Tarring others with the brush of hatred

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