STATE of RACE articles -Woman Behind “Inclusion Rider” Explains
Fracnes McDormand’s Oscar Speech -Slavery’s Legacies (Brazil) -After Affirmative Action (USA) -Is Australia a Racist Country? -How French Law Makes Minorities Invisible -China’s Mixed Views on Race -Linguistic Prejudice is Real Prejudice (and has Real Consequences) -Roots of Indian Racism
Woman behind 'inclusion rider' explains Frances McDormand's Oscar speech Professor responsible for concept spotlighted in McDormand’s acceptance speech tells the Guardian how it can boost diversity
Many people watching the Oscars were left scratching their heads when Frances McDormand finished her speech with the phrase “I have two words for you: inclusion rider.” An “inclusion rider” is a clause that an actor can insist be inserted in their contract that requires cast and crew on a film to meet a certain level of diversity. The concept was explored in a TED talk in 2016 by Stacy Smith, founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California. Having examined the data on diversity in US-produced films, which showed that casting was not representative of the population, she suggested that an “equity clause” or an “inclusion rider” could be part of the solution. “The typical feature film has about 40 to 45 speaking characters in it” she explained. “I would argue that only 8 to 10 of those characters are actually relevant to the story. The remaining 30 or so roles, there’s no reason why those minor roles can’t match or reflect the demography of where the story is taking place. An equity rider by an A-lister in their contract can stipulate that those roles reflect the world in which we actually live.” Smith has likened the implementation of it to the NFL’s Rooney Rule. McDormand was awarded best actress for her performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. She opened by saying “If I fall over, pick me up because I’ve got some things to say”, and then went on to urge all of the female nominees in the room to stand up. After McDormand’s speech, some actors immediately offered public support to the idea on social media, with Brie Larson committing to it.
Brie Larson I’m committed to the Inclusion Rider. Who’s with me?
In an interview late Sunday night, Smith said she was shocked and grateful to hear that McDormand had given a shout out to her work. “I’m utterly elated,” she told the Guardian by phone. “It’s a complete surprise.” Smith said she had worked with attorneys to create specific contract language and has already been in touch with numerous actors interested in the idea. “The real goal is to counter bias in the auditioning and casting process,” she said, explaining that the contract could also stipulate that if the film ultimately failed to meet the requirements, the distributor would have to pay a “penalty” to a fund that supports female directors and other underrepresented groups. Smith said A-list stars could use inclusion riders to ensure proper representation and inclusion of women, people of color, LGBT people and people with disabilities. “The goal is that talent can take the inclusion rider and adopt it in ways that make sense for their values and their beliefs,” she said. Earlier this year, actor Octavia Spencer revealed that Jessica Chastain had fought for her to make a significantly higher salary by negotiating a joint deal on an upcoming film. Smith said inclusion riders could be used to ensure fair pay on sets: “The goal here is to really put it in the hands of the most powerful people.” The professor added that she hopes McDormand’s speech helps the idea spread throughout the industry: “I hope I get calls from the agencies tomorrow saying they want to adopt this across all talent … I’m hoping to make a lot of attorneys really busy.” Backstage after her win, McDormand said she had recently learned of the concept, adding: “You can ask for or demand at least 50% diversity in not only the casting and the crew. The fact that I just learned that after 35 years in the film business – we aren’t going back.” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/mar/05/what-is-an-inclusionrider-frances-mcdormand-oscars-2018
Slavery’s Legacies American thinking about race is starting to influence Brazil, the country whose population was shaped more than any other’s by the Atlantic slave trade
Sep 8th 2016| SÃO PAULO ALEXANDRA LORAS has lived in eight countries and visited 50-odd more. In most, any racism she might have experienced because of her black skin was deflected by her status as a diplomat’s wife. Not in Brazil, where her white husband acted as French consul in São Paulo for four years. At consular events, Ms Loras would be handed coats by guests who mistook her for a maid. She was often taken for a nanny to her fair-haired son. “Brazil is the most racist country I know,” she says. Many Brazilians would bristle at this characterisation—and not just whites. Plenty of preto (black) and pardo (mixed-race) Brazilians, who together make up just over half of the country’s 208m people, proudly contrast its cordial race relations with America’s interracial strife. They see Brazil as a “racial democracy”, following the ideas of Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian sociologist who argued in the 1930s that race did not divide Brazil as it did other postslavery societies. Yet the gulf between white Brazilians and their black and mixed-race compatriots is huge.
Brazil took more African slaves than any other country, and now has nearly three times as many people whose ancestors left Africa in the past few centuries as America does. Yet black faces seldom appear in Brazilian newspapers outside the sports section. Few firms have black bosses. The government has not a single black cabinet member; its predecessor, which called itself progressive, had one—for equality and rights. On average black and mixed-race Brazilians earn 58% as much as whites—a much bigger gap than in America (see chart). The gap in Brazil, as in America, used to be even wider. Much progress has come from antipoverty schemes, which, though colour-blind in design, benefit darker-skinned Brazilians more, since they are poorer. More recently, Brazil has started to try explicit racial preferences (known in America as “affirmative action”). But American ideas cannot simply be transplanted to Brazil. Differences in how the two countries were colonised, and how the slave economy operated, led
to distinct ideas of what it means to be “black”—and different attitudes to compensatory policies and whom they should target. Of the 12.5m Africans trafficked across the Atlantic between 1501 and 1866, only 300,000400,000 disembarked in what is now the United States. They were quickly outnumbered by European settlers. Most whites arrived in families, so interracial relationships were rare. Though white masters fathered many slave children, miscegenation was frowned upon, and later criminalised in most American states. As black Americans entered the labour market after emancipation, they threatened white incomes, says Avidit Acharya of Stanford University. “One drop” of black blood came to be seen as polluting; laws were passed defining mixed-race children as black and cutting them out of inheritance (though the palest sometimes “passed” as white). Racial resentment, as measured by negative feelings towards blacks, is still greater in areas where slavery was more common. After abolition, violence and racist legislation, such as segregation laws and literacy tests for voters, kept black Americans down. But these also fostered solidarity among blacks, and mobilisation during the civil-rights era. The black middle class is now quite large. Ms Loras would not seem anomalous in any American city, as she did in São Paulo.
Colour card In Brazil, unlike America, race has never been black and white. The Portuguese population— 700,000 settlers had arrived at the start of the 19th century—was dwarfed by the number of slaves: a total of 4.9m arrived. Portuguese men were encouraged to consort with African women. Since most came without wives, such unions gained some legitimacy. Their offspring, referred to as mulatto, enjoyed a social status above that of pretos. They worked as overseers or artisans, but
also doctors, accountants and lawyers. A mulatto, Machado de Assis, was regarded as Brazil’s greatest writer even during his lifetime in the 19th century. Mixing led to a hotch-potch of racial categories. In 1976 the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) recorded 134 terms used by Brazilians to describe themselves, mostly by skin colour. Some were extremely specific, such as branca suja (literally “dirty white”) or morena castanha (nut-brown). The national census offers just a few broad categories—as in America, which offers five, though these days America’s also allows you to tick as many as you like and add a self-description. Tiger Woods, a golfer, calls himself “cablinasian” (a portmanteau of caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian). Both black and white Brazilians have long considered “whiteness” something that can be striven towards. In 1912 João Baptista de Lacerda, a medic and advocate of “whitening” Brazil by encouraging European immigration, predicted that by 2012 the country would be 80% white, 3% mixed and 17% Amerindian; there would be no blacks. As Luciana Alves, who has researched race at the University of São Paulo, explains, an individual could “whiten his soul” by working hard or getting rich. Tomás Santa Rosa, a successful mid-20th-century painter, consoled a darkskinned peer griping about discrimination, saying that he too “used to be black”. Though only a few black and mixed-race Brazilians ever succeeded in “becoming white”, their existence, and the non-binary conception of race, allowed politicians to hold up Brazil as an exemplar of post-colonial harmony. It also made it harder to rally black Brazilians round a hyphenated identity of the sort that unites African-Americans. Brazil’s Unified Black Movement, founded in 1978 and inspired by militant American outfits such as the Black Panthers, failed to gain traction. Racism was left not only unchallenged but largely unarticulated. Now Brazil’s racial boundaries are shifting—and in the opposite direction to that predicted by Baptista de Lacerda. After falling from 20% to 5% between 1872 and 1990, the share of selfdescribed pretos edged up in the past quarter-century, to 8%. The share of pardos jumped from 39% in 2000 to 43% in 2010. These increases are bigger than can be explained by births, deaths and immigration, suggesting that some Brazilians who used to see themselves as white or pardo are shifting to pardo or preto. This “chromatographic convergence”, as Marcelo Paixão of the University of Texas, in Austin, dubs it, owes a lot to policy choices. The first law signed by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a white former metalworker who was Brazil’s president in 2003-10, required schools to teach about Brazil’s African slaves. He introduced a “Black Consciousness Day” on November 20th, on which day in 1695 the leader of a slave rebellion died. In 2004 an Afro-Brazil Museum opened in São Paulo. A few states and cities now have racial quotas when hiring, as do the diplomatic service and federal police. Brazil’s public universities—which are more prestigious than private ones—have also introduced admissions preferences based on race and class. In 1997 barely one in 50 young pretos or pardos were studying at university or had graduated. That share rose rapidly as the economy improved and incomes rose, and from the early 2000s a handful of public institutions began to reserve some places for non-white students. In 2012 the supreme court ruled the practice constitutional. Shortly afterwards Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, brought in
racial quotas at all 59 federal universities and 38 technical schools. The effects are already visible on campuses. A study published in August found that between 2010 and 2014 the share of students at federal universities who described themselves as pretos or pardos jumped from 41% to 48%. There were fears that those admitted under quotas would struggle, as some think they have in America. The test that American students take to enter university is a good predictor of academic success, and American colleges typically admit black and Hispanic students with much lower scores than whites or Asians. This sets them up to fail, argue Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor in their book, “Mismatch”. They think that under race-neutral policies more would graduate. Though narrowly approved by the Supreme Court, affirmative-action policies are unpopular in America. Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the use of race as a factor in college admissions, according to Gallup. In Brazil, the picture is different. For the few able to afford private schools and intensive coaching, getting into public universities used to be relatively easy. Entrance exams were poorly designed and old-fashioned; though they have been updated, they are still a crude measure of ability. This is perhaps why hard-working, ambitious cotistas, as students admitted under quotas are known, are able to hold their own. The first universities to adopt quotas have found that cotistas had lower grades on entry but graduated with degrees similar to those of their classmates. From this year half the places in all Brazil’s public universities will be reserved for students who have attended state schools, which prosperous ones seldom do. Half these quota places are reserved for applicants whose family income per person is no more than 1.5 times the minimum wage; and black, mixed-race and indigenous Brazilians are granted quota places in proportion to their share of the local population. The policy has wide support: a poll in 2013, soon after the law was passed, found that two-thirds of Brazilians approved. Naturally, some people game the system. A study in 2012 by Andrew Francis of Emory University and Maria Tannuri-Pinto of the University of Brasília (UnB) found that some mixedrace but light-skinned applicants to UnB, which introduced quotas in 2004, thought of themselves as white but said they had black heritage to improve their chances of getting in. Once admitted, some reverted to white identity. But not all, as “curly clubs” springing up on previously straight-hair-obsessed campuses attest. Brazil has a long way to go before it has a black middle class to rival America’s. A study in 2009 by Sergei Soares found that if the incomes of black and white Brazilians continued to evolve at 2001-07 rates, they would converge by 2029. But a subsequent severe recession has almost certainly pushed this further into the future. Employers continue to favour lighter-skinned job applicants. Less than a quarter of the officials elected in the federal and state races in 2014 were preto or pardo. “Decolonising your mind is tough,” sighs Ms Loras, whose experiences in Brazil have turned her into a black activist. But there are hints that an American-style black consciousness is emerging in Brazil—and not only on campuses. In February Ms Loras counted 17 black models on the covers of glossy
magazines. Two years earlier, she says, there were hardly any. She is publishing a children’s book about famous black inventors. In America such titles are common; in Brazil hers will be the first. According to Renato Araújo da Silva of the Afro-Brazil Museum: “We Brazilian blacks are finally learning to be black.” https://www.economist.com/news/international/21706510-american-thinking-about-racestarting-influence-brazil-country-whose-population
After Affirmative Action What happened when eight states outlawed race-conscious admissions at colleges
Aug 10th 2017| WASHINGTON, DC
IT IS no mystery why university entrance policies generate so much angst in America. Space at elite colleges is limited, and the degrees they confer can transform lives. Well-meaning people are divided on whether universities should simply teach the best-performing students, or try to craft a more diverse ruling class. It is also no secret that Jeff Sessions, the attorneygeneral, is more sceptical of race-based affirmative-action policies than some predecessors. A fuss was thus inevitable when news broke of an internal memo at the Department of Justice (DoJ) seeking staff lawyers to examine a lawsuit filed by Asian-American groups for racial discrimination against Harvard University. To date, the DoJ probe seems modest in scope. But the scare has led defenders of affirmative action to wonder what would happen if the current order fell. Affirmative action has already been banned in eight states, representing more than a quarter of America’s high-school students. Their example shows that the end of formal race-based affirmative action might not be as apocalyptic as its defenders fear. Little changed for the typical student. Research conducted by Peter Hinrichs, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, shows that overall enrolment of black and Hispanic students appeared to hold steady, despite the affirmative-action bans. But those bans did make a striking difference for highly selective universities. The average effect on such institutions was to decrease black enrolment by 1.7 percentage points and Hispanic enrolment by 2 points. One of the most extreme examples came after a ban on affirmative action approved by California’s voters came into effect in 1998. Black and Hispanic enrolment at the University of California, Berkeley—one of the nation’s best schools—plunged from 22% to 13%. That should be not surprising, given the vast gulf in measurable academic achievement along racial lines for students admitted to America’s most selective colleges. To have an equal chance of admission as a black applicant, an Asian applicant to a top college needs as much as 450 additional points out of 1600 on the SAT (a whopping amount to those unaccustomed to American psychometrics). Encouragingly, research by David Card and Alan Krueger, two economists, shows that talented minority students apply at the same rate to leading universities with or without affirmative action.
Admissions offices determined to craft diverse campuses would still have recourse to artifice. After California’s ban went into effect, one study found that 20% of the losses to minority enrolment at the University of California, Berkeley were counteracted by such admissions tweaks. Three of the states with affirmative-action bans—Texas, California and Florida—try to mitigate their effects by using top-percent programmes. These award places at leading public colleges to the best-performing students in every high school (in Texas, to the top 10%, and in Florida, to the top 20%), in effect using existing racial segregation by geography to produce more racial diversity once students graduate. Perhaps most promising is the idea—most forcefully advanced by Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation—that colleges should move towards considering socioeconomic diversity, which would sweep in large numbers of black and Hispanic students while also avoiding the fraught and possibly unsustainable politics of overt racial preferences. Compared with class, affirmative action based solely on race seems awfully blunt in today’s America: it would be hard to claim that the son of black millionaires was more deserving of special consideration than the daughter of hard-up white coalminers.
Is Australia a Racist Country? On the State of our Race Relations Tim SoutphommasaneABC Religion and Ethics8 Apr 2016
In Australia, racism exists in structural forms. It resides not only in social interactions, but also in the systems and rules that govern what is normal and what is deviant.CREDIT: QUINN ROONEY / GETTY IMAGES
Dr Tim Soutphommasane is Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner. He delivered the following address to the Crescent Institute, Brisbane, on 7 April 2016 Many of us have good reason for thinking that the state of our race relations and community harmony is under some challenge. With frequent regularly, we see stories about people being racially vilified or threatened with racist violence on public transport. Far-right wing extremist groups have been vocal in protesting against Islam, including the building of mosques. It is also no exaggeration to say our recent public debates are punctuated by controversies about race and so-called political correctness. During the past week or so, we have seen media outlets outraged by terminological guides used in universities, which suggest that it is inappropriate to refer to Australia being "discovered" by Captain James Cook. The managers of one of our most celebrated musicians, the Aboriginal singer Gurrumul Yunupingu, have alleged he was subjected to racial profiling in a Darwin hospital. The Australian television industry seems divided by the nomination of The Project host Waleed Aly for a Gold Logie. How are we to make sense of all this? And what does it say about the state of racism in Australian society? What does it say about the way we talk about racism as a social issue?
Race and multiculturalism We should resist one frequent diagnosis: the idea that all this confirms that Australia is a racist country. Too often, discussions about racism are reduced to this point. People can be quick to find in any episode or incident confirmation of some moral flaw in the national character. Others, meanwhile, are all too eager to deny that racism exists in Australian society, or assert that any racism that does exist here pales in comparison to what exists overseas.
Either way, there is something wholly unsatisfactory in thinking in these terms. To declare a country racist implies either that each and every member of that country is racist, or that a country's institutions embody racist principles in some fundamental way. To say that a country is not racist, on the other hand, ignores the fact that no country is free of racial prejudice - the fact that every country will have racism in some form and to some degree. If we are to judge the Australian record and take a long view, there is of course racism in much of Australian history. The arrival of British colonists was based on a certain understanding of the world that had a racial character. The idea of terra nullius presumed that civilised humanity was achievable only by Europeans. What the British believed was settlement, was for Indigenous peoples invasion and dispossession. When the colonies federated as a Commonwealth in 1901, the organising principle was that of racial unity in the form of a White Australia. The first legislation passed by the Commonwealth Parliament was the Pacific Island Labourers Act (1901), which expelled all Pacific Islanders working in Australia. The deportation of the approximately 10,000 Pacific Islanders working in Australia - mostly in sugar plantations in Queensland - was aimed to ensure the living standards of white Australian workers wouldn't be undermined by cheap coloured labour. This was soon followed by the enactment of the Immigration Restriction Act (1901), perhaps the best known legislative instrument of the White Australia Policy. The Act would introduce the infamous dictation test used to exclude non-European arrivals. There would be other notable public expressions about race in the early life of the Federation. The first Commonwealth Parliament also passed the Post and Telegraph Act (1901), which stipulated that the Commonwealth government could issue mail contracts only to ships that employed white labour exclusively. The Australian Labor Party enshrined in its early policy platform an overarching principle: "The cultivation of an Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity." Racism in contemporary Australian society is not embodied in the same way. From a country defined by the ideal of a White Australia, ours is now defined as a multicultural one. Since the 1970s, multiculturalism has become part of our official expression of nationhood. Our immigration program is now one that makes no discrimination on racial grounds. The status of citizenship is open to all members of Australian society, regardless of their ethnic background or national origin. This does make it hard to sustain the view that Australian society is irredeemably racist. It is hard to square that assessment with our reality and celebration of cultural diversity. About 28% of our population was born overseas; another 20% are the children of migrants. Public acceptance of diversity and multiculturalism is also strong and robust. The Scanlon Foundation's social cohesion survey in 2015 found that 86% of Australians believe that multiculturalism is good for the country - a level that has been consistent the past three years. None of this should be taken to mean that racism is not a problem. Unfortunately, it still is. I've already noted some of the forms in which this takes. It is concerning that a good deal of racism today is expressed so overtly in public - in places such as our trains and buses. Of course, abuse and harassment on public transport aren't the only forms that racism takes. Racism can be covert as well as overt, and can be subtle as well as crude. Much of racism reveals itself not in dramatic tirades or threatening violence, but in rather more banal forms. Indeed, the research on racism suggests that it occurs most commonly in neighbourhoods, shopping centres and in workplaces. Public transport only features after such locations.
Racism may be more prevalent than we may like to admit. About 20% of Australians say they have experienced racial or religious discrimination of some kind. About 11% say they have been excluded from social activities or the workplace because of their race. About 5% say they've been physically assaulted because of their racial background. There are some groups that are more susceptible to experiencing discrimination: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, those born overseas, and Muslim Australians. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experience racial discrimination in a way distinctive from other groups. If Australian multiculturalism is such a success, what explains the persistence of racism? Perhaps the easiest explanation is that any multicultural success remains incomplete. Our sensibilities are still catching up with the changes that have occurred within the composition of our population. And it's more than just social sensibilities that have lagged behind. Our institutions and organisations have failed to change to reflect our multicultural realities. Another way of saying this is to say that racism exists in structural forms. It resides not only in social interactions, but also in the systems and rules that govern what is normal and what is deviant. Let me focus on two respects in which we see this.
Diversity in media First, the media. It is important to focus on media, because the media occupies a special position in filtering our civic sentiments. It is through media, to a large extent, that a society projects its identity. It provides a society with the scripts for dealing with the world. Yet when it comes to our media, especially our television screens, our multicultural reality comes across as a distant fantasy. Our cultural diversity is not reflected on screen. On this count, Australia fares somewhat poorly when compared to similar English-speaking societies. In Britain, for example, journalists from ethnic minority backgrounds have fronted the major news bulletins for decades: figures such as Trevor McDonald, George Alagiah and Krishna Gurumuthy have been senior newsreaders on ITV, BBC and Channel Four. Here, such equivalent prominence or seniority for journalists of non-Anglo background has arguably been rare. In one interview in 2013, Stan Grant, one of the few Indigenous journalists on commercial television, lamented how during the past 20 years the ABC has not succeeded in sending one Indigenous journalist overseas as a foreign correspondent. The same criticism could be levelled with respect to non-Anglo journalists more generally. We see few Australians of nonEuropean background reading the news, particularly on commercial channels. This has been the case in other forms of programming, too. The non-European faces we see on television seem largely to be confined to being exotic adornments - whether as presenters of programs about the delightful sophistication of modern Australian fusion cuisine, or as plucky contestants in cooking shows. Few non-Anglo faces intrude upon spheres such as sport, that definitive domain of mainstream Australia: think of those commentators of the cricket, AFL, rugby league, rugby union, tennis, or swimming. The realm of dramatic entertainment is especially egregious. Actors from minority backgrounds periodically emerge with scathing criticisms about a 'White Australia' policy in Australian
television. Where minority actors are cast to play roles on television dramas they are often consigned to play stereotypical roles as drug dealers, criminals or otherwise shady characters. There have been some recent exceptions. The success this year of The Family Law on SBS represented the first time that an Asian family had been depicted on Australian TV in serial form. Prior to that, it had been the Lim family in Neighbours, who lasted only a number of weeks before being written out of the script. The Family Lawhas been renewed for a second season, as has Here Come the Habibs, Channel Nine's comedy featuring a Lebanese rags-to-riches family. But when inroads have been made in cultural diversity on TV, it doesn't take much to reveal how threatened or uncomfortable it can make some people feel. This is the only way we can meaningfully interpret the current controversy concerning Waleed Aly, the co-host of Channel Ten's The Project. Aly has been nominated for the Gold Logie, Australian TV's most prestigious award for the most popular TV personality. Yet he has been subject to some sniping from anonymous members of the TV industry decrying that he is unworthy of the nomination. One journalist in Sydney's Daily Telegraph even wrote a much-cited article outlining six reasons why Aly shouldn't win. Some of the reasons include "there's more worthy talent in his field," "diversity needs to be the norm," "he needs to be truly popular" and "he's not on social media." As others have already noted, it is odd that very few nominees for the Gold Logie in the past have been subjected to such personal criticism. This is to say nothing of the nonsensical nature of some of the criticisms directed at Aly. Some of the responses from media personalities have prompted questions about whether race may have something to do with the industry's apparent lack of support for Aly. For example, the presenters of Channel Nine's Today show earlier this week joked about being "too white" for a Gold Logie nomination. While those from Channel Nine deny that anything racial was involved, it is understandable that people would draw such conclusions. It is all of a pattern with the casual racism that can pass for banter on Australian commercial TV.
Diversity in leadership A second area where we fall short on cultural diversity is in leadership. We celebrate the idea of being a mobile, egalitarian and meritocratic society. But there are some signs that a cultural ceiling may exist. Our cultural diversity is not yet remotely close to being represented in the leadership of Australian society. Whether it is the chief executives of the ASX 200, our Federal Parliament, or our public service, we do not see leadership that reflects our multicultural character. Leadership remains a domain of privilege, one where the boundaries appear to exclude certain others - in particular, those of non-European backgrounds. This is one issue I will be investigating in some more detail later this year. In July, a blueprint will be released to help Australian organisations do better on cultural diversity and inclusive leadership. This reflects the work of a taskforce that I convened last year. The group comprises University of Sydney Business School, Westpac, PwC and Telstra. Bringing together the experience of these taskforce members, the blueprint will outline why organisations must embrace diversity - and how they can do so.
The case for cultural diversity is a strong one. We know from a large body of research that diversity is an advantage for business. For example, McKinsey found that companies with higher levels of racial diversity in their workforce outperform others in financial terms. This is because diversity contributes to better thinking - it helps us to make better decisions. In the business setting, diversity can mean creativity, innovation, productivity. One reason we don't do as well as we should is that bias and discrimination still persist in the workplace. Consider some of the evidence. In 2010, economists at the Australian National University found substantial racial discrimination in hiring by Australian employers. The researchers sent more than 4000 fake job applications for entry-level jobs. The applications contained the same qualifications but with different names, distinguished by their ethnic origin. The researchers found that in order to get as many interviews as an applicant with an AngloSaxon name, someone with a Chinese name needed to submit 68% more applications. Those with a Middle Eastern name would need 64% more. By comparison, those with an Italian name needed to put in 12% more applications. Could it be that bias may contribute in some way to the pattern of representation for Australians of non-European backgrounds in the ranks of leadership? It may be that unconscious - and conscious - bias shapes perceptions of Australians of certain cultural backgrounds, in particular their suitability for positions of leadership. To draw upon one encounter I had, someone newly introduced to me asked what I did for work. When I responded that I worked at the Australian Human Rights Commission, my new friend then asked: "So, do you work in the Finance section or IT section at the Commission?" It was an innocent question, to which I responded by explaining my responsibility for matters concerning racial discrimination. But the question, asked with every good intention, was one that revealed some of the assumptions my new acquaintance had about what someone who looked like me was likely to have as an occupation. Unfortunately, there can remain a cultural image that people associate with leadership. Based on their recent research study on "Asian talent" in the corporate world, Diversity Council Australia found that only 18% of Asian background workers surveyed felt their workplaces were free of biases and stereotypes about culture. About 61% reported feeling pressure to conform to "Anglo" styles of leadership, emphasising self-promotion. Clearly, bias can undermine an ideal of merit. But we must be clear about the meaning of merit, and how it in fact operates. The conditions of a truly level playing field are rarely ever met. Judgments about potential and performance, and decisions about hiring and promotion, are invariably coloured by cultural perceptions of merit. We must be vigilant of a situation where we create and maintain certain cultural ceilings in Australian organisations. It would be an indictment of our society if people were to continue presuming that a class of well-educated Australians of non-European background should accept that they remain locked out from the ranks of their society's leadership.
Community harmony I would like to conclude by reflecting on one more challenge. I'm talking about the hostility being directed at Muslim Australians. Ostensibly fuelled by anxieties about terrorism, we have seen some concerning signs of community disharmony. Last year, I conducted around the country consultations with communities about their experience of racism. Representatives of Muslim and Arab communities reported that they were experiencing increased animosity. This is corroborated by research from Western Sydney University, which found that Muslims experience a level of discrimination three times higher than the national average. We have seen some of this in some graphic form just during the past week. Members of a farright extremist organisation unfurled an anti-Muslim banner at the Melbourne Cricket Ground last Friday night at an AFL match. On Sunday, there was a violent clash between anti-Muslim protestors outside a Halal festival in Melbourne. Not to mention the numerous incidents of antiMuslim attacks in public places - including one on a group of girls wearing hijabs in Geelong, and one on a group of students on a Melbourne train. Where there is any criminal conduct involved in attacks on Muslim Australians, it is important that it is held to account by police and the courts. People should report any incident involving violence or threats of violence. Where any incidents involve race or ethnicity or national origin, and fall short of criminal conduct, people may also hold others to account by making a complaint under the Racial Discrimination Act. As for those who choose to confront anti-Muslim elements physically, this is not the answer to racism and bigotry. Such confrontation may only serve to win these elements more public attention than they deserve. People must not respond to any ugliness with ugliness of their own. The best response is one that ensures hatred is brought to account within the law. More generally, our society must take care not to indulge in stereotypes or give any licence to those who spread messages of division. Extremism is a problem. We must repudiate anything that seeks to justify extremism. However, we must take care not to judge entire communities by the actions of an unrepresentative few. At the same time, we must be forthright as a society in confronting prejudice and discrimination. From time to time, some commentators suggest that talking about experiences of racial or religious vilification can encourage communities to adopt a victim mentality. It is also periodically suggested that conversations about racism or religious bigotry can involve excessive political correctness. It is a strange logic, though, to suggest that we must censor ourselves when dealing with prejudice. With respect to anti-Muslim bigotry, the danger in not speaking out is that it can, among other things, make it easier for extremists to seduce alienated youths with their messages of violence. If we are to expect Muslim communities to repudiate extremism perpetrated in the name of Islam - as they have - Australian society must be prepared to repudiate extremism that targets Muslim communities.
More generally, the idea that there's too much political correctness in our society has some perverse implications. Often said in the name of free speech, those who decry political correctness may ironically chill our debates the most. Because those who would otherwise speak about against racism or bigotry think twice lest they be called politically correct. All of which is to say that it is a challenging time for our race relations and community harmony. It is challenging not only because the ugly faces of racism and bigotry are increasingly on display in public, but also because public discussions about race remain fraught with sensitivities. Sometimes you get the impression that calling out racism can be regarded as a worse moral offence than the perpetration of racism itself. It has perhaps always been this way but in fighting racism we must be guided by hope. Hope, as the Czech writer Vaclav Havel said, is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that things will turn out for the end, but rather the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It's the idea that we should do things not because we are guaranteed success, but because they are the right things to do. Dr Tim Soutphommasane is Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner. Actions
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/04/08/4439686.htm
How French Law Makes Minorities Invisible November 13, 2016 4.08am EST Fraternity is often forgotten. Didier Jansen/flickr, CC BY-NC
A year after the deadly 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, and France is still grappling with its relationship with its minorities. After it emerged that some of those who carried out the attacks were French nationals, many renewed longstanding criticisms that the outdated French “republican model” of integration and citizenship might be broken. The model’s objective was to achieve the integration of “nationals” – Bretons, Corsicans and others – and viewed from this historical perspective, it has proven to be somewhat successful. Most of these groups now feel “French”, and their cultural heritage and languages are recognised as part of French identity. But the model was not designed to integrate the diverse range of groups in contemporary France. Instead, it serves to make minorities, and the difficulties they face in French society, almost invisible.
An outdated legal system The French state’s policy rejects any references to national, racial, ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities. This model is based on the idea that the state should interact with the individual only, not communities or groups, in order to give equal treatment to everyone. “Absolute equality” is seen as the best way to ensure the integration of all citizens, to the benefit of both the state and the citizens themselves. As a result, French authorities have rejected any form of targeted measures for ethnic, religious or linguistic groups. In practice this has rendered minorities invisible and brought systemic forms of discrimination. Legally, the constitutional principle of equality has been interpreted as prohibiting the government from collecting data or statistics on the racial, ethnic or religious backgrounds of its citizens, in any context. This means for example that the socioeconomic status of groups across any indicators based on racial, ethnic, religious or other grounds is unknown, and that the national census does not include any questions about race or ethnicity. A 1978 law regarding “data files, processing and individual liberties” explicitly prohibits the collection and processing of personal data that reveals, directly or indirectly, the racial and ethnic origins, or religion, of any persons. In practice, there is a dual impact of this prohibition. First, it means that no statistics exist regarding ethnic or religious discrimination, or discrimination on related grounds.
Second, it has also been translated by courts and other institutions into rules which prohibit any forms of religious affiliation in the public sphere. It is under this “absolute” approach to equality and neutrality that the wearing of religious symbols has been prohibited. Despite the lack of data, some groups feel they are being discriminated against, notably Muslims, “black” French and Roma populations.
Relatives of Bouna Traore who died in an incident which sparked the 2005 Paris riots, inaugurate a street sign ten years later. Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA
The level of discrimination against Muslims or other groups is hard to judge in reality, since, these are invisible in the statistics and official rhetoric of the country. While criminal law prohibits public incitement to hatred, there is a lack of a proper legal system to report and punish hate speech which largely remains unreported. Following the terrorist attacks of 2015, this lack of hate speech monitoring was addressed by the government which launched a large programme to monitor hate speech.. But in general, there is a lack of data regarding ethnic and religious markers. As a result, anti-discrimination policies refer instead to the “banlieues” (suburbs) or “immigrants”, even when the concerned populations might be third or fourth generation French citizens. The lack of proper demographic statistics has often led to unofficial numbers filling the gap, such as the claim that there are 5m Muslims in France. In reality, these figures are often based on the notion that descendants of people who have migrated from the Maghreb and North Africa are Muslims, creating an amalgamation between individual “descendants from immigration” and Muslims. Not only does the rejection of racial, ethnic, religious or linguistic data in the name of equality make minorities invisible, it also entraps them into other categorisations that paradoxically render them outsiders to the French process of equal citizenship.
France needs more ‘fraternity’ The historical weight of the 1789 French revolution and its approach to citizenship cannot be underestimated in today’s political and legal landscape. The “absolute” nature of equality is part of this legacy, with equality seen as the overarching principle in the constitutional edifice. This has been protected and enforced by the Constitutional Court
on many occasions. For example, in 1999 the court decided that ratifying the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages would be unconstitutional on grounds of “absolute equality”, effectively barring the introduction of any form of minority rights into the French legal system. But we argue that another founding principle, that of fraternity, could be used to counterbalance the negative effects of this strict interpretation of the law regarding equality. Of the three terms in France’s famous constitutional maxim, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, the legal significance of fraternity is the least understood. From a legal perspective, its definition has always been problematic, and as our new research has highlighted, it is unquestionably the “weak link” in the trilogy. But a more flexible interpretation of the term fraternity may make it possible to recognise minority rights within the French Republican model – without going against the existing bloc de constitutionnalité, which comprises all the fundamental constitutional values of the country. So far, the dominant focus on equality has meant a rejection of data collected on origin, race or religion. Arguably, a focus on fraternity, which is also one of the fundamental constitutional values, could allow a much more flexible and encompassing approach to diversity within the country, and play an important role in diffusing the tensions that have been developing over the last few years. France is a long way off making this legal connection between fraternity and minority rights. But in India, the supreme court has interpreted fraternity, a term introduced into the preamble of its 1950 Constitution by B R Ambedkar, as engaging minority rights to counteract caste-based discrimination and inequalities. Ambedkar believed that “without fraternity, equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint”. France needs a new legal approach to its model of republican citizenship that would allow its minorities to feel much more integrated, respected, and protected by the legal system. This has to begin with identifying who those minorities are, on the basis of race, religion, language or related grounds – a message increasingly being relayed by French minority advocacy groups. The dormant constitutional principle of fraternity might hold the legal key to realising such a new departure. http://theconversation.com/how-french-law-makes-minorities-invisible-66723
China’s Mixed Views on Race Charlottesville triggered a wave of anti-U.S. press, but the media in the Celestial Empire also dabble in derogatory views of ‘others.’ By Michael Schuman, Contributor | Sept. 12, 2017, at 12:46 p.m. BEIJING — Chinese state media squeezed as much propaganda value as it could out of the chaotic events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where on Aug. 11 a group of white nationalists marched in support of a "Unite the Right" rally, triggering violent clashes between the white nationalists and counter-protesters. One person was killed when a pro-right activist smashed his car into a crowd of protesters. Government-run television in China was sure to broadcast video of the violence, though it almost never shows its viewers any such domestic turmoil. In a commentary defending China's own record on civil liberties, the People's Daily, a Communist Party newspaper, said the events in Charlottesville exposed that "hate and terror are on the rise in America, and such problems are expected to increase," and therefore "America is not a human rights paradise, nor the world's moral leader." This is standard fare in the Chinese press, which tries to highlight such tumult in other countries to paint the Celestial Empire as tranquil and orderly by comparison. But the Chinese are not immune to derogatory views of other peoples, both at home and abroad. The consequence is damaged relations with both its neighbors and domestic ethnic minorities.
The Daily Lives of China's Uighurs Almost simultaneous with Charlottesville, for instance, China managed to offend many Indians with an inappropriate video – from Xinhua, the country's official news agency. The two Asian giants were at the time embroiled in a dispute over a contested border area in the Himalayas, where troops from both sides glared at each other in a tense standoff. Xinhua released a videopurporting to outline India's "sins" in the conflict that featured a Chinese man dressed in a turban and fake beard and speaking in a silly Indian accent. The apparent attempt at humorous propaganda did not go down well in India. The Hindustan Times, a popular daily in
India, complainedit had "racist overtones that mocked and parodied Indians," while one commentator with the Indian Express, another major Indian newspaper, said the video "crossed every line of decency" and lamented that Indians had to endure "blatant racial profiling from its noisy and nosy neighbor." The Chinese media has employed such demeaning characterizations in other foreign policy conflicts. Last year, when the Philippines challenged China's expansive claims in the South China Sea at The Hague, Xinhua published a cartoon that depicted the Filipino leader as a barefoot primitive and the U.S. as an especially big-nosed Uncle Sam. Another cartoonpassed around on social media showed China slapping the Philippines and deriding it as a "banana seller." Domestically, too, the Chinese have severely strained relations with their major minority groups, especially Tibetans and Uighurs, a Muslim Central Asian people who live mainly in the country's far West. Discriminatory policies have suppressed these groups' religion and culture. According to an August report in the Chinese press, a county government in the province of Qinghai removed loudspeakers from hundreds of mosques to prevent the "noise pollution" of the regular calls to prayer. Economically, members of these minority communities often feel they don't have equal access to jobs, education and other opportunities. The subsequent fomenting resentment has occasionally boiled over into protests and violence, such as in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, in 2008 and Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, in 2009. Uighur groups have even been blamed for acts of terror. In 2013, three Uighurs plowed an SUV through a crowd in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, killing themselves and two pedestrians. [READ: China Second Most Popular Country for African Students] Gray Tuttle, a professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia University, sees these policies on minorities as "an expression of deep-seated ethnic prejudices and racism at the core of contemporary Chinese society." These sentiments, Tuttle explains, are rooted in late-19thcentury ideas of Chinese nationalism, and were reinforced by the new Communist government in the 1950s, which began categorizing minority groups and propagating negative views of them. If the discrimination continues, Tuttle adds, it "will undermine Beijing's efforts to foster a 'harmonious society' and present China as a model to the rest of the world." Chinese don't hold positive views of other Asian countries, either. A 2016 Pew Research Center survey discovered that only 14 percent and 26 percent of respondents in China held favorable opinions of Japan and India, respectively. (In the case of Japan, many Chinese still resent the Japanese invasion of the country before and during World War II and the atrocities they committed, most notoriously the Nanjing Massacre. Hostility is further fueled by persistent antiJapanese propaganda in the Chinese press.) A controversial detergent ad aired in China last year, which showed a black man being "washed" into a light-skinned Chinese man, only reinforced the perception abroad that Chinese are prone to racism.
China’s Strong Arm Falls Flat
However, Barry Sautman, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, warns against jumping to simplistic conclusions about Chinese attitudes toward race. He proffers that their negativity toward other peoples may be based more in their perceptions that they are poorer or, as in the case of Uighurs, potentially threatening, than in overt racism. Prejudices toward certain foreigners as shown in the Xinhua India video, he argues, are an import from the West. "It is a big leap to say that people in China in general have a discriminatory attitude," Sautman says. Modern Chinese "have been exposed to various stereotypes that are expressed in the Western world and have absorbed them." Some statistics back him up. A 2008 survey conducted by the University of Maryland showed that Chinese are among the most supportive of equal treatment of all races and ethnicities. Whatever the source, the prejudicial views expressed by Chinese are not helping them win friends and expand the country's influence abroad. Indian media was quick to respond to the mocking Xinhua clip. One animated video features a maniacal, animated Xi Jinping, the president of China, reaching fits of frustration over his failure to stir a laughing Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister. "It is possible that there could be a long-term effect," on China's foreign relations, says Sautman. "A lot of it depends on what the leadership in China does about such stereotypes."
Michael Schuman is a Beijing-based journalist who has been covering Asia for 20 years. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2017-09-12/chinas-complex-relations-with-race
Linguistic prejudice is a real prejudice (and has real consequences) OCTOBER 30, 2013
by Cara Shousterman
There’s been a lot of talk in the media and public discourse about racial discrimination and justice lately. Despite killing Trayvon Martin—an unarmed black teenager—George Zimmerman (who is white and hispanic) walked away a free man due to Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law. But what flew under the radar for most was the treatment of Rachel Jeantel, the prosecution’s star witness. We’ve written a bit about Jeantel before, but we’d like it further discuss some of the issues raised by the reactions to her testimony. As soon as Jeantel’s testimony began, so did the criticism, and much of it was because of her language. She was called uneducated, unsophisticated, and difficult to understand. Defense lawyers even asked her if she was indeed a native speaker of English. But what linguists knew and tried to argue was that Jeantel was a native English speaker—it just wasn’t the variety of English that is seen as mainstream or standard, and Jeantel was being subjected to an intense form of linguistic discrimination which may have affected the degree to which she was seen as a credible witness.
The language varietiy Rachel spoke on the stand is called African American English. African American English is a dialect of English that is spoken primarily by African Americans in the U.S. It goes by many names really—some of them neutral (Black English, Ebonics, African American Vernacular) and some of them derogatory (ghetto talk, bad English,
slang). The name African American English can be misleading, since not all African Americans speak it, and not all people who speak it are African American. With accents and dialects there’s no biological connection between the way someone speaks and the color of their skin. What matters more is who someone grew up with, their peers, and what groups they want to be identified with. Many people believe that there is a correct way to speak English, and anything that deviates from this way of speaking is incorrect, lazy or unintelligent, and has no rules or structure. This belief is called Standard Language Ideology, and it has far-reaching consequences. Because of this widespread ideology, dialects like African American English become marginalized for reasons that have little to do with the structure or complexity of the dialect itself. In fact, African American English has its own grammar and usage rules, many of which are not transparent to those unfamiliar with the dialect. One example: African American English has a marker ‘be’ that can be used before a verb to say that something happens continuously or habitually. So in African American English, you can say “Tonya be riding her bike”, which would be roughly equivalent to Standard English “Tonya rides her bike regularly”. Now if you wanted to turn that statement into a question, like “Tonya rides her bike regularly, doesn’t she?”, would you know how to? Try it. Tonya be riding her bike, __________? a) ain’t she b) don’t she c) be she d) will she If you guessed (b), you’re right, and you probably have had extensive contact with speakers of African American English or you might be a native speaker yourself. If you don’t know the answer, African American English is probably not a variety you grew up speaking, so naturally you don’t exactly know its rules. Now imagine
you had to answer questions all the time in a language variety that you didn’t grow up speaking. Seems like it would be a pretty frustrating experience, and for millions of young people in the U.S., it is. Because African American English is not recognized as a “legitimate” dialect of English in the U.S. school system, many of its younger speakers find they have trouble learning to read, write and even speak in standard English, a variety that is not their home language. For a good primer on the challenges that African American English speakers may face in school, check out the video from the PBS’ documentary, Do You Speak American?. Now I know what you’re thinking: while it may not be fair that African American English (and its speakers) gets stigmatized, this is the reality, and until it changes the only way for its speakers to move ahead academically and get jobs that pay well is to speak the “standard” variety of English. You may be correct about this. But numerous studies have shown that the best way for young speakers to learn Standard English–assuming they don’t get much exposure to it outside of school–is by using their home language (African American English) to help teach the school language (Standard English). This method is frequently used in bilingual education to teach English as a Second Language. In order for it to work here, we must start from a place of acknowledging the legitimacy of African American English as a rule-based, systematic language variety in its own right. Marginalized dialects (like African American English) do not have anything inherently “bad” or “wrong” about them, standardized dialects don’t have anything inherently “good” or “right” about them. They’re simply different varieties. The reason that a dialect become standardized or stigmatized usually has to do with social and historical forces, so that the dialect of those in power becomes the “standard” way of speaking. While most people realize it’s not okay to show prejudice against someone because of the color of their skin, a large proportion of the same people fail to recognize that it’s not okay to show prejudice against someone for the way that they speak. Linguistic prejudice is still prejudice, and in some cases it
behaves as a proxy for more overt forms of racism. Ultimately what we find is that whether it be in the courtroom or the classroom, linguistic prejudice can have real consequences, an issue which is magnified by the fact that many don’t even recognize its existence. https://africanamericanenglish.com/2013/10/30/linguistic-prejudice-is-a-real-prejudice-and-has-realconsequences/
The Roots of Indian Racism Tabish Khair APRIL 16, 2017 00:15 IST
Politicians who are unwilling to concede that Indians can be racist usually also refuse to accept that there is caste prejudice in India There are Indian politicians who believe that there is no racism in India. Nothing that happens — most recently, the attacks on Nigerian students in what is basically a suburb of Delhi — can convince them otherwise. Of course, many of us who have African, black British, or African-American friends and acquaintances cannot understand this blindness on the part of such politicians. Speaking personally, I know that I absolutely dread it when my black European friends or acquaintances announce that they plan to travel in India, particularly north and central India. I cringe at the thought of the experiences
they might return with and what impression of my country, which also has so many things and people to admire, will remain with them. Because I know from having travelled with black Europeans and spoken to Africans in India, and from overhearing some of my fellow Indians, that we Indians can have more prejudices about Africans than most white Europeans today. But there is another group of friends and acquaintances from Europe whose excursions to India, particularly north and central India, I dread almost as much. These are white, especially light-haired or blonde, women. Once again, I have travelled with them in India, and have experienced how some Indians behave and what they say (snide or public comments), which luckily my female companions, not knowing Hindi, stayed blissfully ignorant of.
Remnants of the past Some of this has to do with colonial discourses which have seeped into India: for instance, the 19th century racist European association of Africa with cannibalism. After all, the mobs that attacked Nigerian students in Noida recently were ‘convinced’ that the Africans had ‘cannibalised’ an Indian student, who reportedly died of drug overdose. Similarly, the groping and verbal sexism that many blonde women tourists encounter is partly the result of bad Hollywood films and similar trash, through which ordinary urban Indians encounter the ‘West’. Knowing porn and not Plato, triteness and not Twain, their reactions to Western women are essentially sexist and racist. This is exacerbated by the tendency in many conservative circles, so surprising given our proclaimed spirituality, to consider the material covering a woman’s body to be an indication of her soul and morality! However, it does not do to put all the blame on our colonial inheritance or its neocolonial cultural ramifications. The main reason why such prejudices predominate in Indian caste circles has to do with internal reasons. As a nation, we are yet to face up to the racism and sexism that runs through many caste narratives. Before the British brought us stories of ‘African’ cannibalism, we had our own stories of cannibalism — associated, from
classical texts down to some current Chitra comics, with dark-skinned, non‘Aryan’-looking creatures. Similarly, the way we have often treated aboriginal women in India — partly because their dress codes and social mores differ from mainstream Hindustani (Hindu, as well as Muslim) ones — is simply shocking. With some lower middle and middle castes riding the government’s ‘backward castes’ bandwagon for economic and other reasons, we tend to forget that the worst of internal prejudice in India has been traditionally aimed at ‘dark’ Dalits and dark-skinned aborigines (‘tribals’, not as much at castes like the largely ‘fair-skinned’ Yadavs or Ansaris). This has not changed substantially even today.
Different shades of racism However, racism, unlike what some politicians believe, is not always a matter of colour; it is any kind of discrimination based on the false association of superficial physical differences — skin colour, shape of lips, hair, etc — with moral and intellectual qualities. However, it is also true that skin colour became its dominant index from the 18th century onwards, mostly because many Europeans wished to ‘justify’ the brutal enslavement of Africans. Despite this link between skin colour and racism, one can argue that other kinds of racism have also existed. A major Irish novelist recently referred to the Irish as “the niggers of Britain”. What he meant was that in the 17th century, tens of thousands of Irish prisoners were sold to English settlers in the new world as slaves. As late as the early 20th century, with skin colour taking over, some English scholars were arguing that the Irish were related to “negroes” and not to the English — despite both the English and the Irish seeming indubitably ‘white’ to us. There is an argument that the English worked out their initial theories of racism on the Irish before, in tandem with other Europeans, applying them on dark-skinned people, like many Africans. If so, one can argue that we Indians have worked out — and continue to work out — our racism and racismtinged sexism on our aborigines and Dalits. It is not surprising that politicians
who are unwilling to concede that Indians can be racist usually also refuse to accept that there is caste prejudice in India. http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/the-roots-of-indian-racism/article18061795.ece