How Real Can Discrimination and its Effects be?
I was running some errands last week on a lovely sunny morning when some kids playing nearby caught my attention. They were making noise and running away from another kid trying to join them to play. This little girl was a bit odd in that she had soiled her clothes, with pee, and was munching some dirty piece of mango. The other three children did everything to avoid her the way people avoided individuals suffering from leprosy in ancient Israel.
At some point this little girl realized she wasn’t welcome into the group at all and decided to stand by herself at a distance away from the others. I observed that she almost cried, given the fact that this little girl envied the games the others were playing. To put myself right, all this young girls seemed to be of the same age, the very reason why this discrimination nearly stigmatized our little girl. I wondered for a moment what was going on in this angel’s mind.
Perhaps she was wondering, “Why are they rejecting me?” Maybe this little girl was asking herself, “Am I different, and am I not good enough?” Her gaze at them was one of a person in deep thought. And then you wonder what such a small child, relatively 3 years old, could have been thinking about. I stopped observing this dazzling young girl when her mum came, picked her up and took her to change her soiled clothes.
I wondered for a moment. How real can discrimination be? Do we often realize it, or we are too busy making ourselves lovable that we don’t even notice it? Discrimination according to the Cambridge Dictionary is the act of treating people or a particular group of people differently, especially in a worse way from the way in which you treat other people. This could be because of the differences in skin color, sexual orientation, race, gender, age among other reasons.
Discrimination is often pronounced on the basis of race as was the case in colonial, or rather apartheid South Africa and pre-independent Kenya. In modern age, discrimination has been largely observed to be based on health, economic status, educational status, religion and tribe. The most interesting thing is that mostly, we are not able to notice this discrimination when they come. After all they come in all manner of types and natures; sometimes even from friends.
While growing up, I had children who kept reminding us that their dads were working as senior individuals in government and private companies in big cities. It was either your dad was a ‘cool’ dad, one who works in Nirobi, Nakuru, Kisumu, Mombasa, or your dad was the ‘unfashionable’ dad who worked locally. When you battled it out with greens for supper, your friends could be lucky that their dads had come to visit and brought along meat and bread. The next day you will be left aside as the rest discussed what a tasty supper and breakfast they had taken. These were rare commodities when I was growing up. So during playing time, you could not join in if the rest of the group felt you didn’t deserve to be part of the team.
Come to secondary school and things were just the same. There was the team of dot.com geeks and hippies who rocked our world when we were struggling to understand what this elephant thing called dot.com was. People made friends with those that they felt matched their statuses. Statuses built on the fortunes of their parents and the collection of items they had. The school tried hard to level the ground for everyone but it often addressed just a small part of that.
For instant, there were students who received hefty sums of pocket money, enough to buy the loyalty of some teachers; pun intended. These guys enjoyed the life a high school kid from a well to do family could afford. They went to all school functions because they would manage to buy bread for the organizers and prefects in charge. Then there were the handsome guys who enjoyed the attention of all the beautiful girls in such functions as music festivals, outings and other related activities.
It didn’t end there. Years later in college, it was the ‘cool’ guys vs the ‘commoners’. The handsome and beautiful lot vs the ugly and average ones. The rich vs the struggling ones. This were the associations and if there was one that broke those barriers, it must have been that of convenience. One person was the prerequisite convenience of the other. It was that tough and a lot of us still managed.
Nowadays the discrimination and struggle is on the basis of religious lines, educational levels, fashion, tribal backgrounds and economic prowess. Like I saw one lady being sidelined because a group of others felt they were good looking than her. Then I once went to an event and all the ladies seemed to focus on this one hot guy while a bunch of us were left to talk about male chauvinism, politics and the state of the economy. In fact we were discussing very critical matters before one of our distracted members made this observation. I bet it was meant to break the intensity of the discussion but then we can agree that discrimination is very real from these instances.
Most recently, I realized, people discriminate others on the basis of their language. That some people say they can’t put up with other human beings because their local dialect and accent has taken a better part of them or they can’t speak good language. I once fell for the former, where I was discriminated because of the excess mother tongue accent. It is improving since then and it doesn’t bother me any longer like it used to some time ago.
We thus agree that discrimination is there and it can have a lethal effect on the confidence of the individual as well as their personal esteem. We are a one people and we ought to love one another equally. After all everything in this world is vanity and we will not be missed for the things we didn’t do but by the little good things we did to other people like accepting them fully for who they are. And this is a virtue we need to cultivate in our young ones as they grow up. Yes we are different, but that does not make us less or more human than others.
We will be remembered for the simple acts we did to others such as offering hope for the discriminated and a shoulder to lean on for the oppressed. Let’s learn to accept all humanity, appreciate and love them in equal measure and in their own uniqueness. Discrimination will thus cease from our vocabularies and we will become better than we are today.
End.
Copyright @ 2019.
