To the Editor:
Permit me to provide another example of the issues George Weigel dealt with in “Are Human Rights Still Universal?” [February].
Every now and then a report from India in the Western media recalls the continuing discrimination, suffering, and humiliation of the untouchables. Their situation is the closest thing to the now-ended apartheid in South Africa. But in a way it is worse: South Africa posed a problem of political rights and moral equity. In India, untouchables are an article of faith of the majority religion and not susceptible to challenge on the judicial and political levels, as was the case in South Africa.
In South Africa, too, there was room for foreign involvement—room that many human-rights groups and moral and political forces around the world used effectively. Americans were prominent and possibly critically important.
When it comes to India’s victims of apartheid, no such urgency, or even interest, is noticeable in America or elsewhere in Western countries with professed human-rights concerns. To ask and try to answer why this is so yields some significant insights into Western moral standards and motivations.
To begin with, account must be taken of the natural link between injustice to blacks by whites in former colonial countries as well as in America, and the plight of blacks in South Africa. Black empathy is self-evident, and white liberal feelings of compassion and justice, in light of guilt over slavery and continuing discrimination, are also easily understandable.
But does this alone explain the virtual absence of Western concern, not to mention activity or militancy, toward India’s system of apartheid? Is there not a consistent pattern of motivation when whites are involved in cruelty and injustice, and a much more cavalier attitude when it comes to inequities, persecutions, and mercilessness among nonwhite groups? The same holds true of murderous conflicts among white ethnic or religious groups, as in the former Yugoslavia.
Where are the rallies, the lobbying, the persistent and passionate involvement in India or Bosnia or Sudan? This is true even when the extent of the victimization, in terms of dead, wounded, and permanent consignment to poverty is on a larger scale.
To be sure, we are all closest to ourselves. So blacks can be expected to be more deeply involved when other blacks are persecuted or discriminated against. But is there not something morally amiss when their passion spends itself on white-caused injustice, and the rivers of blood in Rwanda or the starving thousands in southern Sudan evoke hardly a word of concern?
And are not whites convinced of the purity of their human-rights motives and their moral faith also guilty of a double standard relating to the need to deal with their guilt feelings? Another way of phrasing the question is whether blacks are not motivated more by their anger about white racism than by the extent of suffering of fellow blacks. And is white concern not grounded in the selfish need for expiation rather than in genuine compassion, measured by objective standards of justice, equity, and the extent of suffering?
Whether in the United Nations, in Washington or London or Paris, or in the Vatican and in churches and synagogues, these questions must be asked, debated and eventually answered if the quest for human rights is to gain fuller meaning.
Robert B. Goldmann
Washington, D.C.
