The flawed defence of racial bias VIEWPOINT

Barack Obama spent eight years in the White House. Since Mr Obama is a black man, this means that there is no discrimination against black Americans. The carriers of Confederate flags often say that it is absurd for Mr Obama to complain that blacks face discrimination.

Their argument goes thus: Mr Obama was president. Mr Obama is black. Therefore, blacks don’t face racial discrimination. Similarly, the success of Oprah Winfrey proves that there is no discrimination against black women. Extending the logic, Mr Obama’s middle name is the uncompromising “Hussein”. Hence, some of the “very fine people” who rallied recently in Charleston may argue that black men with Muslim names are among the most privileged of American citizens.

When Mr Obama expressed anguish about an unarmed black teenager being shot by a paranoid white man, they felt he had no right to complain about the slaughter of an innocent he described thus, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin”. That specific incident sparked off the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

But regardless of the existence of Mr Obama, Ms Winfrey and General Colin Powell, any statistician who reviewed sociological data about American blacks would unequivocally state that there’s damning evidence of racial profiling and discrimination.

A black man is 10 times more likely to be arrested than a white American, and about five times as likely to be sent to jail. A black woman is twice as likely to be arrested and jailed. Blacks comprise about 14 per cent of the American population — roughly one-seventh. But blacks comprise one-third of the US prison population. A black is umpteen times more likely to receive a death sentence than a white.

The community has lower per capita income than the American median. It has poorer access to decent education in terms of public schooling. Sociological experiments suggest that a job applicant submitting a resume with a “typical black name” like Jada or DeShawn is more likely to be rejected than an applicant with the same exact resume and a race-neutral name or “white” name, like Luke or Holly.

Life expectancy is lower for blacks — much lower if violence is taken into account. An unarmed black man going about his business is way more likely to be shot by a white police officer who is also very likely to be cleared of all charges after departmental investigation.

A black driver, or a black walker, is way more likely to be pulled over by the police for “investigatory stops”. This is so common that “Driving While Black” or DWB is often used as ironic shorthand for racial profiling. The physicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, once described the multiple times he’s been stopped for investigation as DWB, WWB (Walking While Black) and JBB (Just Being Black).

Mr Obama speaking out for his community made a positive difference. He, along with Ms Winfrey and Mr Tyson, is a huge outlier. He had, and has, a big global audience. People were forced to look at racial discrimination in the US, five decades after the Equal Rights Amendment and 150 years after slavery was abolished. American police are now a little less likely to shoot a teenager for JBB since protests by Black Lives Matter activists are guaranteed after every such incident.

Returning to apna desh, there have been multiple gau-rakshak lynchings of Muslims (and of Dalits). Muslims are substantially over-represented in prison and under-trial populations across every state, according to National Crime Records Bureau data. They are less likely to receive bail. They are under-represented in government jobs across every state, and in the central services and in public sector units. Even their right to marry non-Muslims is now being questioned by the Supreme Court.

But of course, Hamid Ansari, had no business using his position to spotlight their plight. Since Mr Ansari was the vice-president of India (and Zakir Husain was President), Muslims have no right to feel insecure.

There’s an old saying, “The plural of anecdote is not data”. To that, one could add the codicil that not every racist idiot is white, or American.