The United States’s stance on the racism conference was strange, but predictable.
It seems that there are no new stories in this world – only new twists, and sometimes new endings. The World Conference on Racism, Xenophobia, Intolerance, etc, etc, will come to a spluttering end under the
balmy skies of Durban, just as its predecessors did in 1978 and 1983, with race hardly making it on to the agenda, and intolerance finally carrying the day.
The proceedings began strangely, but predictably, with the United States refusing to send its most senior diplomat, race-man General Colin Powell, and making do with a low-profile delegation instead. They continued even more strangely when that delegation, having hung around observing for a few days, downgraded their country’s participation even further by walking out before the conference had got to the halfway mark, taking their key ally and client, Israel, along with them.
What a palaver. The US, the wealthiest and most powerful state on Earth, and one that has clearly benefited more than any other from the institution of African slavery (on which the idea of institutional racism was founded) was refusing to engage in the main topic of conversation. The stated reason was the insistence of some naughty Middle Eastern countries of equating Zionism (the philosophy that had brought what some would call the racially exclusive state of Israel into existence) with racism. The real reason, as many pointed out, was the refusal of the Western nations (with the remarkable exception of Belgium) to even talk about slavery and colonialism – for fear that the former slaves and their former colonial extended families back home in Africa would start queuing up for compensation, and thereby wreck the global economy those nations had worked so long and tirelessly to put together.
I cannot stop my mind wandering to two of Shakespeare’s plays, both set in what was then the world’s most powerful trading nation-state. The 16th-century Venice in which Othello and The Merchant of Venice are set could be looked at as the equivalent of today’s world leader. The idea of globalisation might well have originated in ancient Venice, with its tentacles spreading all over the known and unknown world. Racism, xenophobia and intolerance run like poison through the arteries of both plays.
Is Othello about race? No and yes – as much as The Merchant of Venice is and is not about anti-Semitism. Both plays are complex reflections on the human condition. Which is basically one of fear, survival, obscure desire, pig-headedness and greed – irrational emotions rationalised by the nearest available justification, race being just one.
Does it matter that Othello is black and that Desdemona is white? It certainly does. To the lovers – the Moor in his middle years and the beautiful, curious, young Venetian aristocrat – love is blind. But in the end, for Othello and Desdemona – yes, race matters profoundly, because – well, because society says it does.
Does it matter that Shylock is a Jew? Most definitely. His fury for revenge against the contemptuous, Jew-baiting Antonio explains his stubborn insistence on literally claiming his pound of flesh when the Venetian defaults on a debt. A desire for revenge after centuries of racial abuse can indeed make anyone want to plunge a knife into the heart of one’s tormentor.
Othello and Shylock were both outsiders in the sealed society of Venice. And yet what society can ever be totally sealed off from the insidious blood of the unknown world? The Moor and the Jew were a necessary evil, tolerated while they were useful, subtly rejected, despised or destroyed when they crossed beyond the boundaries of their allotted space.
In ancient Venice, the Moor and the Jew, outsiders in that pious, Christian world of conquest and commerce, would have had good reason to make common cause. Shylock’s speech to the Venetian court that is about to trick him out of his legal due, his bitter revenge, says it all.
Addressing the duke, who asks him to show mercy lest mercy be denied to him by the Almighty, he says:
“What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong? You have among you many a purchased slave, which, like your asses and your dogs and mules, you use in abject and in slavish parts, because you have bought them: shall I say to you, ‘Let them be free, marry them to your heirs. Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds be made as soft as yours, and let their palates be seasoned with such viands’? You will answer, ‘The slaves are ours.’ So do I answer you. The pound of flesh, which I demand of him, is dearly bought, ’tis mine, and I will have it. If you deny me – fie upon your law! – There is no force in the decrees of Venice.”
Here was a Jew, speaking not just of his own bitter experience as an underdog in the world of wealth and power, but of the ignominious position of the slave as well – and this in the period when Europe’s adventures in the African slave trade were getting into their stride.
It took a holocaust, and a massive mustering of forces to defeat it, before European anti-Semitism was stopped in its tracks – and yet the disease was never totally wiped out.
It took two World Wars, an anti-colonial wave of resistance, and an American civil rights movement before the former slaves were able to step into the light of the modern world. And yet racism, along with its debilitating legacies, is far from being defeated.
And yet here, in Durban, we had the unlikely vision of a latter-day Othello, a black general answerable to the world’s greatest trading nation, the new Venice, leading his Israelite flock away from any meaningful discussion, rational or irrational, about that pound of flesh that is the Western world’s debt to the Wretched of the Earth.
So, yes, there are no new stories: only strange and bewildering new endings.
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