Racism Not Always Black and White: Indian style

Racism Not Always Black and White
Experts Say Immigration Rancor Fuels Hatred
By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES
June 25, 2008



Sparkle Reid Rai's 6-month-old daughter probably heard the commotion when a man and two women pretending to deliver a package showed up at their Union City, Ga., apartment in 2000.

There, say prosecutors in the high-profile murder trial, the 300-pound man allegedly choked and repeatedly stabbed Rai — a newlywed, whose only apparent crime was being black.

Today, a Fulton County jury began deliberating whether India-born businessman Chiman Rai ordered hit men to murder his daughter-in-law. Prosecutors contend Rai, 68, feared the mixed marriage would smear the family name in a caste-conscious Indian society.

Prosecutors established with black and white non-family witnesses that Rai had never told them his son "Ricky" had married a black woman and that they had a daughter. Sparkle Rai was killed a month after they wed. They are seeking the death penalty.

This case, which turned from a simple murder investigation into an alleged hate crime across two communities of color, highlights the complexity of race relations in a country that has often framed its prejudice in black and white.

But racial intolerance, sometimes in the form of violence, is increasingly more inclusive. Experts say that such bias is nothing new, although the national immigration debate has fueled that hate, giving bigots of all complexions more excuses to act on their ignorance.

Donna Lowry, who married Sparkle Reid's father and is now raising the victim's daughter, said, "It was such a shock to us when we found out a few years ago and we were floored.

"We had no idea it would go in this direction," she told ABCNEWS.com today en route to the trial. "It's mind-boggling. We are raising her biracial child and there is so much hatred on the other side of the family."

Rai's lawyer, Don Samuel, told ABCNEWS.com, "I'm arguing that my client is not guilty. There is no racial issue involved at all."

A dozen witnesses of all colors who had known Rai -- once a professor at two historically black colleges -- said he was not a racist. But Rai's former cellmate, a convicted forger, testified this week that the accused had made bigoted remarks while in jail, according to reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

American-born Amardeep Singh, director of the national Sikh Coalition, which defends the civil and legal rights of Sikhs, admits that his own ethnic group is capable of bigotry.

"You don't come to American to learn to be a bigot," Singh said. "There is bigotry in India. The caste system is deeply ingrained and South Asians in the U.S. still practice caste exclusion."

And he, too, has been a victim.

Racial Slurs Against Sikhs

The 37-year-old is routinely a victim of racial slurs because he wears a beard and a turban. Just recently, while walking home from a Starbucks in culturally diverse Hoboken, N.J., a passerby shouted, "You've got to take that sh-- off your head, you look like a terrorist."

And not just by rednecks. "To be honest, I've been called a terrorist by every single racial category — white, Latino or black," Singh said.

Last month, during a fire drill at Hightstown High School in New Jersey, for instance, an African-American teenager set fire to a Sikh student's turban, singeing the boy's hair.

The incident at this diverse public school with a significant number of blacks, Latinos and Asians enraged New Jersey's large Sikh community

"The fact that something like this could have happened is beyond comprehension, especially in this day and age," the victim's mother told the New Jersey Star-Ledger.