Racism In Disguise

According to encyclopedia definition, Racism is defined as, also called racialism, is generally defined as actions, practices, or beliefs that reflect the racial worldview: the ideology that humans are divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called "races". This ideology entails the belief that members of a race share a set of characteristic traits, abilities, or qualities, that traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural behavioral characteristics are inherited, and that this inheritance means that races can be ranked as innately superior/ inferior to others. It's sad to say in Pakistan, it reaches to such without getting noticed in the society. We all as a nation are either a part of racial actions or victim of it. Recently, Luis Saurez (Liverpool Football player)  taunted racism comments on Patric Evra(Manchester United Football player)  gained a lot of publicity. Its exist every moment, every second in our society.

 I think that the inception of racism in Pakistan began in the theatres, where thousands of people would applaud on the humourous jokes. This was not a serious offence although I think it may hay kick started the trend of such dialogue. From school to universities, where we so called literate people always form circles against the dark skinned friend of ours and make witty jokes on him. It's like a natural gathering of people against  dark skinned people. We always prefer to have more white skinned friends in our group. Even these events are not restricted to students, teachers too are part of it. And often in anger, they call dark skinned student with slangs ; "oye kaliya (blackie), kalay (black), andheray (shadow),etc". I am witness of such events. We will always notice that even students make racism jokes on teacher with dark skin. The fact is that this is not a cause of deliberation but nonetheless we have made a laughing stock out of the people who only share a different colour from us.

Marriages in our society are also influenced by this act. Families like to marry their son/ daughter with fair-skinned person. They don't even consider the good qualities, education and character of the person. Fair-skinned husband always have complaints about their dark-skinned wife and doesn't think her as competent enough to go out with her, just because the people in society would say ; "Look how dark her wife is?". I am extremely sorry to say that nowadays often these women work in offices if they have fair-skinned colour.  Just examine the basic example: Have you ever seen dark-skinned girls as bus hostess or air hostess?

I in particular can't define the extent of racism in our society. I consider the current wave against Urdu speaking community( known commonly as Muhajirs) from rest of Pakistani natives as racism. I consider it racism, when  people shy from a dark skin man in a bus, restaurant and public places and they are treated just as low class. I consider it racism when we separate people on the basis of Punjabis, Sindhis, Pathan, Balochis. Most of us even don't know that we are so amalgamated to the situation that we have accepted it as part of our society and we don't even consider it as an issue. We must remind ourselves of the last sayings of Hazrat Muhammad (SAW) : "You are no better than a red skinned person nor a black but he who has fear of Allah (S.T) in his/her heart".