Two videos going viral caught my eye this Thursday morning and I have cringed so much I don’t know where to hide anymore. More than once today I have thanked my stars that my children are too young to know and watch viral videos and therefore will escape this onslaught.
The first video is of an elderly white woman in a small suburb of Kentucky, USA telling a Latina shopper to ‘learn English’ and ‘go back to where the f*** you came from’.
The second is of social media star Adam Saleh being removed from a local US plane after passengers felt uncomfortable when he spoke in Arabic to his mom on the phone.
Now I am outraged. I have spent some time in USA and have a lot of people I love and care for still living there. I simply shudder to think what they are doing through. 2016 has seen a tectonic shift in politics on the world stage and if this is what that means, then please stop the world I want to get off.
As a parent, raising my children in a world where this anger is de rigueur, unsettles me. This is one of my main worries. How am I to raise a tolerant child in a world filled with this much intolerance? Tomorrow if my son was to watch this video and ask me why that man was asked to get off the plane, what would I answer? Worse if we were sitting in the same plane and spoke in our mother tongue on the phone, would we be asked to leave too because of our brown skin and strange tongue?
For parents, today, the world and its ideals poses a dilemma. Where we are struggling to come to terms with gender neutrality and equality especially in India, we can’t for a moment believe that we are far away just because these things are happening across the seas and not in our backyard. How then, do we help ourselves? More importantly, how then do we bring up our kids?
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Janani S Koushik
Charles Gilbert
Mansi Zaveri
KSP Team
