Masking the Difference
“It is very depressing to live in a time where it is easier to break an atom than a prejudice.” Aditi Das, reporting from the United Nations General Assembly–Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (UNGA-SOCHUM), analyses the continuous discrimination faced by African-Americans on their native soil.
Prejudice has poisoned the world and barricaded every soul with misery and bloodshed. Although the stigma of untouchability is fading, the inevitable system of inclusion and exclusion has been taking new forms.
Racial intolerance against African Americans has persisted for decades. One of the earliest instances of such significant discrimination was the bus incident of Rosa Parks, an American activist. In the 1900s, the city of Montgomery in Alabama had passed an ordinance that segregated bus passengers according to their race. This new law required ‘coloured’ people to give up their seats if there were no ‘white-only’ seats left. On one such day in the year 1955 when Parks was travelling by bus, she was ordered to give up her seat to make space for a white passenger. Determined to sustain her rights as an American citizen and a human being, she refused to oblige and was subsequently arrested. This led to a 382-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system, with prominent figures like Martin Luther King Jr. organizing the movement.
The conditions have not really improved with time. For a country founded on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is difficult for the United States of America (USA) to accept that discrimination continues to exist, even at present. Shockingly, 6,121 instances of hate crimes were reported in the USA in 2016 alone; the most prominent of which, were the anti-Black hate crimes. This was encouraged extensively during the presidential campaign of President Donald Trump in 2016, resulting in increased intolerance and promotion of bigotry.
Years ago, inhuman practices like racial lynching and burning crosses were used to intimidate the minority communities. People were stripped naked, tied to vehicles, and dragged down a dirt road until they were incapacitated or they dropped dead. Hate crimes, motivated by the offender’s bias against a religion, race, ethnicity, and gender identity, have metamorphosed with time. A report by the Sentencing Project issued to the United Nations found that discrimination against people of colour existed predominantly in the country’s justice system. Sentencing, parole, and policing were heavily influenced by race and ethnicity. In 2016, African-Americans comprised 27 percent of all individuals arrested in the USA. These statistics were very high, considering the ratio of their population in the country. This attributed to disproportionate levels of police contact. It also implied that judges and prosecutors were victims to both conscious and unconscious stereotyping. Current policies include legal procedures which intend to prevent the arbitrary or discriminatory imposition of capital sentences.
The EU-Minorities and Discrimination Survey reported that minorities like the Roma, Sub-Saharan Africans, and North Africans faced racially-motivated obstacles when searching for a job or a place to rent. Most of the human rights violations are committed with the active participation of authorities; sometimes even with sanctions. Race continues to determine who shall live and who shall not; diversity has made the society cynical.
It has been observed that discrimination seeps into the minds of the general public in some of the most ludicrous ways. The controversial 1994 “The Bell Curve” thesis, for example, stated that African-Americans and poor people had a lower IQ, thus implying American inequality in genetic difference. These statements are not backed by any scientific proof, but continue to gain popularity because of manifestations of hostility toward racial minorities by members of the white majority.
Although many steps have been taken to remove blatant racism, discrimination remains deeply ingrained in the legal system. Its existence has simply taken a subtler form. Minority groups continue to face disadvantages in their daily lives as the American society remains stubbornly resistant to change.
Sources:
1. https://www.texastribune.org/2018/08/16/african-americans/
2. https://www.statista.com/topics/4178/hate-crimes-in-the-united-states/
(Edited by Keerthisree Raghu.)
Racial intolerance against African Americans has persisted for decades. One of the earliest instances of such significant discrimination was the bus incident of Rosa Parks, an American activist. In the 1900s, the city of Montgomery in Alabama had passed an ordinance that segregated bus passengers according to their race. This new law required ‘coloured’ people to give up their seats if there were no ‘white-only’ seats left. On one such day in the year 1955 when Parks was travelling by bus, she was ordered to give up her seat to make space for a white passenger. Determined to sustain her rights as an American citizen and a human being, she refused to oblige and was subsequently arrested. This led to a 382-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system, with prominent figures like Martin Luther King Jr. organizing the movement.
The conditions have not really improved with time. For a country founded on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is difficult for the United States of America (USA) to accept that discrimination continues to exist, even at present. Shockingly, 6,121 instances of hate crimes were reported in the USA in 2016 alone; the most prominent of which, were the anti-Black hate crimes. This was encouraged extensively during the presidential campaign of President Donald Trump in 2016, resulting in increased intolerance and promotion of bigotry.
Years ago, inhuman practices like racial lynching and burning crosses were used to intimidate the minority communities. People were stripped naked, tied to vehicles, and dragged down a dirt road until they were incapacitated or they dropped dead. Hate crimes, motivated by the offender’s bias against a religion, race, ethnicity, and gender identity, have metamorphosed with time. A report by the Sentencing Project issued to the United Nations found that discrimination against people of colour existed predominantly in the country’s justice system. Sentencing, parole, and policing were heavily influenced by race and ethnicity. In 2016, African-Americans comprised 27 percent of all individuals arrested in the USA. These statistics were very high, considering the ratio of their population in the country. This attributed to disproportionate levels of police contact. It also implied that judges and prosecutors were victims to both conscious and unconscious stereotyping. Current policies include legal procedures which intend to prevent the arbitrary or discriminatory imposition of capital sentences.
The EU-Minorities and Discrimination Survey reported that minorities like the Roma, Sub-Saharan Africans, and North Africans faced racially-motivated obstacles when searching for a job or a place to rent. Most of the human rights violations are committed with the active participation of authorities; sometimes even with sanctions. Race continues to determine who shall live and who shall not; diversity has made the society cynical.
It has been observed that discrimination seeps into the minds of the general public in some of the most ludicrous ways. The controversial 1994 “The Bell Curve” thesis, for example, stated that African-Americans and poor people had a lower IQ, thus implying American inequality in genetic difference. These statements are not backed by any scientific proof, but continue to gain popularity because of manifestations of hostility toward racial minorities by members of the white majority.
Although many steps have been taken to remove blatant racism, discrimination remains deeply ingrained in the legal system. Its existence has simply taken a subtler form. Minority groups continue to face disadvantages in their daily lives as the American society remains stubbornly resistant to change.
Sources:
1. https://www.texastribune.org/2018/08/16/african-americans/
2. https://www.statista.com/topics/4178/hate-crimes-in-the-united-states/
(Edited by Keerthisree Raghu.)
Support Your Sisters; Not Just Your Cis-ters
Samiksha, reporting from the United Nations General Assembly—Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (UNGA-SOCHUM,) expresses her views on the rights and struggles of women from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer+ (LGBTQ+) community.
Gender and sexuality are two things that are decided by each person for themselves. Transgender people are those who have a gender identity different from the one assigned to them at birth. Transphobia is, in general, a dislike or prejudice against transsexual or transgender people and is a concept that is deep rooted in society. People may view transgender people as being “unnatural” and use derogatory words like “hijra”, “tranny”, or “chakka” to refer to them.
Problems faced by women of the transgender community, in specific, are innumerable. Transgender people are four times as likely as the general population to live in extreme poverty. The Trans Murder Monitoring Project recorded 1,700 trans-phobic killings of transgender individuals; a majority of which were transgender women. In the United States, three-quarters of LGBT homicide victims were transgender women.
A staggering fact is that in recent times, 16 states of the United States of America have appealed to the Supreme Court to legalise the termination of the employment of members of the LGBTQ+ community, simply due to their sexuality and gender identity. The federal law that protects employees from discrimination does not explicitly grant them protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, while it does specify that discrimination on the grounds of race, culture, sex, and disability. For more than four decades, there have been efforts to change the wordings of this law to also include sexual orientation, but it has been in vain.
The most jarring problem that the transgender community faces, however, is their coercion into the sex trade. While men are also victim to this evil, a majority of these cases are those of women. This issue arises as a consequence of the fact that they are given nearly no employment opportunities. A case study that can be taken into consideration is that of the Kingdom of Thailand (Thailand). The current sex trafficking scenario in Thailand is an alarming one and the transgender community is an integral part of it—by consent, or otherwise. Their susceptibility to sexual and physical assault is immensely high, as is the risk of HIV-AIDS due to unprotected and non-consensual sex. Desperation drives them to continue in this field, if not for external force. One in four sexual workers in Thailand is raped or forced to have sexual intercourse against their will.
While Thailand’s definition of gender is more fluid than that of the West and despite sex workers being tolerated in the country, the community is still subject to discrimination and legal issues of all sorts. A worker that identifies as female is not allowed to change their sex on legal documents, and is sent to a male prison if incarcerated.
An extremely important facet in the lives of the transgender community is their sex reassignment surgery. The steps that precede this surgery differ from one place to another, in the cases that legal recognition is desired. While in the Republic of Malta, the Kingdom of Norway, Ireland, and the Kingdom of Denmark, citizens simply have to tell the government about their decision, in other countries, the process may require judicial approvals or even testing for mental disorders.
The most disturbing of these, however, is the hurdle that is faced by the citizens of states such as the Swiss Confederation (Switzerland)—sterilisation. The Kingdom of Sweden was the first country in the world to legalise sex reassignment surgery in 1970, but enforced a strict sterilisation law on the grounds that transgender people were not mentally stable enough to care for a child.
While it may seem like the plethora of prejudices and crimes against the women of the LGBTQ community is never ending, we must recognise that the silver lining of these thunderclouds will be the beautiful rainbow that shines after they clear.
(Edited by Keerthisree Raghu.)
Check, and Mate!
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.” Aditi Das, reporting from the United Nations General Assembly–Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM), weighs in on the quandary that arises due to Islamophobia.
It was a mastermind who realised that it was possible to bring someone down, without actually using force, but by injecting a feeling of perpetual fear within them. A similar mastermind used the same concept to bring a particular religion down—Islam. If the society was a game of chess, it would be much easier to use the two-player strategy to comprehend this.
The objective is to bring the opponent down—checkmate! The actions are not hidden; rather they are up in front, for everyone to watch and scrutinise, but the revelation somehow adds to the dread. Most of the Muslims living around the world face the same. They are discriminated against, targeted with hatred, and terrorised publicly. They are abused on the streets without any justification or warrant. The exchange of one piece for an opponent’s similar piece is no different from the real-life “one life for another” tactic that is used. Deploying violence as a tool, while moving intelligently through the black and white grid to get a better position to make an attack and to reaffirm a global racial structure is what the game is all about. Racism and Islamophobia are overlapping conditions; the latter, leading to rather dangerous forms of the former. The attack on 11 September was one such starting point which led to drastic dents on the minds of the non-Muslim communities. It led to a surge in domestic reactions through hate crimes and harassment. Regardless of this, after the first move, the players ought to take alternate turns. Each player had their own strategy.
Acts of extremists and radical groups have jeopardised the positive image of Islam, providing an excuse to the opportunists to use this as a reason to resort to hostility against the entire religion. The police recorded a total of 94,098 hate crime offences across England and Wales.[1] The statistics revealed that more than half of these crimes were directed particularly towards the Muslims. This increase was a consequence of the terror attacks, mainstreaming of anti-Muslim bigotry, political lashing, and manipulation of the society through social media activity. At present, it is not rare for the innocent Muslim to be detained for regular surveillance checks just because of the religion they follow, or to be given looks of scepticism because of the attire they are draped in.
Attributing to the drastic increase in the number of hate crimes against the Muslims in the United States of America (USA)—almost 15 percent—and the increase in restrictions on immigration from Muslim-majority countries, Gadeir Abbas, an attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said, “There has been nothing like this ever, for the Muslim community to be regularly the punching bag of the president of the United States.”[2] To top these restrictions, there are several xenophobic attacks on such refugees and travellers, who are caught clueless about their offense.
In Quebec, Canada, legislation was introduced and passed in 2017 which prevents anyone wearing a face veil from accessing public services like hospitals and public transit. Bill 62 was introduced, as a majority of the population viewed Islam in an unfavourable light. A similar Act of Parliament was passed by the Senate of France in 2010, which prohibited the concealment of face in public. All of these demonstrate the constant suspicion that they must endure.
As the game proceeds, a player may make a move to put the opponent’s king under attack. Islam is looked upon as the evil—portrayed as extreme and violent. This encourages bloodshed on the streets, where the innocent pawns are struck off the board. Islamophobia and its articulation are becoming increasingly popular. It is gaining political support and is manifesting in the minds of the public. The Muslim community is monitored, while their tracks are trailed for ‘castling’ and long-term positioning advantages. The goal is to surround the king and leave no refuge. The endgame is either: resign, or checkmate!
Sources:
Image- https://jeffreyhill.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d417153ef01a5117ab147970c-600wi
1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/uk-hate-crime-religious-muslims-islamophobia-police-racism-a8585846.html
2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-islam-hatecrime/u-s-anti-muslim-hate-crimes-rose-15-percent-in-2017-advocacy-group-idUSKBN1HU240
(Edited by Keerthisree Raghu.)
The objective is to bring the opponent down—checkmate! The actions are not hidden; rather they are up in front, for everyone to watch and scrutinise, but the revelation somehow adds to the dread. Most of the Muslims living around the world face the same. They are discriminated against, targeted with hatred, and terrorised publicly. They are abused on the streets without any justification or warrant. The exchange of one piece for an opponent’s similar piece is no different from the real-life “one life for another” tactic that is used. Deploying violence as a tool, while moving intelligently through the black and white grid to get a better position to make an attack and to reaffirm a global racial structure is what the game is all about. Racism and Islamophobia are overlapping conditions; the latter, leading to rather dangerous forms of the former. The attack on 11 September was one such starting point which led to drastic dents on the minds of the non-Muslim communities. It led to a surge in domestic reactions through hate crimes and harassment. Regardless of this, after the first move, the players ought to take alternate turns. Each player had their own strategy.
Acts of extremists and radical groups have jeopardised the positive image of Islam, providing an excuse to the opportunists to use this as a reason to resort to hostility against the entire religion. The police recorded a total of 94,098 hate crime offences across England and Wales.[1] The statistics revealed that more than half of these crimes were directed particularly towards the Muslims. This increase was a consequence of the terror attacks, mainstreaming of anti-Muslim bigotry, political lashing, and manipulation of the society through social media activity. At present, it is not rare for the innocent Muslim to be detained for regular surveillance checks just because of the religion they follow, or to be given looks of scepticism because of the attire they are draped in.
Attributing to the drastic increase in the number of hate crimes against the Muslims in the United States of America (USA)—almost 15 percent—and the increase in restrictions on immigration from Muslim-majority countries, Gadeir Abbas, an attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said, “There has been nothing like this ever, for the Muslim community to be regularly the punching bag of the president of the United States.”[2] To top these restrictions, there are several xenophobic attacks on such refugees and travellers, who are caught clueless about their offense.
In Quebec, Canada, legislation was introduced and passed in 2017 which prevents anyone wearing a face veil from accessing public services like hospitals and public transit. Bill 62 was introduced, as a majority of the population viewed Islam in an unfavourable light. A similar Act of Parliament was passed by the Senate of France in 2010, which prohibited the concealment of face in public. All of these demonstrate the constant suspicion that they must endure.
As the game proceeds, a player may make a move to put the opponent’s king under attack. Islam is looked upon as the evil—portrayed as extreme and violent. This encourages bloodshed on the streets, where the innocent pawns are struck off the board. Islamophobia and its articulation are becoming increasingly popular. It is gaining political support and is manifesting in the minds of the public. The Muslim community is monitored, while their tracks are trailed for ‘castling’ and long-term positioning advantages. The goal is to surround the king and leave no refuge. The endgame is either: resign, or checkmate!
Sources:
Image- https://jeffreyhill.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d417153ef01a5117ab147970c-600wi
1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/uk-hate-crime-religious-muslims-islamophobia-police-racism-a8585846.html
2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-islam-hatecrime/u-s-anti-muslim-hate-crimes-rose-15-percent-in-2017-advocacy-group-idUSKBN1HU240
(Edited by Keerthisree Raghu.)
Stop Killing YeMEN.
Samiksha, reporting from the United Nations General Assembly-Social, Cultural, and Humanitarian Committee (UNGA-SOCHUM), writes about what has been called ‘an entirely man-made crisis’, by the United Nations (UN).
The Republic of Yemen (Yemen) was the poorest country in the North African and Middle Eastern region even before the current crisis. The conflict in Yemen has been called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world by the European Union (EU). The country has been tormented by an extremely violent war between the Houthi rebels and the internationally recognised government of Yemen. This war was mostly localised to the Saada province, which is an area of the Houthis’ power.
The Houthis began their advance in September 2014, by taking control of the capital Sanaa, after which, they pushed southwards to the second biggest city of Aden. The problem escalated in March 2015 when President Hadi was forced to flee from Yemen. A coalition headed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Saudi Arabia) was formed and included the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Kingdom of Bahrain, Arab Republic of Egypt, the Kingdom of Morocco, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Republic of the Sudan, and the Republic of Senegal.
The United States of America (USA) had also carried out aerial attacks on the Islamic State of Iran and the Levant (ISIL) targets in Yemen. They had also sent a small number of troops on the ground. The USA, along with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of France, also supplied the Saudi-led coalition with weapons and intelligence. This coalition has carried out what is estimated to be, 18,000 airstrikes. These airstrikes had caused a huge number of civilian casualties, with one third of them affecting civilians. They had landed in places such as school buses and public hospitals. These casualties are high—at least 10,000 Yemenis have been killed by fighting, as of March 26, 2018. At least 50,000 children lost their lives in 2017, at an average of 130 children a day.
Iran has often been accused by Saudi Arabia and the UAE of supporting the Houthis and called the Houthis Iranian, proxies. However, the country has declined this charge completely, as the various blockades in Yemen makes the possibility of Iran transferring huge weapons, limited.
Even more alarming, however, is the number of people who have died as a result of deteriorating public health as well as hunger. An outbreak of cholera took place in Yemen in October 2016, wherein 15,658 suspected Cholera cases were reported. People were exposed to impure water and sub-standard hygiene and living conditions and as a consequence, fell sick. Cholera can kill a child within hours if untreated. 196 deaths due to cholera were reported across the country. Children happen to account for 30% of all the cholera infections that occur in the world today. Yemen happened to be extremely dependent on imports for food, medicines, and fuel. 70% of their imports came in through Hodeida, an area of intense fighting. Reckless attacks orchestrated by either of the parties have literally broken bridges that brought food and other supplies to the people. More than 55% of health facilities are partially functioning and nearly all the underground water is contaminated.
The number of Yemenis who have been displaced is yet another cause for concern. More than three million of them have fled their homes and moved within the country, whereas 28,000 are asking for asylum in countries such as the Republic of Djibouti and the Federal Republic of Somalia.
The United Nations has already warned Yemen of all the implications it will face if this war ever ends.
(Edited by Keerthisree Raghu.)