It pays to be white in a developing country- study

In India, particularly in the north, dark skin is associated with poverty and being low-caste.

British colonialism exacerbated this prejudice.

Indians discriminate against others based on their degree of “darkness”.

Darker Indians also struggle with this, but dark-skinned African foreigners are the most severely hit by this prejudice.

This has been grimly illustrated by a spate of mob attacks on Africans in north India.

“Fairness” is associated with being high-caste.

This is often correlated with a higher socio-economic status, so lighter skinned foreigners also benefit from this positive bias.

A white South African man told me he feels “very welcome” in India because most Indians perceive him as a white Westerner, not an African.

There is no simple way to quantify the impact of white privilege in the global economy.

But economists should join sociologists and post colonial scholars in trying to do so.

Countries like India and China represent greater and greater shares of global GDP.

As they grow, the role of white privilege in their economies will likely increase as well.

I have argued in my research that it’s important to speak about the global ethnic economy.

Whether one is studying the role of entrepreneurs in increasing growth or trying to understand labour market dynamics, factors like race, ethnicity, gender and so on should be accounted for.

This will deepen our understanding of daily global transactions.

By Melissa Tandiwe Myambo. This article is reproduced from The Conversation

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