Senator John McCain died in the US this week. The obituaries have been reverential. He was a war hero, captured and tortured during the Vietnam war for four years, he was a considered a moderate conservative, and – of course – he was white. All American, they like to call it. People like that he was conservative without being enslaved to right-wing dogma. He was against abortion and gun control, yes, but he also voted for universal healthcare. He was also smart enough to admit his mistakes, like when he had voted against a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr.
The story most repeated to illustrate his goodness came during his campaign for President against Obama in 2008. In a debate, a white woman got up and asked why America should trust an ‘Arab’ like Obama, and McCain said “No, ma’am, no. Obama was a citizen and a good family man.” How gallant, the papers are saying, how magnanimous. The exchange disturbed me when I saw it in 2008 for the same reason that it does now. McCain’s defense is “Don’t worry, he’s not Arab” as if that’s a bad thing. But these were nuances that you could articulate in the 2000s in America, and frankly, you can’t now.
McCain's defense is "Don't worry, he's not Arab" as if that's a bad thing. But these were nuances that you could articulate in the 2000s in America, and frankly, you can't now
The longer I’ve lived in the US, the longer I can see the singular, indelible truth that America is a deeply racist country. Racist to the point that the discrimination is infused into every bit of it; class distinctions, healthcare, life expectancy, infant mortality, school admission, street culture, everything. And though it is gratifying when a public official defends a rival based on principle, especially in contrast to the present administration, I can’t forget that it was also McCain who brought the dangerous Sarah Palin to the international stage, making that kind of uninformed right-wing populism not only plausible but mainstream.
I am a brown, bearded Pakistani male, and so I know that whenever I go through an airport, I will be “randomly selected”. That obvious kind of profiling I have taken for granted since the turn of the century. But I am also aware that Pakistanis, at home but especially abroad, are a deeply racist people. I am related to people who use the term “kaala” (black) as an insult. Or think that interracial couples on TV are pandering, or that he’s done well “for a darkie.” These people probably do not know they are racist but I wonder if racists ever do.
South Asia's obsession with fair skin
A few months ago, I had a volatile talk with a Desi woman who taught at a university here. We met at a dinner where she took great pains to explain she wasn’t desi. But she sounded Pakistani, spoke fluent Urdu, and later confessed that she had lived there for ten years, so I was a bit confused. She explained that Lahore was the kind of place where if you didn’t go to school there, the people didn’t consider you Desi. Instead, she said, she was “born into the imperialist American Project”, which was her highbrow leftist way of saying upstate New Jersey.
Later in the evening the topic of inherent racism in American sports came up, and I asked a question that I think we have all wondered but that no one gave me an answer to. Why is it that all the top sprinters in the world are black?
The table fell deathly silent, and she berated me for being a bigot. How dare you, she shouted, it’s about training not genes! You are why I don’t like being called desi, she finished, and went to have a cigarette outside to calm down. I admit I felt awful. I asked the question because I was genuinely curious but was I being racist? Was I racist?
The question disturbed me for weeks afterwards, so much so that I went to the library and rented out every book I could find on the subject. It turns out that the question is quite common, and there is a whole shelf of books on the subject. And this is what they told me:
The question is one of anecdotal deduction, based on casual viewing of a posting field. But it is, in of itself, flawed because the way it’s framed generalises black people.
Examine the success not in the sprints but in distance running, for this is also dominated by black athletes. Kenya has won an astonishing 63 medals at the Olympic Games in races of 800m and above, 21 of them gold, since 1968. Evidence suggests that it is not simply that all people of African ancestry dominate long-distance running. It’s not even all Kenyans. It’s individuals from a tiny region in the Kenyan Rift Valley called Nandi. A disproportionate number of long-distance runners trace their origin to this valley.
The same analysis applies to sprinting, where success is focused on Jamaicans and African-Americans. Africa, as a continent, has almost no success at all. Not even West Africans win much. The combined forces of Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, the Republic of Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Togo, Niger, Benin, Mali, the Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Gabon, Senegal, Congo and Angola have not won a single sprinting medal at the Olympics or World Championships.
Our tendency to generalize, then, rests on a deeper fallacy – the idea that “black” somehow refers to a genetic type of people. That’s why the question is flawed, because in it is embedded the idea that we put people of dark skin in a box labelled ‘black’ and assume that a trait shared by some is shared by all. It ignores the diversity, and encourages a biologically divisive argument to be made, which is dangerous. I’m glad I asked the question, because it made me seek the answer I didn’t know. It also made me angry at the woman who berated me because the truth is: she didn’t have an answer either. Which she should have, especially as a “desi non-desi teacher in the American imperialist project”.
I’m telling you this because despite all my time in America, I have never been to a more racist place than Pakistan. And while it may bring some reverse relief to shame America for its treatment of people of colour, which is awful, Pakistan is far more guilty of a bias against not only colour, but difference of any kind. In many ways we are worse, because we don’t acknowledge our bias as bad. It’s far easier to be a victim when stopped in line at the airport. Because that person can’t be a racist, can they?
