Tarring others with the brush of hatred
JAKARTA (JP): My grandmother was an unwavering creature of habit. She ate a spartan breakfast of strong, unsweetened tea with a splash of milk every day, watched the evening news on the dot faithfully and voted Tory throughout her life despite her working class background.
And, as we often found out to our cost, she had no time for Asians.
I saw her erratically when I was a child, for my family lived in South Africa and then the U.S. for most of those years. But in the short window of time when we resided in England, all of us knew it was prudent to give her a wide berth when it came to the touchy subject of "them".
Venture into this territory where rationality feared to tread, and the result was likely to be a rambling, emotional diatribe on what "they did to our boys in the war".
She actually meant World War II and the Japanese but, at a loss to tell them apart from the rest of their cousins on the continent, she conveniently clumped all Asians as one.
It was easier to tar them all with the same brush of hatred and ignorance than deal with having to put gradations on who did what to whom.
Thankfully for her, Asians were few on the ground in small- town Farnworth, Lancashire, in the 1970s. But the reaction was swift on those rare occasions when she did come face-to-face with the "yellow peril" in restaurants or airport lounges. A raised eyebrow, disapproving sneer and hurried gathering of belongings meant it was time to move on. Quickly.
She could also spout off a veritable compendium on the traits of our closest neighbors.
Ask her about the Dutch, and she would tell you it served them right they ended up eating tulips in the war because they were too cowardly to fight. The French? Arrogant, loathe to bathe and consumers of funny foods.
The Germans? Another subject better left untouched, but she would grant they had given the world sultry Marlene Dietrich who, after all, famously gave Abominable Adolf the big brush off back in the 1930s.
Her opinions on the rest of the denizens of Europe -- the Scandinavians, Mediterraneans, the Balkan peoples -- was a blurred gleaning of lore from snatches of conversations and BBC 2 documentaries.
She sounds like a hideous ogre, someone who would have been out stumping for Pauline Hanson's campaign in another place or time.
But I can say truthfully that my grandmother, now long since dead, was a kind, hardworking woman who simply knew no better.
She was a victim of circumstances, of the poverty which forced her to work in the local mills from the age of 12, and of the ignorance which kept her knowledge shuttered in the dark of untruths about that which she did not know or understand.
Her daughter, my mother, engineered her own escape from this darkness through education, even though some might consider marrying a South African and living in his homeland were tantamount to taking two steps backward in the area of respect for other peoples.
But she discarded the nonchalant and insidious stereotypes we foist on others -- thereby keeping them at a distance, objectifying them and allowing us to commit unspeakable acts against them -- to recognize the shared realities of who they, and we, are.
The truth of this has hit home to me with the recent reports on the heinous rapes and sexual assaults of women during last month's riots.
I know that my mother, reading the stories in her living room thousands of miles away, will feel the same aching sense of disgust that ties me in emotional knots. I know that she, too, will not think of whether these women were Chinese-Indonesians, or of Malay stock, or had blond hair and blue eyes like our family members.
She will also not draw distinctions between those people who stood up to the mobs to step in, at great personal risk to themselves, to save others in danger. It was, after all, the humane thing to do.
And I know that she will see what happened as the human tragedy it really is and which we all share, one which defies explanation, rationalization or unctuous excuses.
-- Bruce Emond