‘BEYOND THE PALE’: Internalised Racism In SL.
Published in Ceylon Today, August 26th, 2019
(C) Dr. Devika Brendon 2019
I believe Ireland was the first English colony. And Dublin, the capital city on the east coast of Ireland, closest to the west of England, was the first colonial stronghold. The colonizing English built a fence around the city, made of pointed whiteish stakes and wooden planks, palings, and called it ‘The Pale’. They built their houses and amassed their wealth within its demarcations.
From this they derived the phrase ‘beyond the pale’ - and everyone who dwelled outside this safety zone was regarded as a barbarian, outside the realm of what was considered civilized. Through the decades and centuries following, the phrase became detached from geography and physical setting, and came to mean ‘outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour’. Such is the powerful tribal call of conformity.
Image credit: Stockade Fencing
A couple of years ago, I heard the phrase ‘white worshipping’ for the first time, in Sri Lanka. The person who used it was a westernized Colombo individual, equipped with I-phone, fashionable disenchantment, airs and graces and the other accessories of young, self-described progressive liberals.
He used the phrase to describe those who substituted jeans for sarongs, and bias cut floating boho garments for cloths and jackets. Who put blonde streaks in their dark hair, and who, instead of grinding their own turmeric and plucking coconuts for their milk and water, buy the processed versions in beauty and food products, conveniently packaged in plastic packets and bottles. Did he realize that his use of the phrase itself indicated an internalized racism on his own part?
Worshipping in Sri Lanka is associated with religion and respect for our parents, leaders and guide figures: those who have attained a near-divine status, spiritually and through their learning and education. We bow to the ground in front of our parents, and our teachers and the leaders we respect.
How can such an exalted term be applied to any person’s choices to adopt westernized clothes and lifestyle, their reading habits and their cultural preferences in music, films and food?
Probably only in a society where materialism has replaced spiritual values can such a substitution be made.
It’s not an easy situation, living in a colonized world, as part of the colonized people. The nature of colonization is brutal, exploitative and hierarchical; and its underlying policy is to divide and conquer. Those divisions endure, and cause rancor between the colonized people, fuelled by insecurities that are fostered by the thuggery of coloniser’s norms and values: how ‘white’ are we? how straight is our hair? how much can we assimilate in a dominant culture or imitate our historical conquerors? how much can we identify with those who we perceive as powerful? If these questions trouble us, we are still trying to live within the pale.
It is disheartening to see how crude and binary these judgments are: how people strive to change themselves to gain acceptance into a dominant echelon, even to the extent of undergoing transformative surgery and damaging their health by using ‘straightening’ hair treatments and skin lightening creams.
Racism as an instrument of colonial oppression, when it is internalized by those subjected to it, operates insidiously. It disempowers us, and makes us unhappy with our essential selves. We live in the shadow of the tyranny of judgment, and this fractures our sense of self worth.
This two-edged sword, or fence of stakes and palings, cuts in a myriad ways: compliments are made to those with fairer skin, ‘high end’ clothes and food are French or Italian or North American or European. Fashion centres of the world - we have been told - have been in Paris or New York or Milan. ‘Top tier’ colleges and universities are similarly distributed, throughout the so-called First World, and access to them is increasingly narrowed, and indicates socio-economic privilege. The message of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ quality and value is sent to us in multiple ways: local produce, local products, local customs and local services are often decried in comparison to international ones.
Buying local, seeing value in what is done in the country, seeing beauty when we look in the mirror, being proud of our location and our resources, exercising our sovereignty and celebrating our nationhood, involves gradually transforming the mindshift ‘centre of gravity’ in the vehicle of our economic progress. We can surely progress and take our place internationally without any loss of respect for the traditions and wisdom of our distinctive culture.
We often hear people in the country laughing at others for ‘aping the West’, for westernizing their names, for acclimatizing physically to a Westernized world, mocking each other for our Westernized tastes, making assumptions about the hierarchy of who we date and marry based on their - and our - westernized aspirations or appearance. We can trace this by identifying what we consider to be special celebration meals, iconic destinations, and designer labels, and see it as not-so-White noise: these values often show not our own relative superiority or our nationalism or authenticity, but ignorance of our collective post-colonization experience, and our ongoing everyday situation dealing with its complexities.
(C) Dr. Devika Brendon 2019
I believe Ireland was the first English colony. And Dublin, the capital city on the east coast of Ireland, closest to the west of England, was the first colonial stronghold. The colonizing English built a fence around the city, made of pointed whiteish stakes and wooden planks, palings, and called it ‘The Pale’. They built their houses and amassed their wealth within its demarcations.
From this they derived the phrase ‘beyond the pale’ - and everyone who dwelled outside this safety zone was regarded as a barbarian, outside the realm of what was considered civilized. Through the decades and centuries following, the phrase became detached from geography and physical setting, and came to mean ‘outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour’. Such is the powerful tribal call of conformity.
Image credit: Stockade Fencing
A couple of years ago, I heard the phrase ‘white worshipping’ for the first time, in Sri Lanka. The person who used it was a westernized Colombo individual, equipped with I-phone, fashionable disenchantment, airs and graces and the other accessories of young, self-described progressive liberals.
He used the phrase to describe those who substituted jeans for sarongs, and bias cut floating boho garments for cloths and jackets. Who put blonde streaks in their dark hair, and who, instead of grinding their own turmeric and plucking coconuts for their milk and water, buy the processed versions in beauty and food products, conveniently packaged in plastic packets and bottles. Did he realize that his use of the phrase itself indicated an internalized racism on his own part?
Worshipping in Sri Lanka is associated with religion and respect for our parents, leaders and guide figures: those who have attained a near-divine status, spiritually and through their learning and education. We bow to the ground in front of our parents, and our teachers and the leaders we respect.
How can such an exalted term be applied to any person’s choices to adopt westernized clothes and lifestyle, their reading habits and their cultural preferences in music, films and food?
Probably only in a society where materialism has replaced spiritual values can such a substitution be made.
It’s not an easy situation, living in a colonized world, as part of the colonized people. The nature of colonization is brutal, exploitative and hierarchical; and its underlying policy is to divide and conquer. Those divisions endure, and cause rancor between the colonized people, fuelled by insecurities that are fostered by the thuggery of coloniser’s norms and values: how ‘white’ are we? how straight is our hair? how much can we assimilate in a dominant culture or imitate our historical conquerors? how much can we identify with those who we perceive as powerful? If these questions trouble us, we are still trying to live within the pale.
It is disheartening to see how crude and binary these judgments are: how people strive to change themselves to gain acceptance into a dominant echelon, even to the extent of undergoing transformative surgery and damaging their health by using ‘straightening’ hair treatments and skin lightening creams.
Racism as an instrument of colonial oppression, when it is internalized by those subjected to it, operates insidiously. It disempowers us, and makes us unhappy with our essential selves. We live in the shadow of the tyranny of judgment, and this fractures our sense of self worth.
This two-edged sword, or fence of stakes and palings, cuts in a myriad ways: compliments are made to those with fairer skin, ‘high end’ clothes and food are French or Italian or North American or European. Fashion centres of the world - we have been told - have been in Paris or New York or Milan. ‘Top tier’ colleges and universities are similarly distributed, throughout the so-called First World, and access to them is increasingly narrowed, and indicates socio-economic privilege. The message of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ quality and value is sent to us in multiple ways: local produce, local products, local customs and local services are often decried in comparison to international ones.
Buying local, seeing value in what is done in the country, seeing beauty when we look in the mirror, being proud of our location and our resources, exercising our sovereignty and celebrating our nationhood, involves gradually transforming the mindshift ‘centre of gravity’ in the vehicle of our economic progress. We can surely progress and take our place internationally without any loss of respect for the traditions and wisdom of our distinctive culture.
We often hear people in the country laughing at others for ‘aping the West’, for westernizing their names, for acclimatizing physically to a Westernized world, mocking each other for our Westernized tastes, making assumptions about the hierarchy of who we date and marry based on their - and our - westernized aspirations or appearance. We can trace this by identifying what we consider to be special celebration meals, iconic destinations, and designer labels, and see it as not-so-White noise: these values often show not our own relative superiority or our nationalism or authenticity, but ignorance of our collective post-colonization experience, and our ongoing everyday situation dealing with its complexities.
