Baltimore and more: Beneath the facade, Uncle Sam is also racist and bigoted

Isn’t it time for Americans to develop nodding acquaintance with that cliched idea, that for every finger you point towards others, many more fingers point towards you? The death in police custody of an Afro-American man some two weeks ago in Baltimore, about an hour’s drive from Barack Obama’s official residence, should tell Americans a simple thing that they are unwilling to acknowledge about themselves: beneath many of their white skins, and below their formal tolerance for non-Christian religions, a significant minority of Americans are actually as bigoted, narrow-minded, fundamentalist, racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and Hindu-phobic. [caption id=“attachment_2218514” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A man sits on a bicycle in front of a line of police officers in riot gear ahead of a 10 p.m. curfew in the wake of Monday’s riots. AP[/caption] Americans have been witness to horrible examples of official racism at an average rate of one incident almost every other month. Before the Baltimore death of Freddie Gray, we had Walter Lamer Scott, who was shot and killed in South Carolina (also this month); two officers partially paralysed by harshly bringing down our own Sureshbhai Patel in Madison (Alabama) last February; Jerame Reid was shot dead at a traffic signal in New Jersey (December 2014); Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old, was gunned down at, of all places, a children’s playground, by the Cleveland police (November); Michael Brown was killed by cops in Ferguson, Missouri (last August); Eric Garner was choked to death by cops who held him down and failed to heed his pleas about being asthmatic (July 2014); and James Boyd was killed by two police officers. The above list, for which I am indebted to The Times of India today (29 April) is obviously only the tip of the iceberg, for more gruesome things have happened in the USA - including the Gurdwara shooting which killed six people in Wisconsin in 2012. And we are not even mentioning the everyday vandalism of Hindu temples in America. At last count there were 17 such cases, much more than the alleged church attacks in India, in just one county (Loudon, Virginia) - and of it happened in the space of just a few months (between July and October 2014) (read here). Vandals tend to paint 666 (sign of the Devil) and upside down crosses on temple walls to indicate the Christian origins of these insignias of hate. If one county can see so much vandalism against a microscopic minority of Hindus and Sikhs (who are often mistaken for Muslims), one can only conclude that White Christian fundamentalism is alive and well in America. This bigotry is obviously being fomented by some evangelists and church leaders like Pat Robertson, a former US presidential candidate, who calls Hinduism “demonic” and a “false religion”, or pastor Franklin Franklin Graham, or even politicians like that Idaho senator who refused to attend a Hindu invocation at the opening of the state since she believes America is a Christian nation, and Hinduism is about a “false faith and false gods” (read all about America’s Hindu-phobia here, where I got these examples from). Hindus who are targets of American bigotry may take things lying down, as is their wont, but not the Afro-Americans, who have been rioting after every racist incident (after Baltimore, after Ferguson). Racism is often compounded by Christian fundamentalism. America’s so-called love of the first amendment to its constitution, which guarantees freedom of faith, sometimes degenerates into the “right to personal bigotry” - as many of the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRAs) enacted in various states suggests. Freedom of religion to Christian fundamentalists means the right to discriminate against gays and lesbians, among other things, as I have noted earlier in _Firstpost_. Overt racism is now creeping across the Atlantic to secular Europe. Shocked by the enormous tragedies of the Second World War, and especially Hitler’s Iron Cross-backed anti-Jewish holocaust, Europe had, for some decades, become more tolerant and less fundamentalist than America. The growth of cradle-to-grave welfare states helped lower the power of the church to commandeer people’s loyalties. But the heavy influx of Muslims from Africa and the rise of Islamist terrorism on European soil has rekindled atavistic attitudes and Islamophobia. When states ban the head scarf for secular reasons, and yet the European Court of Human Rights rules that keeping crucifixes in the classroom is part of culture and not a religious infliction, one has to wonder whether this is not communalism masquerading as secularism. When Europe watches a boatload of people fleeing African poverty capsize and drown by the hundred, when an Anders Breivik shoots and kills 77 people in Norway for not resisting Islamism, when right-wing anti-immigration parties rise in the UK and France, one cannot but conclude that deep down, a significant chunk of the population in Europe is also racist and bigoted. But the fountainhead of bigotry in the developed west is probably the US, where Christian fundamentalism, racism (Ku Klux Klan) and genocide (of American Indians) has been part of the nation’s warp and woof since birth. Soon after the Baltimore riots , Barack Obama had this to say: “I think there are police departments that have to do some soul-searching. I think there’s some communities that have to do some soul-searching. I think we as a country have to do some soul-searching.” He should begin by admitting that America has not bid goodbye to racism, bigotry and religion-based fundamentalism even after 240 years of existence as a country founded on the idea of a liberal society based on the rule of law. This is not about tarring all Americans with the same racist brush. The vast majority are good people, free from the taint of bigotry, but this is the case also with people in the rest of the world, including India, too. Taken over the centuries, India’s record on freedom of religion is vastly better than that of Europe or America. Our record on caste though sucks - like America’s on racism.