Part I - Groups and Affiliation
Part II - Stereotypes
Part III - Ghettos
Part IV - Zeitgeist
The title to this blog entry is inspired by a newspaper article I read a few months back on a book written by Arjun Appadurai called Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. For those of you who want a copy, it can found on any of the regular online book stores, like Amazon. I have never actually read the book, only the review in the newspaper. Still, I found the title of the book in itself is very fascinating. I have found no other book title so compelling in recent times. It made me pause, take a deep breath and contemplate on the meaning and its significance. When you spend time thinking about it, so much unravels. This blog entry is an attempt to pen down those thoughts. Mr. Appadurai apparently explains about globalization and co-relates the global unrest and terrorism to it. While his thoughts are those of a seasoned anthropologist and intellect, mine are from a layman's perspective and they have absolutely nothing to do with globalization.
'The fear of small numbers' makes me wonder why we fear small numbers in the first place. Why is it that minorities are viewed with so much indifference, suspicion and sometimes hate? In certain societies, minorities feel they don't have equal rights to the majority even if in the modern free democratic world we are all supposedly equal in the eyes of the law and we have the same rights granted to us by the constitution. While some minorities feel like second class citizens others feel oppressed and discriminated against, not to mention those hordes of people who lost their lives imply because they were not in the majority. Indo-Fijians constitute over 35% of the population of Fiji, yet their political representation has been scuttled over a series of coups since the 1980s. They represent a classic case of a community that feels at times as if they don't have the same rights as the rest of the country. The African American population and the civil rights movements to restore equal rights are well documented throughout American history. It's hardly surprising that over 90% of African Americans voted this time in Obama's historic election to the White House. This is the very same building where people of Obama's race were not allowed to enter in the early parts of the 19th century unless they were part of the housekeeping staff. The African Americans are examples of a race that faced discrimination in the form of brutal slavery and blatant unequal rights.
We can go as far back in history as we want to look at how a dominant group over powers a minority. The indigenous Australians, Aboriginals today constitute less that 3% of the population on the land mass that once completely belonged to them. A majority of their culture, customs and languages are today considered endangered. Under the Australian law, children of mixed heritage were forcibly removed from their parents so that they could assimilate into the Australian culture. Their neighbors, the Maoris, suffered a similar fate of cultural and numerical decimation. In many ways, the natives of Australia and New Zealand fared much better than those of Latin and Central America – the Mayans, the Incas and the Aztecs. We can go back to biblical times, the times when the Hebrews were enslaved to the Egyptian Pharaohs and oppressed to such a degree that God sent to them a Prophet who liberated and took them to the Promised Land.
In modern times, there is no such thing as the Promised Land. There is no land free of occupation. The independence of countries like Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania lead to a mass exodus of people of Asian (read Indian) origin from these countries to places like England. Zimbabwean land reforms in the last decade lead to the redistribution of land to the majority population as the government contended that the whites while numbering only a percent of the population held a majority of the land. This redistribution in turn has led the large scale displacement of the population and the collapse of the economy. Many of the displaced white minorities have now migrated to all parts of the world. The average life expectancy of a Zimbabwean is 36 years.
Slavery, cultural annihilation, displacement and racial/religious discrimination aren't the lowest levels we can stoop to. Our humanity is capable of falling off a cliff. We are a species that's capable of Ethnic Cleansing. The slaughter of 6 million Jews in World War II is not the only example in our history. As recently as 1994, saw the genocide of Tutsis by the Hutus majority in Rwanda that saw the death of over a million people. Around the same time, the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II was perpetuated in Bosnia by Bosnian Serb forces against Bosnian Muslims. This happened despite the area being declared a safe zone by the UN and despite UN peacekeeping forces deployed there. Further crimes against humanity were committed across Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia. In each and every case of genocide in our bloody history, victims were selected, separated, segregated, stripped, raped and brutally killed in unimaginable ways because of one and only one reason – their identity.
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