|
EDITORIAL: Racism
raises its ugly head
Discrimination has reared its ugly face again, even if the people involved
insist it is a matter of safety, not prejudice. However, it is prejudice plain,
simple and ugly.
Residents of Rueilian Community (瑞聯社區) in Taoyuan County’s Bade City (八德) do not
want foreign workers from Ablecome Technology living in the community because of
safety concerns, and went so far as to hang up a banner saying so.
Taoyuan County Councilor Lu Lin Hsiao-feng (呂林小鳳) denied it is a case of racial
discrimination.
“It has nothing to do with discrimination,” she was quoted as saying. “With 460
households and more than 1,000 residents, Rueilian is a peaceful community. They
are merely worried that clashes could happen because of these foreign workers,
with their different skin color and different culture, going in and out of the
community.”
Different skin, different culture, different. That is the key word. Rueilian
residents are not prejudiced. They just do not like anyone who is different,
especially if they have darker skin. Resident Lin Feng-mei (林鳳美) said in a video
clip aired by Public Television that families with children no longer felt safe
playing in the community’s park because “those foreign workers also spend their
leisure time in the park.” As if it were not bad enough to have to share an
apartment building with foreigners, having to share an open, public space with
them is even more unnerving.
Rather than being open to the idea that someone from a different country and
culture living nearby offers an opportunity to learn something about another
culture — or even learn that people are more alike than they are different — the
people of Rueilian have chosen to close their doors and live in fear. And they
are teaching their children to fear difference.
Fear was also palpable in the recent uproar about a Taiwanese university
graduate who was open enough to admit that he was using his working holiday visa
for Australia to do hard manual work (in a slaughterhouse) to save money for
home rather than work and then spend his earnings traveling around Australia.
This raised the fear among some that Taiwan could be turning into a “nation of
migrant workers.”
There was much discussion of Taiwan’s stagnating economy and the government’s
inability to revive the economy, but the undercurrent was that Taiwan was better
than those other countries with large migrant worker populations such as the
Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia; that being Taiwanese was better
than being one of “them”, and yet here was a Taiwanese working as migrant
laborer, a university graduate no less. Which just shows how little people here
understand the economics of migrant work and the fact that many of the
Filipinos, Indonesians and others working in blue-collar or homecare positions
here or in other nations may also be university graduates. It is easier to look
down on someone if all you see are differences.
Taiwan has long been a nation of migrants — the migrants from Fujian Province
who came here 300 and 400 years ago, the flood of Mainlanders after the Chinese
Civil War, the tens of thousands who have immigrated to the US, Canada and other
countries since World War II. Think of the thousands who now work in China (or
doesn’t that count?).
Many of those early immigrants to other countries encountered difficulties and
prejudice, as a visit to the “Immigrants Building America” exhibition at the
Chiang Kai-shek Memorial will attest. So it is tragic that their descendants are
so willing to dish out that same discrimination.
It is a shame and it is a loss for a nation that has begun to proclaim — at
least in government publications and promotional campaigns — that it has
benefited from a melding of people and cultures: Aboriginal, Chinese, Dutch,
Spanish, Japanese, to realize just how much prejudice remains. The residents of
Rueilian should be ashamed — but so should many others.
|
