Last year, for my dissertation, I researched religious conflict in India but now find the story repeating itself in the US. Politicians of a majority religious group (depending on the election) would purposely try to spark tensions with minority groups. In one case, in Deganga in 2010, opportunistic Hindu politicians held a rally in a Muslim cemetery. Predictably, riots ensued.
As I charted all the cases of religious violence, I found something disturbing. Politicians would instigate riots to make religious identities salient.
For example: someone might identify as a poor man and vote Marxist, but if he is instead made to identify as a Hindu, he would then vote for a religious rather than class based party. Religious riots turn religious identities into matters of life and them. A clear them vs us. After the riots, religious identities became prevalent and I found that in the aftermath, religious based parties consistently won elections.
In the American South, politicians have used this same formula for year, using low key racism to win elections. For example: this republican campaign ad from 2006 against Harold Ford Jr. directly played on fears of black men stealing white women, an age old theme in the American south. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWkrwENN5CQ
Trump brought this strategy to the rest of America. He consistently used racism to make racial, rather than economic identities salient. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/11/donald-trump-warns-that-other-communities-are-poised-to-steal-the-election/?utm_term=.b29e3f14068c
“Us and Them” was not about class or religion, it was an us vs them based on race.
A 2014 Research study by David Pietraszewski, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, “The content of our cooperation, not the color of our skin: an alliance detection system regulates categorization by coalition and race, but not sex” presents another route to combat racism.
These researches proposed that us humans have an innate alliance detection mechanism, that detects friendships and alliances needed to thrive in a group. There is no inherent reason that skin-color should predict these alliances: “…racial categories do not exist because skin color is perceptually salient; they are constructed and regulated by the alliance system in environments where race predicts social alliances and divisions.” My research in India found that rather than race- it was religion that predicted social alliances and division. While I’ve seen racism in the UK, I’ve found class to be a much more salient predictor of alliances and divisions here.
The 1890 US Census, divided Americans into White, Black, Mulatto, Quadroon, Octoroon, Chinese, Japanese, or Indians. Half of those identities seem absurd today, the rest are just as absurd
In the United States, race is a construct built up by opportunistic politicians to win elections. A construct we need to fight.
Research by Henry Tajfel on group divisions shows clearly that as soon as lines are drawn between groups, no matter how arbitrary, people begin to see themselves as intrinsically different and look down at other groups.
Whether in rural India, or the United States today, we can’t let opportunistic politicians divide us for cheap victories. We can’t let these lines be drawn. We’re individuals, more than our mother tongue, more than our skin tone, more than the direction in which we pray.
United We Stand, Divided We Fall
India research heavily influenced by Votes and Violence by Steven Wilkinson.
Lecture from Bradley Franks- Culture and Cognition (Jan 19,2017)
Faustus Analytics 