I hope to see nations come together to work on issues that affect everyone

Iwould say that racism never really went away. I would say it was masked by some thought leaders, who helped take the focus away from it.

Because Barack Obama won the election in the US people, people perceived that racism had started to go away or had faded but those in the trenches knew that it never did. I would say that it has resurfaced with the emergence of nationalism and protectionism, not just in the US but across the world — protecting my nation, protecting what’s mine. We are seeing the emergence of old ideologies.

As an American living in the UAE, I have seen that the Middle East and the US are different, so my experiences are different, too. In the UAE, everyone has a passport filled with stamps while in the US, people mainly know about the US and Latin America. Unfortunately, I have had my fair share of racist experiences.

First of all, yes, with the growing trend for nationalism globally, I have started to see an increase in a primitive mindset and divisive rhetoric.

Considering the fact that I live abroad, the media that I turn to is fairly from one perspective. So, I wasn’t really privy to the media or the content that others were watching in the US during the elections last year.

The same applies to social media — because of artificial intelligence, my newsfeed was showing me what other people like me think and talk about, so I was seeing just one side of the issue.

But when I looked at the statistics even before the elections, I could see the numbers that indicated that Trump was favourite to win. He maintained a lead of at least four million on social media and his engagement was through the roof.

It is all about engagement and attention in the world that we live in and he dominated by far, whether it was social media or other media channels.

However, when he won, I wanted to understand more about what some people’s rationale was in thinking he was the best candidate, especially since all the information I was seeing was one-sided prior to the election.

I took this question to social media and posted it to my friends. What I found was that people’s comments varied depending on their religious or cultural backgrounds.

The one thing about living in the UAE is that you share the country with over 200 different nationalities. What that teaches you is true diversity, which ultimately means that you have diverse perspectives, too. That has allowed me to become more open and respectful to other people’s perspectives.

As for the future, I am optimistic and I look forward to not just the US, but even other nations coming together to reach common goals. I have hope that modern minds will prevail and that we will see greater unification on issues that affect all of us like innovation, jobs, energy, education, health and may be even space travel, because even though people don’t realise it, global warming is real.

From Mr Damu Winston

Artificial intelligence and block chain expert living in Dubai