Some racialism

The important question here is not that there is racialism in world, but how do you really define it. People may not mean anything by the words they use, but then the situation and the context becomes important.

So today an old lady, who handles logistics of our department, came into my office room and enquired my fellow lab member about the people sitting in the lab. So we were four of the five who normally sit in the lab. So the situation is that we four do not know the name of the fifth person. So my collegue has a hard time explaining her who the person is. He tries hard but cannot come up with an adequate description that could help this lady. I tried to say the black guy but kept quite. I guess for the same reason my collegue was not mentioning the 'B' word. Or maybe because I was there.

But the poor lady helped us by mentioning the 'B' word. What a relief! But the important thing is when we do not put names to faces we start to associate other things such as height, clothes, status and finally color with the person. That's when pundits like me bring the racial stuff in the picture.

But then people here call Obama the first black president. That's also racial. When we say chapte, desi or amro, that's also racial. I guess we all use some racial terms at least once a day. Then perhaps the lady was just fine. We were unnecssarily bothered.