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Tuesday, July 16, 2013

On the Subject of Treyvon Martin

This makes us sick, really. We thought the U.S. to be a decent country where people of colour were respected. Seems Lester Chambers, a blues singer was assaulted on stage during a show. Well, we thought racism was done in the country and only the remnants existed in red-neck country of the south. No, it seems. Treyvon Martin is another victim in the long line of victims who were lynched or beaten to death in this great country professing equality of all people. A teenager, he was walking back to his house after visiting a store when the gun-wielding George Zimmerman shot him, in cold blood. He has done the right thing according to supremacists across the world, but we chafe, we cry for these crimes of utter human hopelessness. Zimmerman was acquitted as there weren't any eye witnesses to the incident, or, were they chicken to come out?  Are all black teenagers wearing hoodies criminals? We simmer with anguish, but we don't know how to protest this atrocity on humanity. Will justice be done, if at all? Who elected a white jury to try the murderer of a back teenager?

After black man Rodney King was beaten by policemen in a similar incident, he asked, "Can we all get along?" No. It seems the answer is no. The U.S., an assylum of contentment and opportunity for many is not a safe place for dark-skinned people. Blacks constitute 13 per cent of the U.S. population while whites are 77 per cent. So they are a majority and even if only half of them are racists they outnumber the blacks. Does it help that the president of the country is half black?

 The shooting of Treyvon Martin opens a can of worms, all well-fed and bigger than rats. To what extent people will go to prove that they are superior to others. A matter of skin collour (which we battle with in my novel Mr. Bandookwala, MBA, Harvard) is the biggest bane of humanity and will take it down the path of perdition, or, something near it, we are sure. The roots of this discrimination lies deeper than the thick skin of centuries slave traders and racial oppressors.

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