Slavery is almost as old as human civilization itself. I was taught that one of the main reasons the Children of Israel were decreed to spend 40 years in the desert outside of the Holy Land was to wipe clear all notions of slavery in the generation that had been persecuted under Pharaoh. This allowed the former Hebrew slaves to combat one of the unfortunate consequences or phenomena of enslavement: that sometimes those who have been oppressed, once empowered, unconsciously tend to seek new victims to oppress — essentially, a form of traumatic re-enactment.
Of course, in the United States, we know we’ve suffered bravely through the 1950s into the 1970s in finally recognizing African-Americans as full citizens. Let us not forget the tremendous learning curve that era was for this nation. Over these two decades, a black American went from not being disenfranchised politically, through Jim Crow Laws, eating and drinking in separate areas, never daring to look a white man in the eye, to being able to embrace full citizenship, legally and culturally. Yet, we still have serious issues to ponder.
Take the Hispanic population, for example. They are a long-rooted group that accounts for around 20 percent of the population. Incredibly, a gargantuan number of Hispanics still live in or near sub-poverty levels. Have we essentially created the slavery mentality here in the United States with this population, too? Do we honestly walk right past one of “them” without a second thought as to an equal sense of citizenship given to him or her? Or even worse, take aggressive action to debase and eliminate an entire people from our American landscape? I think we might. Take a quick look at www.9500liberty.com for a contextual example of this from our neighbors in Prince William County in Virginia. Some even use the term “illegal aliens” to refer to a multi-cultural and multi-situation group of people, albeit that’s been euphemized recently with “undocumented workers” in lieu of “day laborers.”
And don’t forget the Arabs and those who “look” Arab that reside amongst us at home. Are those whose families have been here for longer than one generation considered fully American or given an exceptional hyphenated status? Remember those anger-filled days post-9/11. A Sikh man wearing a turban was gunned down in Arizona as an act of revenge, even though both his ethnicity and religion are quite different than any Arab.
Abroad, it’s somewhat easier to recognize this phenomenon. In the Persian Gulf, laborers mainly from South and Southeast Asia are imported to work in menial jobs and live in crummy conditions. The native Arab nationals there even admit that they don’t see the laborers equally as humans. It’s so starkly apparent this divide — whether it is ethnic, economic, cultural — between the 20 percent of nationals and the 80 percent labor force. Yes, the South Asians have jobs, and yes, they are getting paid better than the comparable position in their native land. But the point to make here is this: if we do not see an entire segment of the population, is that not ethnocentrism in its most vile form? Is this not the antecedent for more overt forms of segregation and even enslavement?
This may be beyond ethnocentrism. This may very well be the newest incarnation of what we used to call “slavery,” or the debasement of one race in favor of another. When this level of insular thinking becomes mainstream in a society and normalized in the behavioral patterns of an individual, it behooves our pluralistic society to scrutinize itself with a serious reality check.
Parvez Khan is a graduate student in the School of Public Affairs and the religion and international affairs columnist for The Eagle. You can reach him at edpage@theeagleonline.com.
