The “new nor­mal” of pro­tect­ing every­one from any­thing and every­thing has reached the lev­el of social media inani­ties like the ‘Tik­Tok’ chal­lenge. The Nation­al Foot­ball League is impos­ing penal­ties for “bait­ing or taunt­ing acts or words that may engen­der ill-will between teams”. Expe­ri­ence makes me doubt 350-pound line­men are in immi­nent dan­ger from ges­tures or name-call­ing. And grow­ing up with a sur­name like mine pro­vid­ed con­sid­er­able experience.

The vari­a­tions of “Pis­sy pants” kids can come up with is quite impres­sive. (Before any­one asks, I’ve for­got­ten specifics.) Our par­ents wise­ly taught my broth­er and I to ignore the taunters and remem­ber the old line: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will nev­er hurt me.”
That, of course, does not apply to epi­thets like the N‑word, or anti-Semit­ic slurs. They are in a deplorable ‘class’ of their own. But to assign every racial remark — intend­ed or oth­er­wise — to the same cat­e­go­ry cheap­ens and even dimin­ish­es that.
A recent pro­file of the career of U.S. Vice-Pres­i­dent Kamala Har­ris not­ed racism she has had to endure. Includ­ed in the list was Repub­li­can politi­cians delib­er­ate­ly mis­pro­nounc­ing her Indi­an first name.
That’s more in the realm of pathet­ic than racist. Those who do it to pro­voke or demean are less grown up than the kids who played word games with my sur­name. They at least were inno­v­a­tive, and for the most part were try­ing to be fun­ny. The few who did it to be hurt­ful didn’t suc­ceed, for the sim­ple rea­son I was taught not to let them. Lucky for all of us that ‘microag­gres­sion’ wasn’t in vogue back then. Oth­er­wise, some of us would be scarred for life, which is what is hap­pen­ing today.

                                         THERE IS NO ESCAPE

Com­ments are labelled, pigeon-holed, or edit­ed before they are analysed or even con­sid­ered, let alone giv­en a chance to seep into a con­scious mind. Express­ing an uncon­ven­tion­al — mean­ing orig­i­nal — or ‘non-woke’ thought can find you dis­qual­i­fied before you’re bare­ly out of the start­ing gate of philo­soph­i­cal exploration.
To be pro-any­thing is to be anti-some­thing else and vice-ver­sa. There is lit­tle if any mid­dle ground for dis­cus­sion or even care­ful thought. One toe off the mob-beat­en path is now a ‘microag­gres­sion”, although the bound­aries aren’t exact­ly well-marked. One def­i­n­i­tion of the sin is: “A state­ment, action, or inci­dent regard­ed as an instance of indi­rect, sub­tle, or unin­ten­tion­al dis­crim­i­na­tion against mem­bers of a mar­gin­al­ized group such as a racial or eth­nic minority.”
If microag­gres­sions are so sub­tle, how do you fig­ure out if you’re com­mit­ting one? Or on the receiv­ing end?
Denial of intent is step­ping into the Kaf­ka trap.
Derived from the nov­el The Tri­al by Czech writer Franz Kaf­ka, the trap is the con­di­tion of always being wrong. Deny­ing an accu­sa­tion is tak­en as an admis­sion of guilt; only a guilty par­ty would go out of their way to counter an alle­ga­tion of wrong­do­ing. Say­ing noth­ing is the same thing, because silence means accep­tance of the allegation.
Ridicule and con­tempt have replaced dis­cuss and dif­fer. An egre­gious exam­ple is the craze for tear­ing down or defac­ing stat­ues of oth­er­wise great fig­ures because at some stage they took part in or expressed sup­port for a prac­tice that didn’t meet today’s stan­dards or norms. The per­pe­tra­tors laud it as activism or ‘wok­e­ness’, nec­es­sary lest some­one be dis­turbed or hurt by remem­ber­ing past evils.

                               A SENSIBLE ALTERNATIVE

But if there is noth­ing to remind us of the past, evil or oth­er­wise, how will future gen­er­a­tions know it was there, or learn from it? The best exam­ple of how to deal with mon­u­ments to repres­sion I’ve ever encoun­tered was in Mozam­bique, a coun­try that suf­fered for cen­turies under the yoke of some of the worst excess­es of colo­nial­ism imag­in­able. At inde­pen­dence in 1975, mon­u­ments to heroes of the Por­tuguese colo­nial empire loomed over every square of the cap­i­tal Maputo (renamed from Louren­co Mar­ques). When I went there a year lat­er for a series of reports on how the new Marx­ist state was doing, only the plinths remained. The grandiose stat­ues they dis­played had been care­ful­ly cut off and moved to the state elec­tric­i­ty company’s secure stor­age grounds.
“It is nat­ur­al that the peo­ple would want to destroy them,” my gov­ern­ment-appoint­ed guide (read “min­der”) told me. “But they are part of our his­to­ry which we must not allow to be for­got­ten. We are keep­ing them safe until they can be put in a museum.”
Nei­ther my thought­ful guide nor I recog­nised it at the time as a per­fect exam­ple of the wis­dom Vin­cent Van Gogh applied to art: “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” 

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