Sometimes, the people around us can demolish our self-esteem through their subconscious acts. Like a teammate of mine who was telling me how he stopped donating blood to the sick who needed it. This mate of mine was once a compassionate blood donor; he loved donating blood.
However, one day, on his friend’s request, he rushed to a hospital to donate blood to a man in illness. The man, in his sickbed, asked his name. My teammate had a Bengali name, as he was born in a Hindu family. The man refused to take his blood, as he was a Hindu. This incident affected him so much that he stopped donating blood any more.
I was speechless when he told this story to me recently. To my mind, this seemed an extreme form of racism. Whenever the question of racism arises, we South Asians often connote it with the white-skinned humans around the world. But does it ever occur to us whether we, Bangladeshis who mostly have brown skin, may also be of a similar mindset? We’re also inherently racist in many ways.
Allow me to tell the story of another friend of mine who had an esteem-blowing experience when he was a university student. This friend of mine has dark skin, like Africans. One day, he had to go to the Sena Kalyan building in Motijheel.
There wasn’t any rush at the elevator. He was standing alone at its doorstep. When the doors opened, he went through it alone. A lady rushed in just before the doors closed. But the lady looked at my friend and refrained from entering the elevator. For him, the message was clear; it was the colour of his skin that scared the lady.
He was shattered like anything; he still remembers the lady’s look at him, and the incident still makes him depressed. This takes me back to my childhood when we learnt several types of behaviour which perhaps made us prejudiced towards many things. I remember, one of my cousins asked me to hold my nose while we were passing by a cleaner who came to clean the lavatories at our grandfather’s residence. “Why?” I asked. “Because, he will smell,” she replied. “How do you know he will smell?” I asked again. “They usually do,” she replied. And she really did that. But when we were passing by the cleaner, I found out that he didn’t smell!
I could never accept what my cousin was asking me to do. This attitude has, of course, changed since then. We have learnt to break at least some barriers when it comes to valuing all professions. Still, we may need to go a long way. Recently, I was very enchanted by an action of a friend of mine at a dinner party at his residence.
After we had dinner, he called up the chauffeurs to have dinner at the same table where we had our meal. When I asked about it, he said his chauffeur always had his meals at their dining table, after they finished their own meal.
I was amazed by my friend’s gesture to his chauffer. And this reminded me of a training that I went for in the UK. The office campus was quite huge, and they needed gardeners, cleaners, launderers, etc. I saw them diligently working the whole day.
But when it was time for lunch, we along with the gardeners, the cleaners, and the launderers had lunch together. They were also present at the club after office hours. There wasn’t any discrimination. I strongly wished we, in Bangladesh, could also show a similar attitude to people of those professions.
I believe we do show this attitude to all, only when we go to the praying houses such as mosques, temples, churches, etc. In all other spheres of life, there’s a deep sense of discrimination among us, the Bangladeshis.
We have always talked about racism in Africa, North America, Europe, and Australia. They all have been trying to mitigate the problem of racism and prejudice for years now. On our part, we haven’t yet noticed the intense forms of “racism” and prejudice in our society, not to talk about trying to minimise it.
Our discriminatory attitude is quite obvious in our society. Almost all of us are prejudiced against dark skin, as we all display it when it comes to choosing a bride. This practice has been going on for ages in this country, and almost everyone has accepted the fact that men will look for fair-skinned women as wives. But it was hard for me to accept the fact that someone would refuse to receive blood from someone just because the donor was a Hindu.