Prof. Charles Sarvan
A Sinhalese, a friend for over sixty years, recently suggested that I was a racist. I found that particularly ironic because in 1958 I went to his village with my notes to help him re-sit the first-year university examination, and was caught up in the anti-Tamil riot of that year. The denial of equality is not abstract theorising to me. Having been a ‘Para Dhemmala’ in Sri Lanka; a non-white in England in the early 1960s when “colourism” was unashamed, overt and crude; having been an Asian in Africa, and a ‘non-believer’ in a Muslim country, I am for human equality; for equality not in form but in substance, equality not in false protestation but in actual practice; for equality irrespective of ethnicity, skin-colour, sex, religion, language caste or class. All human beings are equal in dignity and rights, affirms Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was worded as “universal” and not as “international” rights because, as Stephane Hessel clarifies in his ‘Time for Outrage’ (written when he was ninety-three), that is “how to forestall the argument for full sovereignty that a state likes to make when it is carrying out crimes against humanity on its own soil”. To deny human equality is to be left with, “We are superior”. If you are different and inferior, then you can be treated in an inferior manner, that is, normal ethical standards of conduct do not apply. This is how humanity has rationalised its inhumane and unjust conduct worldwide and throughout the centuries. If to take the essential equality of all human beings as axiomatic and sacred is to be a racist then I am guilty.
If to be for inclusion, rather than for exclusion and subordination; if to be for decency, as Avishai Margalit describes it in his ‘The Decent Society’ (Harvard, 1996), then I am a racist.
