Racism, Another Facet Of Living In America

Racism, Another Facet Of Living In America and we have a choice to address it in ways that is reasonable and humane.

A producer of the big sitcom show puts together a crew of artists to showcase the achievements of his production company and proceeds to send invitations. After a few days he starts to realize something is missing or not normal about the list. He calls his assistant and orders that she find a handful of black artists to be part of the show. The planned event unfolds, the media gets hold of the highlights and social media goes on a viral frenzy. The day after the event someone inside leakes a photograph of the original list and the modified list. Twitter, Facebook and News Media goes wild with racial comments and revelations. Supporters who believe there was no wrong done praise the producer and others express hatred towards him. People boycott his shows and his followers on twitter grow and fall at the same time.

This is a typical situation in the USA today. Everything is followed so closely and analysed to the granular level only to beat the good out things. There are cases where great things came out of them but often times the translation is lost and the story can get skewed. There are hundreds of these types of stories that float around and I will not be surprised if you can come up with 10 other such stories in 5 minutes.

Coming from a country where some people differentiate one from the other using caste, color and language, it is not very hard to understand that similar theme exists here. I was born in the caste that is considered to be on the higher strata of life and even though my upbringing and education always instilled a sense that we are all just people, there were others around me who believed otherwise. This created a lot of challenges especially in academics and sports. I was not much of an athlete but more of an artist, an actor and peoples person and that helped surpass all the negativity, discriminatory behaviours and bring clarity to make unbiased decisions sometimes deep rooted in my subconsciousness.

That producer in an interview, claimed that he was being a racist and that acceptance to me is more powerful than the actual guilt. So, we are not here to judge but being judged and the outcomes are not in our hands. Sometimes, we make decisions and we make mistakes. We will bump into somebody and we will apologize and then walk together, hand in hand or decide to go our own ways. We as people do need to be more powerful and fair in our decisions and judgements.

America is unique place with many different cultural diversities and is also a part of many initiatives on global changes in our understanding of human race. That we are all made equal, not just in words but in true sense. That tomorrow when you invite your friends to celebrate, you see people and not colors, languages, cultures, religions, sizes, shapes and their sexual orientations but merely see that they are people who enrich your life and find ways to enrich theirs.

Rant By the Author Warning: “I feel sick to the stomach but my heart grows to accommodate these facts and people, when I read or hear folks talk about white Vs black or black this or this life matters etc. Because, I feel that a perfect opportunity was lost to address this problem of discrimination and in the process of fighting for equal rights or addressing issues with legal system etc, a new case of racial discrimination was created. When you say ” Give the browns the equal rights” because first of all, brown is a color and a brown wax crayon probably does not care for equal rights and more over, folks in America already are exercising their rights and they may have different quantities of melanin in their skin, but they are just people you know”