“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter,” said the Reverend Martin Luther King. For leaders of the US civil rights struggle this was not a lofty ideal so much as a practical reason to regroup after being assaulted by thugs, mauled by police dogs and battered by fire hoses. Repeatedly, progressive American citizens – black and white, rich and poor – risked life and limb to integrate lunch counters, buses and high schools and universities in the American South, because they were determined to overturn centuries of racial prejudice.
King and his colleagues were spat on, cursed, and beaten because they dared to insist on the humanity of a group that had been treated as a perennial underclass in American society. Their mission often seemed impractical, but it drew its inspiration from earlier progressive movements. Perhaps the most eloquent slogan of the decade – “I am a man” – echoed a catchphrase of the British Abolitionist movement while quietly alluding to the crux of the 1857 US Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case.
If King were alive today, he would be urging his compatriots to show compassion towards refugees. As mass migrations from chronically insecure parts of the world catch Europe and the United States off guard, millions of silent and displaced people have become a target of opportunity for racists and chauvinists on both sides of the Atlantic. US politicians, particularly within the Republican Party, have displayed a lack compassion that is especially disheartening.
Ben Carson compared potential refugees to “a rabid dog running around your neighborhood”; Donald Trump suggested creating a special registry for Muslims, Jeb Bush argued that the US should focus on helping Christians instead of Muslims. It was Marco Rubio, however, who put the issue into its clearest focus: “Here’s the problem. You allow 10,000 people in. And 9,999 of them are innocent people feeling oppression. And one of them is a well-trained ISIS fighter. What if we get one of them wrong? Just one of them wrong.”
Rubio’s question carries overtones of the “one per cent doctrine” formulated by US vice president Dick Cheney ‒ the idea that potentially catastrophic scenarios, however unlikely, ought be treated as credible threats to US national security. Clearly the vast amounts of manpower and money squandered on this foolish notion have taught the GOP nothing.
Fortunately, as a recent letter to this newspaper shows, not everyone has remained silent. In the wake of the recent attacks in Paris, a few extraordinarily brave French Muslims have stood blindfolded in public squares, inviting fellow citizens to embrace them as an act of solidarity. Thousands have done so. A group of Pakistani comedians have made a viral video which points out, in the course of affirming Muslim solidarity with the victims of the Paris attacks, that the main targets of terrorism, worldwide, are Muslims. Hundreds of thousands of other ordinary people — of all faiths and races — have made similar small but significant gestures against the divisive stereotyping that extremist groups like al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and Boko Haram require for their propaganda to succeed. In its proper context, compassion towards refugees is merely the final rebuke to the autocrats and extremists who have forced them into exile.
Multicultural societies like Guyana have no excuse for ignorance in these matters. We know too well the price of racism and mutual suspicion, whether these arise from religion or ideology. Hundreds of thousands of us have fought racism and xenophobia in other countries and we ought to recognize jingoist posturing for the folly that it is. Moreover, not only do we face none of the threats that have so unsettled Western countries, but, as Mr Lye points out in his letter, we could likely absorb a large number of migrants at little or no cost. Not only would this stimulate our economy, culture and society, it would go a long way towards establishing Guyana as a progressive and compassionate country. Rather than asking why we can’t do this, we should be asking ourselves Why not?
