By Romady
The damage of racism isn’t that visible even to the victims of racism in day-to-day lives because individual racism doesn’t stop people from getting to a position expected of stereotyped people and surpassing those expectations. It won’t do enough damage in the capacity of your everyday racism, not wanting to talk to certain kinds of people or not wanting to sit around certain shades of people, or the active diminishing of certain groups of people. It doesn’t become strong enough to affect those groups of people if racism doesn’t go beyond individual opinions but it organizes itself to shape the victims of racists to the already defined stereotypes given to them in the heads of the racists, such as poor or incapable of being intelligent or influential. It’s even more dangerous when the people who are the victims of racism start to believe stereotypes about themselves and start thinking the stereotypes are who they can be and nothing more and start not expecting more from their community. If victims of racism understand that racism is more than mere opinions of individuals but has been molded into opinions of the public and serves as a tool by which the world is shaped then the victims of racism will have worked actively to pass the lines set for them by racism. I think racism is the silent killer of humanity in that it puts human beings not in an equal opportunity to defend their rights. Because let’s face it if people had a secure right to life and to education and if they weren’t being told or made to assume their communities are backward and incapable from a young age, they would definitely have the inspiration to change their community’s livelihood and not think it’s a lost cause to work towards at without changing who they are. Racism shames the victim into thinking they are less than others because of race and it makes them try to assimilate with those who are thought to be the better while detaching the victims from their communities thinking the problem is the identity of their community when the problem is related to opportunity. All races are great and should be celebrated as they are to show what they bring to humanity instead of giving all attention to certain races as an appropriate depiction of humanity at its finest. To me, in some ways, in a harsh world where nature and humans themselves have made it difficult for the ‘other’ humans to live, the fact that all of us on earth who are the survivors and representation of humanity must have had the ingenuity to survive. People who lived in certain cultural and community forms did so by learning from their environment, people, and nature and have defined existence systems all of which have merit in the contribution of human intelligence.
You understand the magnitude of racism as a threat to human existence when you realize people with huge resources and in organized forms weigh the importance of people through the lens of racism built onto them than by understanding humanity in itself is what’s important everywhere on earth in any race or capacity. It’s dangerous because they scale humanity with an already internalized belief as to who should be given precedence to be allowed to live and those ones who wouldn’t have the strength to shock these racists to tell them “no you aren’t the one to tell me whether I should live or die”. It’s dangerous because the reason some of us live in an abundance of resources and protection while others are deliberately denied the resources and protection at their disposal has majorly become a race.
For me, racism is in its most dangerous form when racism makes racists get more opportunities to be decision-makers in corporations. These corporations in turn join to make bigger organizations to be swayed by racism until finally the biggest institutions of our world are run and decided by racist inclined leaders that do little for humanity based on humanity than politics and race and we arrive at the unpeaceful, hateful, world filled with standards that are lies and believes that is built on fake morals.
I mean let’s see how in the older days during the colonization of Africa how Africans are said to be non-Christian and uncivilized and it was a duty for white people to govern them, enslave them, and make them Christian. In this day and age, there are so many African countries that believe in a higher being and we see a western world that had defined the mark of being civilized as Christianity evolving into belief based on scientific facts and that faith in Christianity could be a mark of ignorance. Some define Christianity is to be practiced between the real Christian brothers and that it is a religion closer to some race than another. This in reality isn’t even accepted by the Christian faith itself states Christianity is a faith that preaches to think for another as you think for yourself and that all human beings are created in the image of God. But some racists think they are selected to be more Christian than the others going against the faith teaching itself. Although I would like to thank Pope Francis for speaking against what’s happening in Tigrai, the weight of what’s happening should have compelled him to stand with the fathers of the Catholic Church in Tigrai who are calling what’s happening in Tigrai clearly genocide. At least, it should have brought the case more to Pope Francis’s attention than it has been.
Another source of racism is the belief that some communities are more prone to drug addiction, and crimes and unable to develop as a society. Again here I don’t know if there are statistics about drug addiction and race but we can say exposure to drugs is rampant amongst all races in our world. Crimes do happen in places of less opportunity among all races and the incapability to develop in countries in Africa, for example, is a deliberate act of leaders to incapacitate their citizens to stay in power, case in point, Eritrea. These leaders are never evaluated based upon the educated force they have brought forth or how corrupt they are in working with foreign countries’ corporations. The needs of the people come second if at all they come. Those who care and speak for their people are silenced. Let’s also not forget the effect of colonialism that has left certain orders in society that allows colonizing corporations to be the ones in monopoly still in taking over big economic shares that benefit the corporations and not the society such as in education and residence building, supply of water and electricity or technology transfer. The deficiency in opportunity has made increased numbers of the capacity building difficult in Africa. Africans can’t do research and development schemes when they are still fighting for survival in their own countries while the elite and their government don’t do enough to make them better benefactors of opportunity in their own countries. If Africa was like Europe in sustaining certain lifestyles that allow Africans platforms to think further in changing their conditions and they didn’t, Africans would be judged. And yet with all the problems of wars (mainly border conflicts from colonialism), resistance to governments funded by the west, exploitation of western corporations which don’t appropriately give back to the African society but some of their government officials, Africans have still given back to the world in what small available opportunity that they have. Imagine how much they could have contributed had there been a conducive environment to develop Africans. There are children in Europe such as in Georgia being arrested for the usage of drugs and their families being unable to visit them in the prisons because of lack of money. These are forgotten places in the world where parents don’t have enough security to protect their children. Corporate racism however uses racist teachings in a way that serves it to drive the interests of a few people leaving behind billions to suffer unchallenged because it has created faithful defenders of the system through lies most people are fed about ‘who is who in our world and through ignorance to keep the status quo of this world. These Europeans in Georgia are not made open agenda in western media to protect certain races’ reputations instead of helping these people based on them being people and in the name of humanity.
If people of all races have peace and are exposed to the equal opportunity they can all perform to do in ways we have a better world. What racism does is intentionally create a denial of opportunity in fear that the competence of others might deny the superiority of some and superiority is a must to have for some. It’s a plan to make others stay way behind so that it wouldn’t be a fair challenge to rightful development. Weakening, while seeming to be supporting, is a component of racism by itself which is missed by most racist victims. Racist victims think racism is the attack but it’s only a means to align the odds to win the race by the attacker. It’s not the final attack in itself but denies thought directions into the betterment of self regardless of attack and seizing opportunity for oneself. It is, for the activators of racism, an inferiority complex or protection of their community in fear that victims of racism might find ways to live without dependency upon the racists and recognize what’s at their disposal. It’s a way to fight any attempt to level the playing field for others to define themselves as deserving of dignity, wellbeing, and satisfaction in being who they are. For the passive racist, however, it’s just a learned behavior and pure ignorance of what he/she is made to believe or support.
When it comes to physical attributions of races in contrast to each other, this is seen as a source of racism as well in addition to possession of ‘appropriate’ manners, being educated, being a crimeless society, and other benchmarks to stereotype ‘other’ people. I like the saying beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Although some groups of people are defined as more beautiful than others, it’s not all people in certain people groups that possess the right dimensions that give the illusion of what’s beautiful and we just can’t use that as a definition of what we think is beautiful and beauty is subjective. I can find someone really dark-toned in South Sudan as beautiful as someone really fair in Germany, France, or London. Although racism cant has a universal basis to say these people are like this in all consensus it still makes its way through our societies defining itself as an understanding between people as to how certain races are or should be conditioned to be thought of as reality. As I said those societies that have been subject to deliberate discrimination do not have the same grounds to assert their rights in the world and should be exempt from the racist judgment as an incapacity innate to those societies. This would make racism lose ground altogether.
When we talk about racism it’s to say that all human beings regardless of race aren’t given equal rights to humanity’s needs primarily as well, forget politics, economics, and freedom of expression. Now take the case of Tigrai as an Example. Tigrai is a region in Ethiopia, in East Africa. The Ethiopian government and the neighboring Eritrean government invited some troops from Somalia state and the neighboring region’s Amhara forces have invaded the sovereign region of Tigrai since November 4th, 2021. it has been 17 months since the outbreak of the war. In Tigrai, so much has been done that hasn’t been addressed enough as an attack on humanity that targeted Tigrayans in ways unthinkable and so cruel. The world has forgotten to address the humanitarian crisis. It’s an absolute example of racism where the world forgot what humanity means to it and has dismissed from addressing it with absolute seriousness because it isn’t important enough on a scale of humanity to some leading world-class organizations such as the UN. Since the outbreak of the war :
- more than 120,000 women have been raped including in mass and there are only the ones reported
- there have been more than 300 something massacre sites
- Children are dying because of malnutrition and lack of medication
- Electricity and water have been cut off for eight months
- there is no banking being allowed in Tigrai by the Ethiopian government
- ancient historical and religious places have been a target
- all food products found have been looted or burned by the invading forces while they were in Tigrai for eight months (the invading General has said they have done all they wanted to do in Tigrai and they can just wait to see the demise of Tigrai from afar)
- 80% of the health centers have been removed with the intention that people can’t get any health treatments while there is an active war happening
- Ethnic cleansing has happened in a part of Tigrai, Western Tigrai, according to a recent report by Amnesty International and HRW
- In the rest of Ethiopia Tigrayans have been mass arrested in a manner of concentration camps, cramped together, and given food once a day, without visitors’ rights and even bathroom freedoms. This includes 17,000 Tigrayans that used to serve the Ethiopian army. Recently, it has been known the Ethiopian government has been deploying these troops back to war from where it had put them in prison without giving reasoning for their arrest or for their redeployment to war.
- and to top it all off, there is an active siege by the Ethiopian government upon 7 million people, using Tigrai itself as a concentration camp in which people are in immediate need of food and in starvation because the Ethiopian government won’t allow food and medical aid into Tigrai. No Tigrayan can enter or exit Tigrai at this point without the risk of death by forces of the Ethiopian government and allied forces as well as the Eritrean government.
This is all very much reported around the world and documented. Now let’s take a look at Ukraine for comparison.
I don’t support the invasion of Ukraine. The war in Ukraine has been happening for 2 months. In these times we have seen the Russian troops allow aid into Ukraine and allow exit of civilians from Ukraine to flee to neighboring countries for safety. Of course, there was the discriminatory treatment of people while exiting Ukraine. But this was done not by the Russians but by the Ukrainians themselves. Africans in Ukraine have faced this preferential treatment in what was a time that could essentially determine life or death for them. In cases of these, racism becomes the culprit to be preferential in the fundamental rights to life.
I know-how concerning the war in Ukraine and that it could be the cause of the third world war. Apart from a couple of places, I haven’t heard humanitarian rights violations by Russia that come anywhere close to that in Tigrai. But the American president has recently called what’s happening in Ukraine a genocide. Russia has voted against being removed from the human rights commission of the UN for the atrocities it caused in Ukraine while Ethiopia and Eritrea who are responsible for genocide in Tigrai sit comfortably in the UN voting on whether or not Russia stays in the human rights commission of the UN. They voted for Russia to stay. America has made sanctions on Ethiopia in order to address the human rights violations in Ethiopia for which the government is an accomplice that hasn’t quenched its thirst for war. And yet in the 17 months, the war has been happening the US has tabled bills and dragged executive orders while people continue to die from the refusal of entry of aid by the Ethiopian government into Tigrai. Nothing meaningful has materialized to stop the Ethiopian government’s conduct of human rights violations and genocide. But the World Bank has decided to give 300 million dollars to the Ethiopian government to rehabilitate the war-torn areas of Ethiopia while the Ethiopian government didn’t even allow aid to wait for months on the doorsteps of Tigrai to enter. Our world leaders are still working actively with a human rights violator and a genocider as it has done enough to at least alleviate the suffering in the slightest way. I wonder if that to them is what’s expected to be done by an African leader.
If your definition of gross human rights has become equal in our world, Putin of Russia would have to match the deeds of the Ethiopian government to take the number one rank. You would have to imagine
- more than 120,000 Ukrainian women are being raped including in mass and these are only the ones reported
- Children dying because of malnutrition and lack of medication
- Electricity and water being cut off for eight months
- no banking is allowed in Ukraine
- there are more than 300 something massacre sites in Ukraine by Russians
- ancient historical and religious places being a target in Ukraine by Russia
- all food products found in Ukraine being looted or burned by invading forces in Ukraine and then Sieging it for as long as eight months and the invading general saying now they have done all we wanted to do in Ukraine and we just wait to see the demise of Ukraine from afar
- 80% of the health centers are being destructed with the intention that people can’t get any health treatments in Ukraine while Ukraine is in an active war with Russia
- there is ethnic cleansing in a part of Ukraine reported by Amnesty International and HRW
- to top it all off, an active siege on 7 million people in need of immediate food and starving because the Russian government won’t allow food and medical aid into Ukraine
This is when the notorious Putin of Russia would equate to the Nobel Peace Prize winner, “Dictator”, Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia.
Then imagine after all this, you find the UN a supposed representative organization of the world, through its chief, thanking the Ethiopian government for allowing just 10% of the amount of aid to enter a sieged area in eight months in order to have a narrative for the world bank to give money enough to allow Ethiopia to continue to run its military campaign. That’s when you can understand there is truly no justice in this world in the name of humanity. I wonder if the third world war would have started for far less than this, or if at all the world would be capable of stopping it in fear of losing interests or in self-preservation as the Ukrainians who expected their fellow West allies to help wouldn’t step up, no matter how so very much so they would like. The basis for all international humanitarian actors to act should be humanity.
But when the world pays all its attention and claims genocide to a situation far less severe in Ukraine, while genocide is killing people in mass in Tigrai, you understand the strength of racism in determining the way humanitarian crisis is dealt with, rather than on the basis of humanity in this world. I can full-heartedly say there isn’t such an organization that deals with worldwide humanitarian crises without giving precedence focusing on humanitarian issues and ignoring race and politics except maybe for MSF. This shows us how our capacity to look at what’s wrong and right has been clouded by race. All humanitarian organizations seem to be responding to areas that have the crisis based on the political importance of the area as if the crisis was created in the first place and not to be responded to by these organizations unless certain political gains come forth. The response of the UN in gratitude to a genocidal regime (at least an ethnic cleansing enabler as reported on by the Amnesty International and HRW) is very exemplary of this. It shows in the perspective of these organizations the difference in scale that’s permissible, to happen in certain parts of the world in comparison to another, to be called a certain kind of crime against humanity. The reaction of the general public to actions in one place, as opposed to another, is also very concerning. I will write one account of an interaction I had with a Ukrainian on Twitter while, we Tigrayan people, were responding to a US State Department statement on aid being allowed in. Tigrayan people were only asking to aid access the Ethiopian government had blocked but this Ukrainian had the audacity to say “help Ukraine first with enough arms and you will get back to them later” as if the United States wasn’t giving Ukraine enough attention. As if the United States doesn’t breathe, eat and drink Ukraine’s issues every day. This person should have been able to speak for the people of Tigrai but instead is speaking about being given priority when people are literally dying out of starvation in Tigrai and nothing being done for Tigrai for the humanitarian issues would affect Ukraine. Tigrayans do campaign for Ukraine, however, out of principle because Ukraine has been invaded by Russia and Tigrai is also under invasion although it’s important not to forget that the Ukrainian government like Russia was one of those that sold arms to the Ethiopian government conducting the genocidal war in Tigrai. This world keeps going away from peace, fairness, and fair competition and this isn’t only because of the unmatched appetites of corporations running our world today but because of people’s selective acceptance of inhumane practices on others of a different race by these corporations. Allowing these organizations that work to weaken societies in certain races to fuel their corporate interests and as a result give them stereotypes as poor and incapable, while people to whom these corporations give much of the services to not being reactive enough to their injustices lets them continue their inhumane actions unchecked. American government and media have been really vocal about what’s happening in Tigrai but the American public not being as vocal about a possible genocide happening in the world is an example of the blunt response of the public to gross human rights violations in the world which is not to be expected from a society thought to enjoy better human rights than most countries of the world.
I don’t see racism as an outcome of a natural interaction of human beings, but that thought and unconsciously learned to be an impediment to people’s interactions and perceptions of each other. The passive racist and victim of racism aren’t benefactors but both victims of those profiting from these differences. The racists are given defined territory to explore by the activators of racism so they don’t make their own interpretations of the world. They are also made to explain their morals on grounds of stereotypes instead of standing up for them unconditionally, which endangers the morals of these people being compromised. The victims end up as angry, unwelcome, undeserving, or hating the perpetrators of racism for the psychological pressure they create on their society from progressing. So many are hurt and confused and not especially benefited but humanity is in the meanwhile torn and lost amongst people. Racism is a tool educated to the masses that have made the few benefits while the masses justify whatever harm the few have done to succeed leaving their actions uncriticized because it isn’t happening to their kind. The knowledge of this lets the perpetrators of human rights violators and opportunity deniers know who is fair game to harm. Unfortunately, this leaves billions of people around the world victim with no one speaking out loudly enough to preserve their rights to protection and safety as there is a huge chance those in the seat to protect are racists themselves and driven by their own interests.
