Racism: A problem of past and present

While I was lingering on the search box of my computer, I thought of typing “word” in it. But, accidentally, I typed “white”. Typing error is a common thing, but what I typed was not so common. The thought travelled intermittently inside my mind. Questions jumbled here and there. But, deep down, a question was torturing me—Why I chose white, why not any other word starting with the letter “W”? The answer lies within me and us—within our system—schooling and socio-behavioral malpractice.

Suddenly I thought, white has no whiteness unless it jostles with blackness, or yellowness. The structuralists explicated similar thoughts many years ago by saying everything has two poles; white-black, water-land, male-female, and these poles are called as binary oppositions. But, by giving the divergent idea, Jacques Derrida – pioneer critic of deconstruction, explained about binary oppositions by saying ‘one of the two terms govern the another”. So, we can simply say, in the case of racism white governs black. The root lies here.