I was naive enough to think racism was an American thing...like I could go to Beijing, Moscow, Rome or Tel Aviv and be treated with more respect than I get here in my own country. But now I realize that it would probably be harder for me to get a cab in those cities than it is in New York City, Chicago or Ferguson, Mo.
Black people are victims of racism and aren't wanted or respected almost anywhere you go in the world--except maybe on a basketball court or American football field...European soccer fields notwithstanding.
Racist attitudes associating blacks with every negative stereotype from crime to drugs to disease to barbaric behavior to government dependency appear to have spread around the world. There are countless examples of rampant global racism against people of color, particularly black people. Blacks are ostracized and/or even physically for allegedly taking jobs, burdening health and education systems or simply dating native women. Whatever the motivation, it's ugly and downright depressing.
Perhaps the most despicable example is that the Jewish state of Israel is running refugee camps (tantamount to concentration camps) for thousands of African immigrants the country desperately wants to get rid of. Is that the supreme irony or what?!
Here's an excerpt from an article by Bob Dreyfuss that appeared in The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/...):
Israeli Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar bluntly links his concerns to the fear of losing the “Jewish” nature of Israel:
“There are currently around 30 million people moving around Africa, people who have left their home countries and are looking for a place to be. We can all understand that pressure, but if we are too liberal, then we will lose the country. We will lose the only Jewish country that exists.”
Israel is seeking to deport the African migrants to Uganda, an ironic notion, since in the early days of Zionism Uganda was once held out as a long-shot possibility to host the creation of a Jewish state for European Jewish refugees.
Tensions and protests by the migrants, along with anti-African violence by vigilante citizens of Israel, has been on the rise. Reports Al Jazeera:
Tensions began on Dec. 10, when the Knesset passed an amendment to the Anti-Infiltration Law, which authorized the detention without trial of approximately 55,000 Africans currently living in Israel. On Dec. 12, Israeli prison officials began transferring Africans from the Saharonim prison to the brand-new Holot facility, which is still under construction only a few hundred meters away in southern Israel. Once the first 1,000 beds are filled with Africans from Saharonim, the government plans to move another 2,000 Africans now in Tel Aviv to the detention center.
And if you think that's bad, get this: The Israeli government is apparently practicing Eugenics on Ethiopian immigrants. Check this out from an article in The Daily Banter (
http://thedailybanter.com/...) by Ben Cohen:
After learning that Israel admitted it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections without their knowledge or consent, I must confess to feeling ashamed of myself as a Jew. While the nation state is not, I believe, synonymous with Judaism or Jewish people in general, its behavior does in many ways reflect on us.
From the Independent:
The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically.
One of the Ethiopian women who was interviewed is quoted as saying: “They [medical staff] told us they are inoculations. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.” It is alleged that some of the women were forced or coerced to take the drug while in transit camps in Ethiopia.
Last year, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who also holds the health portfolio, warned that illegal immigrants from Africa “threaten our existence as a Jewish and democratic state”.
Israel’s continued pathway to outright fascism is horrifying to watch. Its behavior towards the Palestinian people can be described only as modern-day colonialism, and the revelation that it is neutering its black citizens puts Israel up there with South Africa’s apartheid government.
IRIN reports: Growing up in Israel, Shay Sium became accustomed to being called a “nigger”. Sium, 32, has lived in Israel most of his life, but says he and other Ethiopian Jews are treated differently from other Israelis: factories do not want to employ them; landlords refuse them; and certain schools turn away their children.
“The word discrimination doesn’t describe what we experience. There is another word for it: racism. It is a shame that we still have to use this word today,” he told IRIN.
As disturbing as Israel's racism is, it's not the only Middle Eastern nation where racism is a problem. Nearby Turkey is another.
This is from an article published by Palash Ghosh in International Business Times (http://www.ibtimes.com/...):
African immigrants in Turkey are facing the same types of discrimination and prejudice as they do in Western Europe. The Hürriyet Daily News of Istanbul, citing comments from an academic, reported that African immigrants in Turkey feel excluded and discriminated by both the Turkish public and the state institutions.
“It is so strange this country [Turkey] is not welcoming Africans,” Mahir Şaul, a Turkish anthropologist and professor at the University of Illinois in the United States, told the paper.
“They [African immigrants in Turkey] have a hard time finding a place to rent, most of them are cheated by locals, and they face social exclusion even on the streets.”
Saul estimated that at least 50,000 African migrants live in Turkey, mostly in Istanbul. About one-third of them are from sub-Saharan Africa. Saul made a distinction between the treatment accorded to North Africans (Arabs) and sub-Saharan Africans (blacks) in Turkey.
“There are substantial differences among the two groups,” he said. “North Africans are Arab in culture and mostly Muslim, whereas sub-Saharans are not Arab in culture and are mostly Christian,” adding that North Africans face far less discrimination. “Black skin marks people out, and it socially affects their lives very negatively,” he added.
In years past, many Africans used Turkey as a launching pad to somehow move to Europe. However, now that most European nations are mired in a deep economic malaise while Turkey’s economy is relatively buoyant, more are choosing to remain in Turkey. But it is not easy for them, especially when they confront the Turkish police.
“A [black] African migrant is generally exposed to more violence and mistreatment by the police than any other migrant of a different race,” Saul said.
Unlike Middle Eastern racism, most of us are aware of European racism, but maybe not the violent extent of it. Per an article by Obi Akwani posted on IM Diversity.Com (
http://imdiversity.com/...):
"...several African students were attacked on the streets of St. Petersburg by people described as “a group of youths.” On the same night, in the same street on two separate occasions, two students were attacked. One was killed and the other escaped with serious injuries.
In 2005, more than 15 people were killed in racially motivated attacks. A year before that there were 44 such slayings, according to the Moscow Bureau of Human Rights.
Survival for non-white people in Russia means that they must learn how to behave themselves in order not to become casualties of the raging wave of racism in the nation’s cities. For Africans in Russian cities this has come to mean knowing where they can go and when it is safe to go there.
Behave themselves? That's synonymous with "stay in your place." Unreal. Is this 2014 Russia or 1963 Birmingham, Alabama?!
And then there's China. Here's part of an article by Gabrielle Jaffe posted on CNN.Com
(http://www.cnn.com/...):
Liberian student David Johnson moved to China just two months ago. He said he has already been subjected to several racist remarks. "One time I was walking down the street and someone called me a stupid black c***," he reported.
"Maybe it was because I was with a Chinese girl and they don't like that."
Reports of this kind of racism date back to when Africans were first welcomed into China to study at Chinese universities in the 1960s. And in 1988, a violent, 300-strong mob broke into an African students' dormitory at Nanjing University and destroyed their possessions while chanting "down with the black devils."
The number of Africans and foreigners living in China has risen significantly since then. Communities have grown up in major cities such as Guangzhou, where 20,000 Africans now live, according to official figures. Some scholars, trying to account for the number of undocumented migrants, put the estimate at around 200,000.
However, "even in those cities where there is now a concentration of black people, still most Chinese have little to no contact with them," said Barry Sautman, a professor of social sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology who specializes in the issue of race in China. As such, their ideas about blacks are largely shaped by the media, Sautman, said, adding, "In the media, Africa is portrayed as a house of horrors, with a huge number of people dying from diseases, wars and extremely high crime rates."
Racism is not just an American thing. It's goes far beyond Ferguson, Mo. and Sanford, Fla. It has no boundaries. It's worldwide. And by all indications, it's getting worse.