleblowers had revealed the scale of the devastation and asset-stripping of Bengal under his rule. “We have murdered, deposed, plundered and usurped,” wrote Horace Walpole. “Say what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the East India Company?” That summer, a satire was published in London lampooning Clive as Lord Vulture, an unstable imperial harpy, “utterly deaf to every sentiment of justice and humanity… whose avarice knows no bounds”.
Clive was hauled before parliament with calls to strip him of both his peerage and his wealth. The select committee found, in addition to lucrative insider dealing, that “presents” worth over £2m had been distributed in Bengal, and recommended that the “very great sums of money … appropriated” by Clive and his henchmen be reimbursed. Despite escaping formal censure, Clive came to be seen as the monstrous embodiment of the East India Company’s violence and corruption.
But just as statues of defeated Confederate generals rose in the southern United States, long after their deaths, as totems to a white supremacy that was felt to be under threat during the civil rights movement, so, in due course, Clive was subject to an equally remarkable metamorphosis: in the early 20th century, as resistance was beginning to threaten the foundations of the Raj, Lord Vulture was miraculously transformed into the heroic Clive of India. Like the erection of the Confederate statues, even at the time it was a deeply controversial matter.
In 1907 the former viceroy, Lord Curzon, recently returned from India, threw his weight behind a campaign to erect a memorial to “the Victor of [the battle of] Plassey”. His successor, Lord Minto, already dealing with the serious unrest caused by Curzon’s partition of Bengal, was horrified at the proposal, and called it “needlessly provocative”. The secretary of state for India, outside whose office the statue was to be raised, wearily agreed with Minto and wrote that he was beginning to wish that Clive had been defeated at Plassey.
Today Clive’s statue stands outside the Foreign Office at the very centre of British government, just behind Downing Street. Yet clearly this is not a man we should be honouring today. If at the time many thought the statue should never have been erected, now, as we stand at this crucial crossroads after the toppling of Edward Colston, the moment has definitely come for it to be sent to a museum. There it can be used to instruct future generations about the darkest chapters of the British past.
It is not just that this statue stands as a daily challenge to every British person whose grandparents came from the former colonies. Perhaps more damagingly still, its presence outside the Foreign Office encourages dangerous neo-imperial fantasies among the descendants of the colonisers.
In Britain, study of the empire is still largely absent from the history curriculum. This still tends to go from the Tudors to the Nazis, Henry to Hitler, with a brief visit to William Wilberforce and Florence Nightingale along the way. We are thus given the impression that the British were always on the side of the angels. We remain almost entirely ignorant about the long history of atrocities and exploitation that accompanied the building of our colonial system. Now, more than ever, we badly need to understand what is common knowledge elsewhere: that for much of history we were an aggressively racist and expansionist force responsible for violence, injustice and war crimes on every continent.
We also need to know how far the British, every bit as much as the Germans, helped codify a system of scientific racism, creating a hierarchy of race that put white Caucasians at the top and blacks, “wandering Jews” and Indian Muslims at the bottom. Yet while the Germans have faced up to the darkest periods of their past, and are taught about it unvarnished in their schools, we have not even made a start to this process. Instead, while we understand that the Belgian and German empires were deeply sinister, the Raj, we like to believe, was like some enormous rose-tinted Merchant Ivory film writ large over the plains of Hindustan, all parasols and Simla tea parties, friendly elephants and handsome, croquet-playing maharajahs.
This has become a real problem. Our vast ignorance of everything that is most uncomfortable about our imperial past is damaging, every day, our relations with the rest of the world. In particular our misplaced nostalgia for our imperial past is encouraging us to overplay our Brexit hand. Contrary to fantasies of Brexiters, our former colonies are not about to warmly embrace us. Nor can we kickstart the empire, as if it were some sort of old motorbike that has been left in a garage for 70 years. The strategy of trying to strike trade deals with Commonwealth countries - dubbed Empire 2.0 by some in the Civil Service – has been a total failure.
Indians, in particular, have bitter memories of British rule. In their eyes we came as looters, and subjected them to centuries of humiliation. The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation.
Removing the statue of Clive from the back of Downing Street would give us an opportunity finally to begin the long overdue process of education and atonement. In 1947, at the end of the Raj, Indians removed all their imperial statues to suburban parks where explanatory texts gave them proper historical context. We could do the same. Alternately, by placing Clive and others of his ilk in a museum, perhaps one modelled on the brilliantly nuanced and hugely moving National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington DC, we can finally begin to face up to what we have done and so begin the process of apologising for the many things we need to apologise for. Only then will we properly be able to move on, free from the heavy baggage of our imperial past.
Racism is a health crisis. But poverty is too – yet progressives blithely accepted the costs of throwing millions of people like George Floyd out of work writes Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Guardian
‘Less than two weeks ago, the enlightened position was to exercise extreme caution. Many of us went further, taking to social media to shame others for insufficient social distancing.’ Photograph: Devon Ravine/AP
When I reflect back on the extraordinary year of 2020 – from, I hope, some safer, saner vantage – one of the two defining images in my mind will be the surreal figure of the Grim Reaper stalking the blazing Florida shoreline, scythe in hand, warning the sunbathing masses of imminent death and granting interviews to reporters. The other will be a prostrate George Floyd, whose excruciating Memorial Day execution sparked a global protest movement against racism and police violence.
Less than two weeks after Floyd’s killing, the American death toll from the novel coronavirus has surpassed 100,000. Rates of infection, domestically and worldwide, are rising. But one of the few things it seems possible to say without qualification is that the country has indeed reopened. For 13 days straight, in cities across the nation, tens of thousands of men and women have massed in tight-knit proximity, with and without personal protective equipment, often clashing with armed forces, chanting, singing and inevitably increasing the chances of the spread of contagion.
Scenes of outright pandemonium unfold daily. Anyone claiming to have a precise understanding of what is happening, and what the likely risks and consequences may be, should be regarded with the utmost skepticism. We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges’s Aleph. Yet we know very little about what it is we are watching.
I open my laptop and glimpse a rider on horseback galloping through the Chicago streets like Ras the Destroyer in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; I scroll down further and find myself in Los Angeles, as the professional basketball star JR Smith pummels a scrawny anarchist who smashed his car window. I keep going and encounter a mixed group of business owners in Van Nuys risking their lives to defend their businesses from rampaging looters; the black community members trying to help them are swiftly rounded up by police officers who mistake them for the criminals. In Buffalo, a 75-year-old white man approaches a police phalanx and is immediately thrown to the pavement; blood spills from his ear as the police continue to march over him. Looming behind all of this chaos is a reality-TV president giddily tweeting exhortations to mass murder, only venturing out of his bunker to teargas peaceful protesters and stage propaganda pictures.
George Floyd wasn’t merely killed for being black – he was also killed for being poor
But this virus – for which we may never even find a vaccine – knows and respects none of this socio-political context. Its killing trajectory isn’t rational, emotional, or ethical – only mathematical. And just as two plus two is four, when a flood comes, low-lying areas get hit the hardest. Relatively poor, densely clustered populations with underlying conditions suffer disproportionately in any environment in which Covid-19 flourishes. Since the virus made landfall in the US, it has killed at least 20,000 black Americans.
After two and a half months of death, confinement, and unemployment figures dwarfing even the Great Depression, we have now entered the stage of competing urgencies where there are zero perfect options. Police brutality is a different if metaphorical epidemic in an America slouching toward authoritarianism. Catalyzed by the spectacle of Floyd’s reprehensible death, it is clear that the emergency in Minneapolis passes my own and many peoples’ threshold for justifying the risk of contagion.
But poverty is also a public health crisis. George Floyd wasn’t merely killed for being black – he was also killed for being poor. He died over a counterfeit banknote. Poverty destroys Americans every day by means of confrontations with the law, disease, pollution, violence and despair. Yet even as the coronavirus lockdown threw 40 million Americans out of work – including Floyd himself – many progressives accepted this calamity, sometimes with stunning blitheness, as the necessary cost of guarding against Covid-19.
The new, “correct” narrative about public health – that one kind of crisis has superseded the other – grows shakier as it spans out from Minnesota, across America to as far as London, Amsterdam and Paris – cities that have in recent days seen extraordinary manifestations of public solidarity against both American and local racism, with protesters in the many thousands flooding public spaces.
Consider France, where I live. The country has only just begun reopening after two solid months of one of the world’s severest national quarantines, and in the face of the world’s fifth-highest coronavirus body count. As recently as 11 May, it was mandatory here to carry a fully executed state-administered permission slip on one’s person in order to legally exercise or go shopping. The country has only just begun to flatten the curve of deaths – nearly 30,000 and counting – which have brought its economy to a standstill. Yet even here, in the time it takes to upload a black square to your Instagram profile, those of us who move in progressive circles now find ourselves under significant moral pressure to understand that social distancing is an issue of merely secondary importance.
This feels like gaslighting. Less than two weeks ago, the enlightened position in both Europe and America was to exercise nothing less than extreme caution. Many of us went much further, taking to social media to castigate others for insufficient social distancing or neglecting to wear masks or daring to believe they could maintain some semblance of a normal life during coronavirus. At the end of April, when the state of Georgia moved to end its lockdown, the Atlantic ran an article with the headline “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”. Two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.
As a result of lockdowns and quarantines, many millions of people around the world have lost their jobs, depleted their savings, missed funerals of loved ones, postponed cancer screenings and generally put their lives on hold for the indefinite future. They accepted these sacrifices as awful but necessary when confronted by an otherwise unstoppable virus. Was this or wasn’t this all an exercise in futility?
“The risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn’t keep people from protesting racism,” NPR suddenly tells us, citing a letter signed by dozens of American public health and disease experts. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to Covid-19,” the letter said. One epidemiologist has gone even further, arguing that the public health risks of not protesting for an end to systemic racism “greatly exceed the harms of the virus”.
The climate-change-denying right is often ridiculed, correctly, for politicizing science. Yet the way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like … politicizing science.
What are we to make of such whiplash-inducing messaging? Merely pointing out the inconsistency in such a polarized landscape feels like an act of heresy. But “‘Your gatherings are a threat, mine aren’t,’ is fundamentally illogical, no matter who says it or for what reason,” as the author of The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols, put it. “We’ve been told for months to stay as isolated as humanely possible,” Suzy Khimm, an NBC reporter covering Covid-19, noted, but “some of the same public officials and epidemiologists are [now] saying it’s OK to go to mass gatherings – but only certain ones.”
Public health experts – as well as many mainstream commentators, plenty of whom in the beginning of the pandemic were already incoherent about the importance of face masks and stay-at-home orders – have hemorrhaged credibility and authority. This is not merely a short-term problem; it will constitute a crisis of trust going forward, when it may be all the more urgent to convince skeptical masses to submit to an unproven vaccine or to another round of crushing stay-at-home orders. Will anyone still listen?
Seventy years ago Camus showed us that the human condition itself amounts to a plague-like emergency – we are only ever managing our losses, striving for dignity in the process. Risk and safety are relative notions and never strictly objective. However, there is one inconvenient truth that cannot be disputed: more black Americans have been killed by three months of coronavirus than the number who have been killed by cops and vigilantes since the turn of the millennium. We may or may not be willing to accept that brutal calculus, but we are obligated, at the very least, to be honest.