Can we bridge this gap?

By Godaya in London

I was walking past the City Hall the other day, and there was a tall Sikh gentlemen coming out of it. He had a long graying beard, and was dressed in traditional clothing. We passed each other, nodding to acknowledge each other's presence, and then I heard it.

"Osama." Not "Obama" as in "Barrak," but "Osama" as in "Bin Laden." A couple of teens on bicycles were circling him as he walked, repeatedly shouting "Osama." This was the first time that I experienced something like this in London. I've never personally had this kind of thing thrown at me, and considering the large non-British population in London, this is something I never expected. But this was not the real shocker.

The real shocker came when I spoke to a member of our London staff. I went for a flight on the London Eye, and I was surprised to see that there were tight security precautions in place. Not the invasive and nuisance type we have in Sri Lanka, but tight security nonetheless. We started talking about security, and then one thing led to another, and I found ourselves talking about the London bombings, which led to 9/11, which led (regrettably) to Bush, which then led to the war in Iraq, and we ended up discussing Afghanistan, which invariably brought up Osama. And I related this incident to her. I told her how I was surprised to see this, and how I thought racism would be a thing of the past.

And the shocker came when she said that it is on the increase, citing ignorance as the reason. And then I realised it was ignorance that was driving this. It was apparent that those teens did not know that Sikhs came from India, and that Osama was of Arab origin, and is now believed to be in Afghanistan.

Ignorance leads to prejudice, and a lot of people out there live with prejudice. Due to the type of work I do, I've managed to remove much of the prejudices that we are brought up with. And then as you start thinking, you manage to remove all the other pre-conceived notions that you have, and condition yourself not to build prejudices.

It is ignorance that leads people to believe that women are weaker creatures than men, that whites are better than blacks, that people from a specific set of schools are better than those from others. We want to be in the "better" part of society, and create an "us-ness."

People create prejudices against topics they are not comfortable with. I call myself a sexual rights activist, and this brings me across more prejudices.

Just as the modern members of the Aryan nation are prejudiced against blacks and Jews, we live in a culture where the major section of the society swear in the name of God that people with HIV deserve it, that homosexuals should be condemned, that sex workers (or to employ a commonly used word, prostitutes) do it for pleasure, and that women who seek abortions are promiscuous.

Sit back for a moment and think. It's the difference that "they" have from "us" that we are not comfortable with. And the moment you have a prejudice against someone just because they are different from you, you are no different from the likes of Hitler, or the KKK. And look where they ended up.

For once, I'm darn sure that I'm not being Goday.