Even as the news channels flood us with a surfeit of visuals, telling us about the abominable attacks of Indians in Australia, a new fashionable term ‘racism’ enters our jargon.

Racism is not a recent phenomenon, nor is it confined to one country or region. Racism is a global attitude, which strangely seems to be raising its head, at a time when the borders between nations seems to be disappearing. Sports, workplaces, schools, homes- all seem to be afflicted with this curse.

A Sivanandan, political activist and writer, in his article “Poverty is the new black” in the journal Race and Class says:

Racism has always been both an instrument of discrimination and a tool of exploitation. But it manifests itself as a cultural phenomenon, susceptible to cultural solutions, such as multicultural education and the promotion of ethnic identities.

Tackling the problem of cultural inequality, however, does not by itself redress the problem of economic inequality. Racism is conditioned by economic imperatives, but negotiated through culture: religion, literature, art, science and the media.

… Once, they demonised the blacks to justify slavery. Then they demonised the “coloureds” to justify colonialism. Today, they demonise asylum seekers to justify the ways of globalism. And, in the age of the media, of spin, demonisation sets out the parameters of popular culture within which such exclusion finds its own rationale — usually under the guise of xenophobia, the fear of strangers.

In times when people migrate to other shores in search of better living, education or work more than before, cultures cannot remain isolated. This blending of diversities can bring about fear of losing one’s own identity. This fear manifests in varied forms of abuse- sometimes subtly, sometimes assuming gory manisfestations.

Sivanandan, Director of the Institute of Race Relations writes:

It is a racism that is not just directed at those with darker skins, from the former colonial territories, but at the newer categories of the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted, who are beating at western Europe’s doors, the Europe that helped to displace them in the first place. It is a racism, that is, that cannot be colour-coded, directed as it is at poor whites as well, and is therefore passed off as xenophobia, a “natural” fear of strangers. But in the way it denigrates and reifies people before segregating and/or expelling them, it is a xenophobia that bears all the marks of the old racism. It is racism in substance, but “xeno” in form. It is a racism that is meted out to impoverished strangers even if they are white. It is xeno-racism.

Discrimination exists in many forms in nations across the globe. In the West being dark skinned invites racial abuse. It is the same slur we attach to the white skinned when we call them goras. The sad fact remains that people are learning to mistrust and be phobic of anybody and anything which isn’t like themselves.

Tolerance is a disappearing trait. And this racism that we face outside the boundaries of our nation is no different from what we face within it. Political parties and organizations which inflame tempers, teaching us to raise our walls and treat other with mistrust deserve the same disdain that we give racists. It is time we learnt to accept people different from ourselves. It would make life a lot more beautiful, as it ought to be.