COLOR/RACE DISCRIMINATION

COLOR/RACE DISCRIMINATION

 Race discrimination involves treating someone (an applicant or employee) unfavorably because he/she is of a certain race or because of personal characteristics associated with race (such as hair texture, skin color, or certain facial features). Color discrimination involves treating someone unfavorably because of skin color complexion.

Race/color discrimination also can involve treating someone unfavorably because the person is married to (or associated with) a person of a certain race or color.

Discrimination can occur when the victim and the person who inflicted the discrimination are the same race or color.

Race/Color Discrimination & Harassment

It is unlawful to harass a person because of that person's race or color.

Harassment can include, for example, racial slurs, offensive or derogatory remarks about a person's race or color, or the display of racially-offensive symbols. Although the law doesn't prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).

The harasser can be the victim's supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer.

AN EXAMPLE WHERE ONLY FAIR COLOUR IS PROMOTED

Fair & Lovely, arguably India’s most popular skin lightening cream, has just emerged from the makeup room. It now calls itself Glow & Lovely. To campaign bluntly and in your face, literally, for “fair” skin is clearly bad manners, given the worldwide momentum of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Obviously, the intention here is to rename and un-shame.

By adroit label management, manufacturers of Fair & Lovely have found a good place to land. They offloaded “cancel culture” conscience keepers, kept their customers safely strapped, and stayed on course. Street protests and internet ballistic missiles work when they have clear implications for state policy. For example, Barclays Bank was once in trouble for its apartheid connections and JK Rowling is roasted today because her remark “biological sex is real” offends transgender rights.

Glow (or Fair) & Lovely, however, need not fear. It is below the radar for hostilities towards it, unlike the examples above, have no policy implications. Color preference in India is an aesthetic choice, largely a domestic affair. It has no obvious impact on public spaces like racism does in the US. The Indian variant of “colorism”, if one may call it that, is an unfortunate consequence of colonialism. But that does not allow it to gate crash into the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

The anti-racist struggle in the US, even Europe, is way beyond surface aesthetics and has a profound bearing on public policy and administration.  Police reform in America stresses anti-racism and color blindness, while police reform in India seeks independence from political masters. Reservations in India are based on caste, while affirmative action in America is largely color coded.

The markers of status in India are far more subtle and varied with skin color playing only a peripheral role, at best. For example, no Indian cop will have his knee on a person’s neck because of skin color. In the high-end job market being “wheatish”, or fair, is easily trumped by brains and skills. A Bengaluru-based IT executive put it graphically: “We need Nerds, not Birds.”

There are times when light skin works in India but, ironically, in the reverse direction, such as when hiring people for low end jobs, like that of shop assistants and hospitality staff. This is because a pleasant face at the counter, or reception desk, helps customers reach for their wallets without a muscle pull. The store owner or the hotel general manager could be much darker than the junior, front line employees, many of whom are from India’s Northeast, where people are generally “fairer”. Yet, it is these light skinned migrants from Northeast who face actual, public racism in Bengaluru, Delhi, and elsewhere .If ever a movement emerges in India saying “Dark Complexions Matter”, the first casualty will be the family. Siblings would club siblings and cousins would fire bomb one another’s homes. Given the idiosyncratic ways genes combine, it is quite likely that children from the same parents may have different skin pigmentation. The darker ones may resent nature’s callousness but they wouldn’t be categorized as half-breed, mestizos, or reole, or quadroon, or octoroon, or illegitimate, whatever. Their parentage is never in doubt, nor concealed.

This is in contrast to the phenomenon known as “passing” that was prevalent till recently in the US, when light skinned blacks tried to hide their lineage in the hope of passing off as whites. Till the 1950s the “one drop rule” was used quite frequently in America to separate the races, though it never really became law. If somebody had 1/64th black blood, that was it. No matter what the actual skin pigmentation, the person could even be a sunshine blonde (like civil rights leader Walter Francis White), but would still be categorized as black.

“Being a Negro’s a lie, anyway. Nobody sees the real you. Nobody knows who you are inside. You just judged on what you are on the outside whatever your color. Mulatto, colored, black, it don’t matter. You just a Negro to the world.”
― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

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