Them Versus Us

The first part of this thought experiment was intended to test if my perception of the ‘Other’ was a reflection of nothing more than my own prejudices. It had me revisit repeatedly the same set of objects arranged in different ways to see how my reactions varied in response to the arrangements.

In the second part of the experiment I want to see the picture from the other end. This time I imagine myself to be a member of the set of objects and try to sense how I would feel in the various scenarios.

The setting is still the same – a classroom of children being visited by an outsider. As before, imagine that in the initial arrangement of the class all students, wearing the school uniform and no other marks of identification, are seated in random order.

The subsequent arrangements are as follows:

1. The boys and girls are seated separately.
2. The fair skinned and the dark skinned students are seated separately.
3. The school uniforms are gone and students in western dress are seated separately from those wearing native dress.
4. The urban and rural students are seated separately.
5. The non-handicapped and the handicapped are seated separately.
6. The students are wearing marks of religious identification and seated apart from each other.

In this experiment, the identity of the visitor varies in each scenario. The visitor can be male or female, dark or light skinned, in western or local dress, from an urban or rural background, and belong to the majority or minority religion.

How would we expect the children belonging to the various subsets to respond to a particular incarnation of the visitor? Under what conditions would the responses of the different subsets be the same? Under what conditions would they be markedly different?

There is a larger public policy issue embedded in this experiment. We know, for example, that public housing projects built exclusively for low-income groups ended up stigmatizing the poor. Racially imbalanced neighborhoods (black inner cities, white suburbs) heightened the resentments against segregation. Confining religious minorities to ghettoes fueled social tensions.

In an earlier post we have referred to the difference between ‘bridging’ capital (ties between groups) and ‘bonding’ capital (ties within groups) and pointed to research that shows that the former is much more crucial for social harmony. This would suggest that any arrangement other than a random mixing of the children in the classroom could give rise to fears and apprehensions whether they are justified or not.

We can now extrapolate from the classroom to society. In a region like South Asia where the social order is fractured in so many diverse ways and history carries such a burden of oppressions, we need to make a conscious effort to eliminate the sense of distinctions to the extent possible. We need to strive to see everyone as a citizen or transform everyone into a citizen, equal in every respect, and do away with outmoded notions of majorities and minorities.

We know that human beings are not born with prejudices. Children when allowed to play together are not conscious of differences; it is the early socialization that gives rise to the sense of difference followed by the perception of superiority or inferiority. This is what we need to minimize, if not altogether eliminate.

Is that possible?

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Us Versus Them

I am perplexed by the Us versus Them phenomenon. Try as I might, I have not been able to explain why it has such a powerful hold on so many of us.

Let me try and work through it once again using a thought experiment. I would like you to stay with me as I do and to give me your feedback at the end.

I imagine that I am invited to speak to a class of high school students in a city that I have never visited before.

I arrive at the school and walk through a corridor into the class. In front to me I find 60 students of both genders wearing the school uniform and no other marks of identification seated in random order.

Before I begin speaking to the students, this movie in my head goes into rewind mode. I am marched backwards out through the corridor. There is a pause and then I march back into the class. This process is repeated many times. Each time I re-enter the class, I find a different arrangement of the same students. Let us say, I am confronted with the following arrangements, in turn:

1. The boys and girls are seated separately.
2. The fair skinned and the dark skinned students are seated separately.
3. The school uniforms are gone and students in western dress are seated separately from those wearing native dress.
4. The urban and rural students are seated separately.
5. The non-handicapped and the handicapped are seated separately.
6. The students are wearing marks of religious identification and seated apart from each other.

I try and imagine if my emotions and mental responses would be the same in these subsequent encounters as they would have been in the first one.

Would that depend on whether I was sexist or a feminist, a racist or a sectarian, an Anglophile or an Anglophobe, on whether I had disdain for the handicapped or contempt for the unsophisticated?

Would I sense that the rural students smelled differently? Would I want the religious minority to apologize for something? Would I wish the girls to be more modestly dressed?

Remember that it is the same set of students; only the outward appearances and/or the seating arrangements differ in each scenario. Should my emotional response vary? And if it does, would it be fair to conclude that what I have to examine is myself and not the class?

Would it suggest that there are certain prejudices that I carry with me that make me react in a particular way to a particular arrangement of the same individuals?

I still won’t be sure where I picked up the prejudices – at my mother’s knee, in early socialization, in school, at my place of worship – but would I begin to look at myself more critically?

How would you react if you were the subject of the experiment?

Is it really Us versus Them or is it Us versus Us? Do we have to stop looking for someone to vilify, hate or pity and instead reach within ourselves to slay the demons that make us see the same reality in so many jaundiced ways? 

Can we do it?

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The Peculiarities of Imran Khan

Two things struck me as being odd in Imran Khan’s article that I had discussed earlier: how he found wisdom and the use he put the wisdom to.

Imran describes his narrow escape: “it was a miracle I did not become an atheist. The only reason why I did not was the powerful religious influence my mother wielded on me since my childhood. It was not so much out of conviction but love for her that I stayed a Muslim.”

I have just recently read Latika Gupta’s account of what some mothers are doing to their children and so reading Imran’s sentence made me shiver. Imran just turned out be very lucky in having a pious and sensible mother but is it a good idea in general to be shaped by the powerful religious influences of mothers and to believe in something out of love rather than conviction?

Could it not be the case that mothers would pass on all their prejudices to their children and the children would subscribe to them out of love? Let us stay within Islam for the moment and imagine a Muslim mother saying that Islam is superior to all other religions. Quite possible. But the same Sunni Muslim mother at the same time might say that Shias are not really Muslims and need to be taught a lesson (or vice versa). Equally possible. Where does that leave us?

To range a little further, is it difficult to imagine a White mother saying that Blacks were not quite humans or an affluent mother saying that the lower orders need to be kept in their places?

The bottom line is that much as we love our mothers we cannot be fully objective about them and nor can we expect them to be fully objective about the societies they live in. When all is said and done, mothers are more likely to pass on the same bundle of prejudices that they picked up from their own mothers especially if they have never been exposed to any other viewpoints – half the mothers have never been to school in some countries of South Asia.

This is where the contribution of the public school system becomes absolutely critical. It is the function of the schools to ensure that the prejudices imbibed at the mother’s knee are neutralized before they have a chance to harden into lifelong attitudes. This is all the more crucial in societies like ours that are riven by innumerable fault lines along which mothers might have taught children to hate each other.

To get back to Imran Khan. What I found hard to understand was why, once he had found wisdom and become a good and tolerant human being, he had to go off on this crusade to prove that the East was superior to the West. I am sure he himself is responsible for this attitude and that it could not have been his mother who passed it on to him.

I keep puzzling over this great need to prove that one’s ways or inheritance are superior to someone else’s. It must be a powerful urge because one runs into it all the time. Have you heard people argue that Indian classical music is better that Western classical music? They are different, no doubt. But both have lasted over a thousand years and so both must be beautiful in their own ways. Would it not make more sense to enjoy the music than to try and prove the superiority of one over the other?

This is one human need that I have not been able to explain satisfactorily to myself. Is there a reader that can shed some light on the subject?

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Similar and Different: Black and White

In an earlier post we had referred to two very recent books that highlighted the crucial role of education in inflaming relations between communities in multi-ethnic and multi-national countries. 

Some very candid comments by Vinod alerted us to the fact that socialization at home plays an equally important role in forming our opinions of others in the community – whether we see them as different from us and, if so, what values we attach to the differences.

This raises the obvious question of the relationship between socialization at home and education in schools. In searching for an answer, Dr. Meenakshi Thapan (Department of Scociology, University of Delhi) pointed us to the recent work of Latika Gupta on this subject.

Based on her research in Daryaganj, Delhi, Latika Gupta, has confirmed that children develop an exclusionary awareness of religious differences very early in life, often by the age of four before they enter the formal system of education.  A newspaper article based on this research is here.

This has relevance for the earlier discussion on this blog. It could be argued that the books we had mentioned earlier highlight attempts at indoctrination that are marginal in society. But Latika Gupta’s work makes us see the situation from a different perspective. Even if we ignore the fringe phenomena, we can say with reasonable certainty that the mainstream educational system is not doing anything positive to counteract the effects of socialization in the homes.

This is a major conclusion because it suggests that without proactive action we would end up with generations after generations of deeply embedded prejudice that cannot portend good outcomes for any country.

Thus education, while it can be source of problems, is also the only means we have for a solution. And this brings us to the subtitle (Black and White) of this post.

One should find it both ironical and deeply disturbing to compare community relations in the Indian subcontinent with those in North America – the trends are so starkly opposed that they deserve attention.

In North America there was two centuries of bitter antagonism and prejudice between Whites and Blacks based literally on a master-slave relationship. It was crime to educate Blacks and as late as the 1950s mixed marriages were not legal in a number of states. It was the federal state that stepped in decisively in the mid 1960s with Civil Rights legislation to reverse this legacy. And amongst the first things to be targeted after voting rights was education. School segregation was abolished against great White resistance and curricula were changed to eliminate all derogatory and discriminatory references to Blacks. This decisive action has now borne fruit in a remarkable healing with the election of Barack Obama as the President of the United States.

Contrast this with the opposite trend in the subcontinent where communities had lived together for a thousand years with nowhere the same kind of discrimination or intolerance. From there we moved to the brutalities of the Partition and now to the point where intense hatred is emanating from homes and either not being corrected or actually exacerbated in the schools.

Clearly there is a case for federal states to stop playing politics with this issue and to put the long-term future of their countries ahead of their short-term gains. It is said that the Civil Rights legislation in the US cost the Democrats the Southern vote for decades but in retrospect that seems a minor price for the payoff.

Of course, nothing happens by itself. We need a cohort of civil right activists who see the implications of this issue for their countries and for themselves and are willing to fight for that future.

A longer version of Latika Gupta’s research was published in the Economic and Political Weekly this year but is not accessible without a subscription. You can request a copy from thesouthasianidea@gmail.com.

For a school curriculum that is sensitive to issues of diversity see the website of the Oneness Family School.

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