The Diminishing Law of Ethnicity

Posted on December 16, 2018 by Prabhat Sinha , One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.

Try Hard. You cannot preserve Ethnicity as a pickle in this century. It can exist no more than a flavouring.

Ethnic was when people existed with lands, rivers and seas struck between them as never broken barriers. When one group of people did not know what the other groups were like. It was ethnic when you did not know any better than how you or your neighbours could do it.

Ethnic is faded and jaded as the world melts and merges into one another to accept, engage and adopt what never was your own.

Is ethnic the same as the ethnic was a hundred years ago, or more?

So what is left with ethnicity? Race? Identity? Belonging?

Hasn’t it faded so much that recognising it the way you did 50 years ago is difficult. Yes ethnicity is walking lame in the face of global convergence.

True global convergence lacks a clear identity. But it is only when identities diminish that the world converges.

Yet people will exist who feel threatened just as the weak get nervous amidst change. And the weaker lose their nerves. That’s when the revolution begins against convergence. Such a revolution can never be evolutionary as it fights against the very core of evolution. It resists change. It denies change. It battles against change. And when several get together, it imposes a wall against change.

They often give reasons and most reasons are based on fear. Fear that you will lose. Fear that you will be lost. Fear that you will be overcome. Fear that the other world has bad, odd and the terrible. Fear that change is short term. Fear that you ought to fight against any that influences change. They will want to curb it, eliminate it or even kill it.

Now that gets violent. And some find a window of an opportunity as they know that there is a large number of people who fear the change. People who fear they will lose their existence. So they will create or build organisations. Most such organisations start with promoting ethnicity as a culture.
Come on, even the one changing is losing. They are willing to lose in order to get better. As the fight against change gets tougher, they are likely to impose, coerce or threat. As they want more people fight against change than those who are willingly merging and converging.

Ethnicity is acceptable as long as it is silent. When it begins to get a voice to destabilise change, it will evoke resistance. Promoters of ethnicity will evoke people to lobby against those who are more willing to change. They will fight hard to showcase an identity amidst merging identities. It is also like to evoke people to surround a wall around them with age old cultural and historic practices, behaviour and even ways of life. And, those who resist or desist are likely to be labelled dissenters or traitors. Thus breeding provocateurs of ethnicity.

It is then that ethnic loses its innocent flavour. Its flavour lapses to attract or inspire acceptance or its adoption by others. People wish to converge when the ethnic lives naturally, not as a cult or as a symbolic practice.

The fight is on very much not just in the Asia or Africa but even silently amidst Asians or Africans in the Europe or Americas as some people may believe that setting an identity in a foreign land will empower them. Thankfully it is meagre. As most people are willing to merge ethnically willingly. And no one wants to engage the ethnic that has been crafted or constructed with the view to brand it better or superior than the other. It is not a toothpaste.

Empowerment in the modern world however comes out of how well you adopt, adapt and are willing to share, exchange, give and take. How well you improvise on the converging ideas, habits, practices or lifestyles. How well you cultivate them for the better.

Some countries have died fighting ethnicity. Some more are willing to die. Eventually however only those worlds are likely to empower and evolve who will let ethnicities converge with the view to evolve more ingeniously, successively for the better, for the more superior.

Ethnic that is silently unique, delightful or evokes a wow is that will merge better. Ethiopia may be a much less developed nation. Ethiopian food however is a choice for many as it simply exists as an art.

As none know that the time has better to offer as it moves ahead, better than the times that have flown by.