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Very true. Too often, people mistake anger, frustration, tiredness and anything else that causes rudeness or poor service to be racism. Relax, people - this country gives you more equality than almost any other place in the world. Most of the inequities you experience are likely caused by something other than the color of your skin.

Well, yes, for most callers it might just be an expression of anger and the will to do something about the situation (although to me its a damn stupid way). But there are quite a few who would have reacted much differently if instead of a “backward” country like India, it had been an “advanced” country like Germany taking away their jobs.

I personally know an American who still wonders how people from a country where one of the main modes of transportation is elephants can do as good a job as Americans.

This is not exactly racism, but it is somewhere in its vicinty.

Shanti, I quite agree that “White Americans abusing Brown Indians”, as you put it, is not neccessarily racism, but it is if it manifests in racial abuse, which this kind of thing often does. The TOI article doesn’t mention it, but an acquaintance of mine in a call centre said that she gets called things like “stupid brown bitch” all the time, and I’ve heard enough such anecdotes to know that most such calls degenerate into similar racial pejoratives. Perhaps the racial abuse is a manifestation of anger from a different source, but it is racist in nature nevertheless, even if racism is not its primary cause.

To sum it up, it is not the fact of calling and abusing, but the content of the abuse, that makes it racist.

It’s not easy to believe that some people find this outrageous act to be funny
To update u, The radio jokeys’ involved in making the abusive and threatening call to a call centre employee in India, have been suspended for a day (!) .
http://jiten99.blogspot.com/2005/01/offshore-outsourcing-to-india.html

This is in continuation of my previous comment. I strongly feel, the air station who hired these two jokers should seriously think of outsourcing their jobs to India to bring in some sanity, and quality to it’s programmes !

Only 20-30 % Americans travel abroad and hence most of them have no idea of the other side of world. India is a Superpower as visioned
by Honble Rashtrapati Abdul Kalam and folks have proved themselves !!!

To come to the point… any reference to color is “racist comment” and its not that customers
always get best service when calls are dealt within US/Canada. Call centers use scripts when dealing with customers and same case applies to India/China . Operators are trained to deal with
these kind of stress and handling of these type of
calls.

You are right, Amit - I guess the distinction you make is though, lost on many. The whole episode then just degenerates into a racist event without the distinction between the actions and the content.

Jitendra, again, American RJs are known for their stupid pranks - you probably are not aware of a pair of RJs making a couple have sex ina church and stupid stuff like that. I think their prank had more to do with juvenile idiocy than racism.

Racism exists as much in the intent as it does in anything else. I think that intent is pretty non-racist in each of these events mentioned, even if malicious.

A lot of Indians use the R-word with gay abandon for every little piece of ill-fortune to visit them on a foreign land. I see a lot of this on Slashdot.

This is very ironic since India has experienced very little real racism (the biggest example I can think of is what I’ve heard of 1st class carriages and clubs reserved for whites only in Colonial India).

I have often wondered if Indians love the ‘racist’ card so much because it allows them to overlook their own xenophobia, as amply demonstrated by the warped casteist/communalist outlook a lot of Indians — even educated ones — hold.

…but in all the complaints raised by ‘Indians in the Diaspora’ of racism whilst abroad, is there an equal hue and cry when Indians look down upon other races as inferior or ‘lesser’? Take a look at the reaction to and treatment of Africans, British Islanders and African Americans … Can you say that you have treated these people with the repsect that you demand that whites treat you?? My observations say ‘NO!’ There is a Christian text in which Jesus says ‘Let he who is without sin be the first to cast stones.’ and the result is no stone could be cast. Physicians heal thyselves. In doing so you will enhance your kharma and possibly pick up allies in the battle - at least you’ll have less to worry about being attacked from behind.

listen to the call yourself.
http://www.edrants.com/_mp3/Power99_Call_to_India.mp3

Anya, I read the transcript of the call at Rediff before I talked about it. I listen to prank calls made by local radio stations to people every day. Some are funny, most aren’t.

The punks who made these calls also supposedly made fun of singer Aaliya’s death - was that racist too? Dumb, tasteless, vulgar and not worth listening to? Yes. Racist? No!

Actually, Late Night with Conan O’ Brien did a nice little piece on the whole call centre thing with Andy the technician going all the way to India with his desktop computer (including the monitor) to get his pop-up problem fixed while also trying to get a date with the call centre girl who was helping him out. A parody like that is funny, what the RJ’s did was puerile and inane…I pity the section of their audience who actually enjoyed the stunt.

Gee, Shanti, “You’re a filthy rat eater” and “I’ll come out there and choke the eff out of you”, and Don’t you get slick with me, bitch!” were all part of that “prank”. Sounds pretty benign to me…

MadMan, the prank was not benign - it was worthy of suspension. I don’t want it to be called racism, that’s all since there are nut-job RJs who do this all the time to all kinds of people.

I have already called the prank dumb, tasteless and vulgar - I never said it was benign. Just because something is not racism doesn’t mean it is benign just as every malicious act need not also be racist.

Shanti… maybe it was a prank. One can concede that. But the phrases used smack of racial profiling. And there can be no denying that. What else can you make of “filthy rat eater”??

And the fact that this was broadcast to a wider audience means that the people who look up to the likes of RJs will use such language freely!

And consider what would have happened (just in the realm of supposition) if the girl getting abused would have responded back saying “shut up u filthy nigger!” It still wouldn’t have been rascist, eh?!

Sameer, the content of the calls might be racist - what I am questioning is if the intent was racist as well. I think the RJs decided calling her a “filthy rat eater” would be the way to give her grief or they might have thought it was so over-the-top that she might not take it seriously.

Here is an example from real life - I worked with a Jewish guy who made fun of my accent all the time and teased me about eating monkey-brains and stuff. I called him “Shylock”. Take away the part of us trying to joke around and you see racist speech here. What we were trying to do was be so over-the-top that we couldn’t possibly take each other’s words seriously.

Hi, I’ve got you on a feed on Bloglines, and just wanted to comment on this piece.

The call had racist content, yes, we both agree to this. You do pose an interesting question. Was the call racist? Or rather, was the intent of the call racist? You’ve read the transcript of the call, so you know what was said…

People are angry about off-shoring here. They have a reason to be, no doubt. However, mixing up that attitude with feelings of superiority is bordering dangerously on the edge of racism. If the call was made in the privacy of his home, I may be able to dismiss it as a bitter man exacting his pound of flesh. However, that call was aired on a national radio station, and the clip was on the web-site. The audience now was not just the hapless call center representative, but the entire country, a large chunk of which is South Asian. There was an outcry as there should have been. People were offended but it, as they should be. And I think they were right to take it as a racist issue, no matter what the original intent was.

Racism is a very sensitive subject and a very touchy one. Let one call go by calling an Indian girls a “filthy rat eater”, and you’re opening the door for other slurs and other insults. Today it was said in anger at losing jobs to another country. Tomorrow they’ll take it further, and use it indiscriminately. The Indian population by and large may not have experienced much racism, but it does exist. You do see white and black kids being racist against the browns. You will find yourself getting shifty-eyed stares when you stop at a gas station of a small town in the middle of the mid-west. Racism, unfortunately, does exist. And material like that, no matter what intent it was made with, will only fuel the issue some more.

Maybe this person didn’t intend it to be racist. But let that pass, and you’re giving the green signal to open a whole Pandora’s box of racism.

Shanti, I agree to the point you’re trying to make about intent. And just like you gave a personal example, let me too! :-)

A couple of my colleagues are originally from Uttar Pradesh. Our banter over a cup of tea includes my calling them bhaiyyas who have all but destroyed Mumbai. This is done in jest and I am called a ghaati in return. Now none of us think we’re being boorish or xenophobes. But take this on a bigger scale and when a Bal Thackeray announces that North Indians are acting parasitically with regards to Mumbai, everybody and their dogs rise up in arms damning Thackeray for his statements. Why is that?? … That is because Thackeray is in a position to influence a lot many number of people by his views.

And that is pretty much my argument here. Pranks are great on radio. I have played some on air too! But this Star-Buc wild incident went beyond the limits of a prank.

Well… at the same time, I don’t say Indians are on a high horse. Indians sometimes are probably much worse!

There are plenty of people out there who will grab the nearest stick and beat someone with it whenever they lose their tempers. If there is a racial insult available, they’ll use it. Otherwise, they’ll use something else. Someone with that little self-control is probably close to the edge anyway when they’re calling customer support.

I think the whole off-shoring business is overblown. A lot of the call center jobs had already gone to low-wage areas of the US before departing these shores. One company was even using prisoners on work-release. We can afford to send these jobs elsewhere, can’t we?

My only problem with offshoring is that the help desk was traditionally the first stop in many IT careers. Now that much of the help desk work is gone, we will need a replacement.

I don’t know if it’s racism or not, but it’s da*ned uncivil and horribly rude. Petty, petty, petty.

(Hi Shanti, sorry for not stopping by lately. Life is busy. For you, even more so with the baby I’m sure :) )

MD, I agree with you - shock-jockism is getting out-of-hand and these two nimrods were prime examples of that.

Hey Shanti. Commenting after ages. How’s the baby?

I think the call was boorish, and had an element of racism, even though the primary intent was targetting “bitch who took my job” rather than “brown bitch”. The barb about rat eater was racist though.

I would call it secondary racism. The main trigger isn’t necessarily race, but once something else triggers the anger, then racist slurs come in handy to vent the anger.

By the way I was speaking to a white American at lunch yesterday (i’m in California for a week btw), and he said that he thought this outsourcing brou-haha is a form of racism-mixed-with-complacency.
he said the job being lost is made worse by the fact that some third worlder is getting it. Funny you should mention Ireland, because he said “If the jobs go to Ireland, we would think, hey the guy who got the job was prolly better than me. But if it goes to India or Asia, we think “sweatshops”. It is racism caused by complacency that whatever happens, whites will continue to dominate the world.”

Hi Gaurav, good to see you again :) The baby is doing great - the people who have to watch him? Not so good. He is turning into a little monster.

I think you made my point better than me - the call started off as boorishness and devolved into racism as a hurtful means.

Dear Shanti,

A friend of mine sent me a link to your blog. You are right. I agree with you. We can’t very precisely say that the intent of the call was racist. It dealt with nationalism more than racism. It was not a White/Black American abusing a Brown Indian, it was just an American abusing an Indian.

However, consider this for a moment. Does the fact that America is officially the most racially diverse nation on the planet give Americans license to abuse people from other countries and then hide behind the argument that their country is tolerant of those very races, IFF they are American?

You seem to be making the argument that, it’s OK to call non-American black people apes and non-American chinese people slopes. And, that, I believe is more perverse than being xenophobic or racist.

The proponents of Free Trade and Globalisation, when facing the brunt of it’s effects, can’t handle them?

Oh, that’s so sad! We are so sorry for you poor Americans. Please, call us anytime you like and abuse us so that you feel better. We are trained to “handle that kind of stress and language” [this is to the person who made that argument in his comments]

But it was all about the intent. It’s established that the callers intent was to abuse the Indians. Not because he hates them per se, but because he hates what they are doing to him. And that’s not racism. Is it racism then, when he does it to an immigrant Indian cab driver in NYC? Or an Indian American in NJ?

You are saying that racism is not OK, but nationalistic jingoism is? In a country that has progressed on immigrant intellect and labour? It’s laughable as an error. It’s promoting Nazism (without the racism, though) as an ideal if done wilfully. Then again, Bush is President of the United States!

Sorry for two posts, but I just thought of something.

If this isn’t racism, this is something worse.

What is racism? One way, it’s just outpouring of blind hatred for people who are unlike you in ethnicity or culture.

Another way, is what I’d like to term, laughably so, constructive racism, is when you pick at the negative qualities predominant in an ethnicity or culture which is unlike yours. Of course, these negatives are from your perspective.

So Jews and Chinese are misers and authoritarian parents, Negroes, prone to violence and drug abuse and the Indians, apathetic to physical fitness, so on.

If I were an optimist, I’d say, hey, they are bringing out issues that plague that particular community more than they do others! After all, few people would mind being presumed to be gifted at math, supremely athletic or gods at programming.

However, this issue, with the call-centre prank call, deals with something worse.

This man abuses a woman because she is the best person for the job! Because she is doing a better job per dollar than anyone in this idiot’s country!

Now, I am no socio-economist, but that sounds like the defeat of capitalism to me. No? You are abusing the person who is providing you with the best service per dollar! You are abusing the best person for the job precisely because she is so!

So, it comes as a surprise to me to see Americans defending this person as not being racist, when they should be denouncing him as un-American!

Or did I sleep for the last 15 years and the Soviet Union won the cold war?

Banya, if after entire reading through the entire discussion you still somehow got the idea that I was defending these actions, there is nothing else I can do to change your mind.

Well, you are playing DA to them, demanding that they get away with just being obnoxious rather than being labeled racist, aren’t you?

I did not mean that you approve of their actions. What I felt was that you were trying to potray that what they did was not as bad as being racist, when it’s actually much worse.

If he wasn’t being racist, he was being something much worse, is what my point is. I can at least try and comprehend racial hatred and its origins. But hatred towards a person who is the best for the job she is doing precisely for that reason is just incomprehensible, if you try to think about it. No?

Banya, my point is that there are worse things than racism and just because an act is malicious, it doesn’t have to racism.

What is worse? a murder or a calling someone a racist name?

In the same way, not calling these acts racism doesn’t take away from their malice or vileness. Such acts cannot be condoned.

Just to clear some things, jobs are not going overseas from the US because the people overseas are better - they are going because they are cheaper. There are plenty of equally capable people here - they are just more expensive than someone overseas, that’s all.

Shanti,

They are better per dollar. A better employee is one who does the same job for a lesser salary. I do not mean to look down on Americans, and personally know Americans who are well qualified for the jobs they are doing, and I do not think they will ever lose their jobs to Indians; but the issue remains, the Indian does a better job per dollar than the American.

However, that is just one aspect of the case. The second aspect is that you agree that this particular case was something worse than racism. I understand that you did not condone this RJ fellows action, and I agree with you that this is not racism, but I felt you did not dwell upon this incident being worse than racism, which may have given some people the idea that either you condone this, or you feel this act to be something less than racism, which I believe it’s not.

Let’s just end it here. :) I must say, you are quite well informed, and a prolific blogger. I wouldn’t want to miss out on other articles on your blog.

cheers!

Banya, thanks - It might have been my mistake not explaining myself more clearly. Will strive to do so in the future :)

interesting stuff…how about the racism in India between Indians? I’m not Indian but I’ve read that most of the ‘untouchables’ in the barbaric caste system of the Hindu religion are the dark-skinned people and I know just from experience as a black person that most Indians are caught up in the white supremacist philosophies that consider the lighter the skin the better the person. All you have to do is watch Indian TV or movies and they do their best to never show any dark-skinned people.

Rio, there is definitely a lot of skin-color-consciousness among Indians. You are considered beautiful if you are fairer-skinned. You can see in most movies that the dark-skinned women are the seductresses while the fairer-skinned actresses are the goody-goody heroines. I know my mother-in-law would have been happier if my skin were fairer :)

peace shanti,
yes I have seen this and recently read some interesting stuff about this…but I know in Jamaica Indians and Blacks (I prefer the term African as there are Indians who are also ‘Black” in color) get along quite well maybe due to the Indian population is so small, as opposed to Trinidad & Guyana where I think there is more tension between the two groups (I don’t even think it’s as bad as it used to be) due to a large Indian population. But I am not blaming Indians per se for this color coding of humanity…this is a system that was developed over thousands of years by white humans who had somehow developed a philosophy that they are somehow superior to darker colored humans. It is deeply entrentched in our psyche and will be very hard to change.
peace