[WSMDiscuss] COVID-19 Pandemic- How Caste and Race Play Out Their Role

[Umakant]

Dear Friends

Greetings! COVID-19pandemic and the response by the State in countries all over the world hasraised many serious questions and perhaps we are still not able to find anyright answers despite knowing it well how primordial value system of caste andrace still guides human behavior and conduct in society at large. 

 

The classic examplesof caste and race determining the fate of millions of people into subjugationand brutal exclusion from the development process has meant that Dalits inSouth Asia and African Americans in US shall always remain lesser humans. Andshall always remain sacrificial lambs too during pandemics like COVID-19, ornatural disasters. 

 

Do pass it on toothers in your circle/network. 

 

Thecoronavirus has laid bare the reality of America's racial caste system

Malaika Jabali, Opinion, TheGuardian, May 27, 2020 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/27/coronavirus-america-racial-caste-system

 

Generationsafter Brown v Board of Education, the US is still separate and unequal 

 

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India’s Pandemic Response Is A Caste Atrocity

ChitrangadaChoudhury and Aniket Aga, Opinion, NDTV, May 27, 2020 

https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/india-s-pandemic-response-is-a-caste-atrocity-2236094 

 

Indiahas a sickness so serious, that even its response to the Covid-19pandemic betrays a fatal infection. Nowhere in the world has a lockdown been asinhuman or imposed with such contempt for the lives of its millionsof working poor. The Modi government's turning of a health challenge into ahuman catastrophe and the approval of a large section of India's elitescan only be explained by casteism, which grades people on a hereditaryhierarchy of worth, and legitimises the brutalization of 'lesserbeings'.

 

Thelockdown is in effect a caste atrocity i.e. a willful act of violence inflictedon marginalized castes, and invisibilized in the name of halting a virus. 

 

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The pandemic is sending India's poor into the abyss

Moushumi Roy and Tirth Bhatta, Salon, May 24, 2020 

https://www.salon.com/2020/05/24/the-pandemic-is-sending-indias-poor-into-the-abyss/

 

Already rife with inequality, the pandemic hasdistributed suffering unequally among India's underclass 

 

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COVID-19: Indians from the North East region victims ofracial and regional prejudice

IANS/OutlookMagazine, May 24, 2020 

COVID-19: Indians from the North East region victims of racial and regional prejudice


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With the recentoutbreak of the Coronavirus and the exponential rise in the number of cases,people from the North Eastern states of India, besides being affected by thepandemic, have also been hit by racial profiling and discrimination based ontheir appearance. 

 

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With Regards 

Umakant, Ph. D 

New Delhi 



 






My final words of advice to you are educate, agitate and organize; have faith in yourself. With justice on our side I do not see how we can lose our battle. The battle to me is a matter of joy. The battle is in the fullest sense spiritual. There is nothing material or social in it. For ours is a battle not for wealth or for power. It is battle for freedom. It is the battle of reclamation of human personality. 
B.R.Ambedkar
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