Race, religion and ethnicity are being used to cover up all kinds of atrocities

Except when I was a young girl, when “mhindi” was a word derogatively used against me, I have never felt that my race or religion were the most important things about me.

On the contrary, I have tried to live my life outside race and religion because I have seen that these rather superficial markers of identity have divided the world and robbed people of their humanity.

Race and religion are used to cover up all kinds of sins and lay claim on resources. For instance, in Iraq, the Islamic State is reported to be using the Quran to justify the sexual slavery of women and girls, just as Europeans used the Bible to explain apartheid and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

However, the terminology used to describe these crimes varies depending on who is committing them. When Muslim extremists kill Christians, they call themselves jihadists but are castigated by non-Muslims as terrorists. When a white man killed nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, recently, he was called a racist, not a terrorist.

On the Indian sub-continent, the border between India and Pakistan is like the Great Wall of China – people who share the same culture, traditions and language have been separated because of the myopic ambitions and phobias of pre-independence politicians.

So you have the bizarre situation where there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan but citizens of either country cannot freely cross each other’s borders.

FESTERING WOUND

In the United States, blackness is a health hazard. Blacks are arbitrarily arrested by the police more than any other race. The killing of black people for minor misdemeanours by white police officers has almost become an epidemic. Ironically, the crisis of racism appears to have escalated under a black president.

The United States’ history of slavery has been an old festering wound that refuses to heal. Black people remind white Americans about the country’s brutal, genocidal past.

Some white Americans hope to erase this memory through the physical erasure of blacks from their midst. Ironically, some white people in America are so keen to adopt black identities that they have changed their looks to appear black, as did Rachel Dolezal, who not only denied her white parentage, but went on to get elected as the president of the Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

What could have prompted a white woman to adopt a black identity in a country where blackness does not offer many advantages? Critics of Dolezal, who was recently “outed” by none other than her parents, say that she is an opportunist who took on a black identity without suffering the hardships that most blacks in America experience.

This type of confused self-identification combined with religious and ethnic bigotry are making this world an intolerant, unforgiving conflict-ridden place.

'FAILURE OF IMAGINATION'

The last two years have been the most traumatic in terms of forced population movement largely due to conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine. According to UNHCR, by the end of 2014, almost 60 million people had been displaced from their homes, the highest level of displacement witnessed since World War II.

In a world that is so digitally connected, it is ironic that human beings are becoming more disconnected, polarised and inward-looking.

One of President Barack Obama’s most memorable messages in the speech he delivered to the Kenyan people was that “a politics based solely on tribe and ethnicity is a politics that is doomed to tear a country apart”.

He called this type of politics “a failure of imagination” because it uses a denominator that one has little control over – ethnicity – to mobilise people and gain votes, just as religious extremists, be they Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Jews, use religion to divide people.

Obama’s message that we should remain human above all else couldn’t have come at a better time.

Unfortunately, the US president failed to acknowledge the role the American government has played in spawning conflict and breeding terrorism in places such as Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Pakistan.

The media too missed an opportunity to ask him why US military aid and interventions have always led to more, not less, conflict around the world.

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