‘All lives matter, black and white’
Gandhi’s Durban-born grandson gives his perspective
ARUN Manilal Gandhi, an Indian-American socio-political activist and Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, does not agree with the slogan Black Lives Matter.
The slogan is part of an international human rights movement that originated in the African-American community.
It campaigns against the violence and systemic racism levelled at black people.
Gandhi said while he understood why and where the term originated from, it perpetuated the divided society that people have created.
“I believe that all lives matter. Therefore, we should all work towards creating that kind of respect for all life,” said Gandhi.
Black Lives Matter is also an activist organisation in the US, which was started six years ago by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi.
According to wikipedia.org, it regularly holds protests speaking out against police killings of black people and broader issues such as racial profiling, police brutality and racial inequality in the US criminal justice system.
Last month, the Black Lives Matter campaign was back in the news after 46-year-old George Floyd, an African American, died in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
It was alleged that Derek Chauvin, a white policeman, knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed face down in the street.
Two other officers further restrained Floyd and a fourth prevented onlookers from intervening.
During the final three minutes, Floyd was motionless and had no pulse.
The officers allegedly made no attempt to revive him and Chauvin’s knee allegedly remained on Floyd’s neck when emergency medical technicians attempted to treat him.
After Floyd’s death, demonstrations and protests against the use of excessive force by the police and the lack of police accountability were held globally.
But the peaceful protests turned violent as a police precinct and two stores were set alight and many stores were looted.
There were subsequent clashes with the police.
President Donald Trump, who called for force to end the clashes, has been accused of fuelling the tension instead of uniting Americans.
Arun Gandhi was born in Durban and lived in the Phoenix Settlement, which his grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi,
established in 1904.
He said after his dad, Manilal Gandhi, died in 1956, he went to India to immerse his father’s ashes. While there, he met and fell in love with Sunanda, whom he went on to marry. They have one daughter, Archana.
“However, the then South African
apartheid government would not allow me to bring them home with me, so I was forced to live in India,” said Gandhi.
“I worked as a journalist for 33 years before joining the lecture circuit in the US.”
For 30 years now, the 86-year-old grandfather has been promoting Gandhian non-violence to audiences that range from high school pupils to university students and laypeople.
He is based in Rochester, New York, and describes the city as mid-sized with a conservative population, especially non-Africans.
Gandhi said the neighbourhood was integrated but everyone kept to themselves.
“I have been here since 2004 but beyond saying ‘hello’, if you happen to come out of your house at the same time, there is no socialisation, so consequently no one knows who lives next door to them,” he said.
He added the US had an informal apartheid – where the whites were at the top of the pyramid, followed by Indians and Asians and blacks.
Gandhi said after Floyd’s death, while people of colour were angry, white Americans were more shocked than angry.
“They cannot believe that a white person would be so ruthless. They are oblivious to the brutality of their kind towards the black race.”
He acknowledged, however, that there were some good police officers in the US who have rallied in support of the protesters, adding that this was the first time they had come out against their own.
“Until now, they kept quiet and turned a blind eye. Floyd’s death was heartless, even for the police, so it is no surprise they came out openly in sympathy with blacks.”
He said he believed the protests had started off as legitimate and peaceful but hooligans had since infiltrated the movement, resulting in violence.
Gandhi also cautioned against activists who said non-violence had never worked.
He said he saw similar protests in South Africa and India and that people seemed to misunderstand the philosophy of satyagraha (non-violence).
“They think that as long as they don’t use physical violence, or hurt or kill human beings, they are non-violent. That is wrong. Violence against property is equally abhorrent.”
He also believed that the violence was partly generated by the police to end the Black Lives Matter campaign.
With the 2020 US elections expected to be held in November, Gandhi said Trump hoped to be re-elected and the violence would serve its purpose.
“It serves his purpose to generate this violence and add to the frustrations of blacks so they can boycott the elections.
“That would improve his chances of winning.”
He said police brutality appeared to have increased since Trump was inaugurated in 2017.
“He is the most divisive president in the history of the US. He continues to divide.”
Gandhi said it was unfortunate that during this time, many forgot that Covid-19 continued to threaten humanity.
“We can only hope that we will not have to pay heavily for this lapse.”
Gandhi’s sister, Ela, who lives in Durban, is the chairperson of Gandhi Development Trust and the Phoenix Settlement Trust.
LIKE many people around the world, I was shocked and dismayed at the senseless death of George Floyd. And like many, I did not know him, but that did not stop most of us from feeling angry and helpless.
Obviously we could not help directly, nor could we support the family at this distance, but many people across the world took to the streets to protest police brutality.
They did this at great personal risk because of the over-zealous police and army response that was reminiscent of the dark days of the civil rights movement in the US and our student protests in South Africa.
John Oliver, in his TV show Last Week Tonight, traced the beginning of policing in the US to the militia which was responsible for finding, capturing and returning runaway slaves to their “owners” on the plantations. He says the police were racist right from the beginning and it is something we can identify with in South Africa.
I can vividly remember the police lining up at the bus stop at the then University of Durban-Westville (now part of the University of KwaZulu-Natal) to wade into the students with batons, whips and tear gas.
I can also remember that many of the police were Indian and African men, who believed that putting food on their children’s plates was more important than the lives of the children of other parents. And we have had our own senseless acts of police and army brutality against what political parties are happy to call our own people.
It seems that everywhere we turn there is a new conflict based on old unresolved struggles and Facebook is no exception.
The one battle, strangely enough, is over the #BlackLivesMatter campaign. I’ve seen many members of the Indian community argue that all lives matter. They are right, of course.
All lives do matter and they are right to approach anything with scepticism. I also found a reason to question it.
I thought I should share the way that I made sense of the campaign and accepted its relevance and importance to me.
My first issue was with the term “black”. Many people are uncomfortable with being classified as black.
Apartheid South Africa did not use the word black to refer to all people classified as non-white.
So, I was not classified as white (obviously) and I did not want to be classified in such a derogatory sense as non-white, and I had problems with being classified as Indian simply because, while I may belong to a cultural tradition, I am not a citizen of India.
I had to understand that being black was not an insult, but really an affirmation of something positive along the lines of Black Consciousness.
Therefore, I see blackness as a state of mind rather than the colour of my skin. It is a way to refuse being oppressed.
No one is going to say that I’m not black, because it is a state of mind that I choose for myself.
The second issue was a little easier to understand and it could be reduced to one simple question: “When did black lives ever matter?”
Well, if I consider the history of all black people it is clear that my life really did not matter to whites (not to refer to skin colour but the state of mind).
I really did not have to be a historian to know that black lives didn’t really matter – otherwise we would not have had slavery, subjugation and indenture.
Since my heritage was interrupted by indenture (which is a form of slavery), it was clear to me that black lives never really mattered.
The last issue is whether African-American lives matter more than, say, South African lives, or even Hispanic lives. This has been my greatest worry. I even want to change BlackLivesMatter to #AllBlackLivesMatter.
This does not mean that all lives don’t matter, but white lives have always mattered more than black lives – think about the poor white problem in South Africa and how the railways provided employment and accommodation for white workers.
So, I’m black and my life has been demeaned, manipulated, traded, violated and destroyed by whiteness, but I can proclaim that my life matters and I can join with like-minded people and proclaim that #BlackLivesMatter.
So, what is it that we can do?
I’m not suggesting that people support the #BlackLivesMatter campaign, but I do suggest that if they genuinely believe that all lives matter, then start a campaign and don’t dilute the potency of the #BlackLivesMatter campaign, because it deflects the focus away from police brutality to an argument that does not achieve anything besides ruining friendships.
There is something that we can do which is well within our influence as parents.
Oliver also pointed out that police brutality was made palatable and even acceptable by the media. Remember when psychologists were warning us not to expose our children to too much violence on TV? Well, it turns out that they were right.
Almost every American film and television series glorifies violence. From Dirty Harry to Lethal Weapon, The Fast and the Furious to Arrow, violence is glorified.
Children see this violence, but they do not experience the pain.
Educational psychologists once conducted a study where they observed children in two rooms; in the one room they had toys like guns and swords, and television that showed violence, while in the other room they had toys such as dolls and building blocks, and television that showed nonviolent programmes.
They observed that the children in the first room became violent but the children in the other room did not. Well, building a peaceful world starts in the home.