Cascades of prejudice

Ages ago a newspaper article etched upon me an imprint so powerful that it never left me. I will never forget. I was just a kid. I still kick myself for not having retained a cutout.

The article ran a full cascade of prejudices and discriminations: A looks down on B, B looks down on C, C looks down on D, D looks down on E, and the list goes on and on. Until we run out of Roman alphabets A, B, C, D, E, … include scholars, traders, teachers, government officials, tycoons, laborers, prisoners, disabled people, sex workers, females who are in love with females, males who are in love with males, persons who do not align to any of the tick boxes on forms demanding personal particulars, and more. No one is left out. Every profession and non-professional, every identity and all walks of life are named. There is a place for everyone in the cascade.

The list scrolls on. So our society is made up of folks where everyone is looked down on by some others, at the same time he or she looks down on still others. Like an infinite waterfall at any point there is always an upstream and a downstream. Nobody is ever short of having somebody to look down on. We all belong to a caste system where there are always castes below us and there are always castes above us. The problem with the caste system is—as people from caste traditions readily testify—there is no way to get out of one. There is no way to switch. People are stuck. Promotion is not a possibility.

How visionary that author was, I still find it overwhelmingly amazing. Goodness, expressed in a Chinese newspaper, back in the eighties, in a land esteemed to be south, least developed and far from civilized for sure. That time and that place, rainbows suggested no pride. A mention cannot be as brief, but the author put pride alongside the rainbow in all its glory.