Indian and American editors should do more than just acknowledge the race and caste problem.
Susan Goldberg, the American Jewish woman editor-in-chief of National Geographic, has admitted in a recent editorial that the 130-year old magazine’s coverage has been “racist for decades”. “To rise above it, we must acknowledge it,” she wrote.
It immediately started a scramble for the latest edition of the magazine, titled the ‘Race Issue’. Race is, in fact, going to be NatGeo’s special focus area for 2018.
I don’t understand how facile admissions, after an issue is morally settled, still makes for news. Other white editors have made this admission decades ago. Way back in 1968, the Presidential Commission on Civil Disorders had said that American journalism has a race problem.
It is a little late in the day for us to applaud the act of ‘acknowledging’ the problem that race presents to American society. Late to acknowledge caste in India or the problem the global North presents to the aspirations of the colonised South. The conversation has long shifted to reparations and tangible compensatory gestures.
I would have been more impressed if Goldberg had stepped aside as editor-in-chief for 2018 and allowed a black woman or, at the very least, a black man to take charge of the special focus year. That would be an ‘acknowledgement’ of the real problem — that there are too many white people, male and female and Jewish, in journalism.
Such acknowledgements are rare in India where again there are too many upper-caste journalists.
Our journalists too have put out several special issues on caste, untouchability and social exclusion over the decades. Mainstream novels and movies have referred to it. Many alternative films, which spoke about the issue have gone mainstream.
Upper caste Indian feminists, particularly journalists, don’t like being reminded of their relative advantage over Dalits. Like Goldberg, they too have sterling credentials and the best of intentions. On some aspects of Dalit lives, using the critical femme lens, they have produced better stories than many Dalits have.
They like it when I compliment them for the quality and depth of their stories but hate it when I say that it is not just enough to write better stories. One female colleague acted like I had personally offended her when I pointed out that she was part of an all-woman discussion panel, which was great, but the panel was also all Brahmin. She said caste was one of the topics discussed at the panel.
What’s new in that? Caste and untouchability are a morally settled issue in India’s political circles where nobody is openly anti-Dalit. From the communists to the communalists to the Gandhians to the Maoists, everybody has by now acknowledged that India has a caste problem.
But nobody has offered a transfer of power to Dalits. Not even to the extent that they can solve their problems themselves. India’s electoral system is designed in such a way that upper-castes have a greater say in deciding the winner in constituencies which are reserved for Dalit candidates.
Of course, the race problem is different from the caste problem. But there needs to be more research and writing on the overlap of caste and race because of how closely American society resembles ours.
The forms of racism are different but the racists are all the same — one of 50 shades of white.
Too often, strong, courageous white people, many of them women like Goldberg believe too deeply in their goodness and the strength of their newfound pro-black ‘wokeness’. So deep that they take offence when their privilege is pointed out.
They believe that in order to become a part of the solution, all they have to do is “acknowledge” their past mistakes and stop discriminating black people. They expect that their small confessions will gain a large audience and set them along a better path. They believe that to be born again as a non-racist white person, you must first make your confession. It is a matter of unwavering faith, like the American dream.
They aren’t bad people, far from it, I actually find them quite sincere. They sincerely believe that #NotAllWhitePeople are bad. They believe that it is enough if they aren’t bad White people. Enough if they participate in the latest #BlackLivesMatter protest.
Goldberg writes: “I’m the tenth editor of National Geographic since its founding in 1888. I’m the first woman and the first Jewish person — a member of two groups that also once faced discrimination here.” What she doesn’t acknowledge is that there is a world of difference between the two groups and the third group about whom she was trying to start a conversation. The difference between Jews and women, and black people is that many Jews and many women have become editors in America. The biggest difference is that Jews and women are not being hunted down by the police in the inner cities of the US for wearing their hats low.
Shouldn’t ‘woke’ feminist women understand the black position and the Dalit position better? They are woke enough to understand the problem with mansplaining and manels. Shouldn’t they be woke enough to know that their attempts to replace white men with white women, upper-caste men with upper-caste women present a major contradiction?
It’s just not enough for them to correct their language, change their gaze and expand their vision. Being good is not longer good enough.
How would Goldberg react if a White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant male editor of a major publication commissioned a special issue for women on women’s day and inaugurated it with a grandiose editorial titled “The female issue”?
No number of special issues on race and caste by white people and upper caste people, male or female, will ever be able to do justice to the race issue and the caste issue. By presenting them as special issues, editors are refusing to acknowledge that race and caste are a daily aspect of life in the two countries, common to the point of being exasperating, the point of being boring.
Like sports, soap operas, politics, cinema and celebrities, caste and race need to appear in the dailies and on prime-time on regular days and nights, like a Monday or a Wednesday. Not in the Sunday supplement, not in special issues.
The author reports on caste, communalism and corruption. He is on a sabbatical from journalism at the moment.