I, PHOBIC (or... Some Of My Best Friends Are Muslim)
PART I
The moment finally comes on January 13th, 2016, when I read that French "satirical" magazine Charlie Hebdo - the one and only - has scraped the bottom of the barrel of moral consciousness. It has printed the cartoon below, showing little Aylan Kurdi drowned and suggesting that had he lived, he would have grown up to grope women like the accused New Year's Eve assailants in Germany. (It should be noted that only 3 of the 58 men who have been charged in those assaults are Middle Eastern asylum seekers.) Because Charlie Hebdo believes that you can never dive too deep into the toilet, in a move typically reserved for black folk, Aylan and other Muslim men are depicted as monkeys.
What a familiar refrain.
Islamophobia has taken root in North America and many European nations, accompanied by an eerie level of acceptance that allows someone to speak about banning an entire religion and then convincingly win the Republican nomination.
Our former Prime Minister, in an attempt to cater to Islamophobes here at home, decided that his ill-fated Campaign of Disdain didn't have enough components so he proposed the infamous government “Tip Line” for the reporting of #BarbaricCulturalPractices. I still wonder what he was hoping to hear. Did he suspect an abundance of acid burnings in Trois-Rivieres? An epidemic of child brides in Peggy's Cove? Female genital mutilation in Red Deer? Weekly honour killings in Willowdale? What was its purpose, other than to try stigmatize a singular group and induce a feeling of Big Brother created not only by the government, but by each other?
Just for kicks, I wonder... what would have happened had we opened Harper's door to practices not confined to Islam? Let's try a couple.
SPANKING. #BarbaricCulturalPractices
Oh dear... I just heard a whole lot of Christian moms and dads lose it. “We're not barbarians! A smack on the bum sometimes is what a kid needs! The Bible says spare the rod and spoil the child.”
Another one, shall we?
CIRCUMCISION. #BarbaricCulturalPractices
Oh... yes... a whole lot of Jewish mothers and fathers got real quiet there too. “We're not barbarians! This is offensive. You're insulting our religion and our cultural tradition.”
And yet, I've had unfortunate exchanges with Christians and Jews alike who were more than willing - anxious even - to report the "uncivilized" practices of Muslim-Canadians. How very interesting it is the way some people can react when the lens through which judgment is passed is suddenly spun around and focused on them. How easily we defend the elements of our own cultures and faiths that could be called into question when put under the microscope. So quick are we to think: “How dare you say that about US. It's not US. It's THEM.”
It is THAT thought, right there, that bigotry counts on.
It's not us. It's them.
It is always THEM.
Everytime I begin penning a new piece, I wonder if I'm setting myself up to lose a few friends. We'll see. I write this today because a few years ago I made a personal commitment to cultivate one quality for two years, then choose another and do the same for the next two. (The goal is to hover somewhere in the vicinity of the human being I wish to be by my 50th.) The quality de l'annee is truthfulness. I have always been honest. Now I wish to be truthful. I view them differently. I view honesty as not telling lies, but truthfulness as consciously speaking [my] truth. Truthfulness is harder.
In the years following 9/11, other attacks by Al Queda or Al Queda-inspired terrorists make it clear that the horror of that day is not the full extent of the vengeance sought against the West. The news shows us the faces of fourteen hijackers, all young Muslim men. We learn about some of them taking pilot lessons in Florida as they plot the death of thousands. We hear about Al Queda every single day. A radicalized Muslim man tries, and thankfully fails, to blow up an airliner with a bomb in his shoe. Bombings in Madrid and London, while not the scale of 9/11, succeed in maintaining Western fear. There is a terrifying incident in which a bomber on a train (I cannot recall in which city), purposely turns his backpack in the direction of a mother and child before trying, unsuccessfully, to detonate it. Hearing the list of radicalized Muslim groups that have made it their mission to terrorize those with whom they have political grievances and who will not conform to their worldview, by attacking not only Christians and Jews but predominantly non-extremist Muslims in their own countries, is beyond horrifying. Al Queda, ISIS, Al Shabaab, Boko Haram – massacres, kidnappings, suicide bombings, beheadings, burning people alive in cages – is it hard to wrap one's mind around the ease with which these things are done. American and Canadian politicians remark that one of the greatest threats to peace on the planet is radical Islam. Leftists go crazy, declaring the remark racist and incendiary.
I roll my eyes.
It seems insane to me that anyone who is not asleep could argue that point. Acknowledging that groups who come right out and declare that they wish to destroy the West, create a celiphate, and slaughter those who would oppose them are a huge threat to world peace seems like Logic 101. Does this mean that they are the ONLY threat? Of course not. Does it mean that we can start treating "Islam" and "radical Islam" as synonyms? Definitely not, no more than we can equate right-wing evangelical Christians with your run-of-the-mill Protestants. Does this mean the West is innocent?? Hell no. Recognizing that the actions of North American governments have had a major hand in the rise of radicalized youth in the Muslim world does not negate the fact that these groups are undeniably heinous. A 14-year-old Malala, herself Muslim and guilty of nothing, took a bullet in the head at the hands of the Taliban for the crime of wanting to go to school. You can't blame that on Bush's or Obama's foreign policy.
I am very aware that Canadian and American policy (the former especially during Harper's tenure) has often been antipathetic to Arab nations. (How do you orphan thousands and thousands of Iraqi youth in a decade-long unjustified war and then be shocked when they grow up to be ISIS?) I know the bodycount left by Western aggression is staggering. We know that the threat to us, however, is not Islam at large but fringe groups of radical fundamentalists. It is the actions of a relatively small number of extremists that lead to the grossly unfair and generalized view of an entire religion. I read a report earlier this year citing most of these extremist groups as boasting only a couple of thousand members, and the total number of people belonging to groups such as these as only about 75,000. To make a point, I'm going to pretend that these numbers are modest and double them, to 150,000 radical fundamentalist whackjobs. There are approximately one and a half billion Muslims on the planet. As with any group of people, many of them will be the koolest people you've ever met, and many will be horrid human beings whom you'd meet once and never want to speak to again. I'm not talking about the regular awful people. I'm talking about the terrifying, murderous, if-you-don't-believe-in-Allah-the-way-I-believe-in-Allah-I'm-going-to-dismember-you-on-camera people. Let's say there are 150,000 of those. Or, if you still think “There's got to be more of them!” – okay – let's take the original number and go all out and quadruple it, to 300,000. 300,000 insane bloodthirsty radicals running amok.
Now let's do some math. 300,000 lunatics. 1.5 billion Muslims.
Were we to assume that the estimate of 300,000 is true, that would mean that exactly 0.0002% of the world's Muslim population is radicalized.
Not 20%. Not 2%. Not .2%. Not .02%.
0.0002%.
That means that to find two Muslims with views that extreme, you would have to speak to ten-thousand.
How would the percentage change if we substituted Muslim to Christian? Would it be any different? Those Pentacostals love their guns and nothing gives them a bigger hard-on than the thought of the biblical Armegeddon in which all non-believers are slaughtered.
It is easy to think that the number of extremists is higher, if you focus on the horror of the crimes and the number of people killed. Neither of those things has anything to do with how many radicals actually exist. Three people can easily walk into a building with automatic weapons, block the exits, and mow down 200 captive people. The enormity of the massacre does not reflect the enormity of the group responsible. Although many people were involved in the planning, the hijackings of 9/11 were carried out by fewer than 15 people. They killed 3,000. So yes, these groups wreak havoc and are immensely dangerous. I get extremely angry when I read or hear liberals trying to negate them in an effort to disempower them. I negate no group that aims to kill people and succeeds. (Newsflash: ISIS is not crying in a corner because people decided to "de-legitimize" them by calling them Daesh.) Last year people were shrugging them off, calling them a joke and a non-threat to Westerners. I dare those people to say that to the families who must spend the rest of their lives haunted by images of loved ones being beheaded. ISIS "wasn't a threat" to Westerners, and then they waltzed in to Paris and Brussels and put that mythology to rest. It is thoughtless to dismiss the potency of any group whose actions have caused such pain. They must be combatted, but they are NOT the mainstream religious. They are the anomaly. They contort religion for their own political purposes, and do not follow the teachings of their own deity and prophets.
If they comprise 0.0002% of Muslims, it means that the remaining 99.9998% are rational, peaceful people. But ask Trump or FOX News or your everyday Arab-hater, and you'd think the number of radicals was 50%.
In the months after 9/11, we are reminded ad nauseam that terrorists make it their mission to seamlessly blend in to the crowd, and that many of them look like your average college student. Every once in a while for good measure, a video of Bin Laden is released by Al Queda in which he calls for the blood of the West and lists the nations that radical Islamists should target – a list that includes Canada. We are told to report suspicious behaviour. U.S. and Canadian governments repeatedly call for "vigilance" – reminding us to be on the lookout but never making it clear exactly for what. The cable news networks, only too happy to be more television drama than useful information source, engage in a 24-hour cycle of conspiracy theories and terror alerts. Particularly egregious is FOX News, a network whose conservative base already eschews anything they consider “the other”. Anti-Muslim sentiment swells and to my socially-aware self, the burgeoning racism leaves me distraught.
I always say that the work we do comes into our lives for a reason which often does not reveal itself until years later. I don't believe that people end up in jobs by accident, or that I end up in a show or directing it by accident. I believe that each experience is intended to teach us, if we enter into it modestly and allow it, and to enable our spiritual growth. In 2012, I begin occasional work as a standardized patient. (An SP plays the role of patient in scenarios with medical, nursing, and pharmacy students as they train for or take their final exams.) Many of these students were already practitioners in the homelands and are working towards being certified in Canada. Some of them are of African and East European descent; the vast majority are Muslim from Arab nations. I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this job has not been brought into my life by chance. Meeting these warm and lovely people is a gift premeditated by the Universe to keep my heart and mind, through all of the fear-mongering and rhetoric, focused on the 99.9998%.
But I was talking about the aftermath of that horrible day 15 years ago. We are all familiar with racism and anti-Semitism -- at that time the Big Two when it comes to ethnic and cultural bigotry. We know the reality of sexism and homophobia, two other pervasive forms of societal prejudice. Then the 11th of September happens, and in its wake another hatred that has always existed but hasn't been at the fore of our consciousness was suddenly shoved into the spotlight. Islamophobia. It is everywhere. I am deeply affected by the immediate call by many to storm into an Arab country – it doesn't seem to matter which – and annihilate the terrorists. Sickened am I by the animosity; I feel that I have to do something. I am in my late 20s and an aspiring singer/songwriter; this is a full five years before the theatre crashes into my life. I organize two benefit concerts featuring friends of mine from the indie music scene. One is called Colourkind. It is for Artists Against Racism.
It is October 2001. I consider myself a conscious and just person. I believe myself immune from feeling even a hint of such prejudice.
I am wrong.
My subconscious self is on a different field entirely, and the enemy is gaining yards with every play. Each day, unbeknownst to me, I become more susceptible to the relentless fear-inducing that swirls around me. Then one day, I smile warmly at a Muslim man on the subway and he stares stoicly back.
I get off the train, afraid.
Never could I have imagined small seeds of Islamophobia burrowing inside of my head. They never make it to my soul, luckily. But they are there. They are there.
There. In my head.
I will never forget the day I realize that I am having the thoughts.
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PART II
And yet that feeling, which I acknowledge as Islamophobia, has ZERO to do with hating either Muslims or Arabs.
Such a hatred has never existed within me, nor has even a casual dislike. At that point in time there exists simply fear, and based on what I've been hearing, the fear feels justified. It truly is, as the second half of the word states, phobia. Had a terrorist organization of Swedes committed 9/11 and sworn to run blood in Canada, my anxiety would be directed at any blue-eyed blonde man with a knapsack. Had it been the work of an extremist group out of Manila, every textbook-toting Filipino would make me tense. And because I have no way of knowing whether the men in the airport are part of the 99.9998% or the 0.0002%, self-preservation automatically makes the possibility of danger the dominant thought.
My trepidation around these men is not rooted in any pre-existing aversion to Arab people. It is fear of a description -- not because I in any way view them as my enemies, but because I believe that they view me as theirs.
It is right here that I feel we must stop, think, and be more honest about the truth of being human.
Underneath the "I love everyone" exterior, as a species, we are scared.
Human nature, by its very definition, means experiencing vulnerability. There are reactions to fear that human beings have, thoughts that run through our heads and emotions that run through our bodies, than weaken our moral resolve. Our primary motivation - our base instinct - is survival. That is how we're wired. If we are told that a subsection of people from a certain group wants us dead, the most natural reaction in the world is to experience anxiety around that group. It is far too unsophisticated to simply label that racist. That is natural. I don't believe that there exists a person (including Muslims) who, if warned on the news tonight that a Jamaican terrorist group had killed 3,000 people elsewhere and pledged to attack in Canada, would not look at every black man on the subway with slightly different energy tomorrow. I'd be doing the same -- and I'm black. If someone tells me that 10 Indigenous men out of 1,000 want to kill me, but I have no idea who the 10 are, I am likely to grow subconsciously resentful of all Indigenous men for me making me feel uneasy and unsure and threatened. That is human.
The challenge is knowing when it crosses from one side of the line to the other. When does a feeling which is natural in a given situation become bigotry?
That happens, to me, when we don't take note of what we are feeling and check ourselves. When we don't take stock of our most private assumptions and why we make them, when we don't find the courage to look in the mirror and ask ourselves what we may be thinking that we wish we weren't, when that initial understandable anxiety morphs into disdain and distrust that stops us from seeing the individual, when the hostility is felt regardless of the circumstance and affects our beliefs about that group in its entirety -- we have become prejudiced.
But here's the wrench -- an apparent exception to "human nature" -- which in and of itself is deeply bigoted.
Almost nothing I just said seems to apply when the perpetrators are Caucasian. (I used Swedes as an example of how I would react, not society at large.)
The pervasive fear of an entire group does not occur when heinous crimes or terrorist acts are committed by white people.
The worst terrorist attack in the U.S. prior to 9/11 (excluding the genocide of Native Americans), the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, was carried out by a very white Timothy McVeigh. Over 98% of mass shootings I can think of in the last decade have been committed by a white male. Columbine, Virginia Tech, San Bernadino, Aurora, Newtown, Charleston... and many, many more. Where is the terror striking society's heart at the thought of white men?
Ahh... right. Nowhere.
If people of colour allowed themselves to feel this fear, we would paralyze ourselves. The sheer number of people from the group we'd be fearing is too high. We would be able to engage with almost no institutions. It is “easier” to fear a group that comprises only 3 or 5 or 10 percent of the population. One can practice avoidance and self-isolation. It is impossible to do the same with a group that comprises 50% of the population or more. No matter how many Dylann Roofs or Adam Lanzas there are, for me to suffer from “Caucaphobia” in North America is for me to essentially cease to be able to function.
The bigger reason for this exception, however, is who holds the power. Society is run largely by white males, who are the husbands/dads/brothers/uncles/cousins/lovers of (predominantly) white women and girls. The fear of white men will never become widespread because Caucasian people, who are the largest single group by race and the holders of almost all systemic reins – including the media – will never distrust, stereotype, or demonize themselves en masse.
I am grateful to have never crossed into the realm of vicious racial bigotry. I don't believe I have it in me; I was raised too well and value compassion and fairness too highly. I did, however, become prejudiced for a time. Taking the meaning of prejudiced at its most literal, I pre-judged. I would see the beige-skinned boy on the subway and pre-judge him as someone who possibly saw me as a combattant. Typing that now, I shake my head at the irony. But I do not beat myself up for having been scared by forces determined to perpetuate fear. That experience taught me a lot -- about government, about mainstream media, about myself.
There will always be those brimming with hate and notions of superiority. Straight people who think they're better than gay people. Brown people who think they're better than black people. Light-skinned blacks who think they're better than dark-skinned blacks. East Asians who think they're better than South Asians. Whites who think they're better than everyone. I don't believe, however, that everyone who harbours a latent negative feeling towards another group is coming from an innately vicious place. I know this because I've lived it. I've lived it as someone who was once homophobic and am now completely embracing of the LGBT community. I've lived it as someone who was a card-carrying member of Campaign Life in high school and am now passionately pro-choice. In my life I have taken journeys of ideological evolution that moved me from stances that were indoctrinated and uninformed, but never hateful. I was a good person, but there was a lot that I had been told and a lot that I didn't yet know.
People can change. I changed.
It begins with questioning our biases, contemplating our blind spots, and then naming them out loud.
We don't do that, though. We live in a society that is now in a stranglehold of "political correctness" that prevents such admissions. (This is its own topic; another piece addressing this is forthcoming.) Everyone is now out to prove how non-bigoted they are, without first doing the self-inventory necessary to find out if that is actually the case. We do not speak the truth of ourselves, even when it is the most important thing we could possibly do, if it might mean that we offend someone.
The fact is that "some of your best friends" can be whatever, and you can still hold negative biases towards that group for any number of subconscious reasons. The fact that four of my closest friends are white, that I adore my white brother-in-law, and that I love my half-white niece and nephew more than life itself, does not prevent me from feeling waves of rage towards whites as a whole in those instances when the pain and injustice inflicted by them upon blacks hurts so much that I feel it in my teeth. That feeling neither sullies nor negates the deep and genuine love I feel for many, many Caucasian people. But I have learned that as a human being, there are waves of resentment that come from the continued subjugation and mistreatment of my race. I will not pretend that those waves don't exist. I do not tell myself that I'm a horrible person when they come. I am able now to understand the complexity of a wave, its rationalizations and flaws, and allow it to pass through my body when it comes. It runs through me and then it leaves. If I didn't allow it to pass through, if I held it tightly and locked it there, it would grow and fester and become spiritual cancer.
I am very vocal about discrimination, exclusion and inequity, and always will be. But I refuse to sit in a place of hating others. I have learned to discern between hating people's actions and ideologies -- and hating people.
Hate is fear on steroids.
The West fears that radical Islam is coming to kill us. Radical Islam fears that the West wants to eradicate it. Blacks fear that whites will continue to denegrate us without consequence. Whites fear that were blacks to rise up and revolt, revenge would be terrifying. Asians, Latinos and Indigenous people fear that in discussions of racial injustice, they are often rendered invisible. We are draped in gradations of fear - both spoken and unspoken - and it presents as everything from "I'm not sure I want to get on that plane" to "I'm going to blow up that f**king plane."
The musical Avenue Q features a song entitled Everyone's A Little Bit Racist. I don't actually agree that that's possible; racism is not merely an attitude but a system. Like sexism, it is a system of oppression embedded into our societal structure, created and maintained by those in the dominant power bracket. Most people of colour do not have the leverage or hold positions of authority with which to be able to oppress or exclude whites. Society was built and racism designed to be a from-whites-to-people-of-colour practice.
Anyone, however, can be prejudiced. Anyone can make assumptions about another individual or group based on a categorization. Anyone can be unpleasant to someone else based on race. Do I believe that everyone's a little bit prejudiced? Yeah, I do. Do I think that the lion's share of those who consider themselves liberal would openly discuss how the seed of prejudice was planted and has been watered inside themselves? No, I don't. That is beyond unfortunate, because until those truths are uprooted, we will continue to spend all of our time decrying those whose expressions of bigotry are loud and overt, while never taking the time to question the subtle but potential damaging biases inside each of us.
I am getting off of this train.
I wonder what is in that knapsack.
I don't like that he isn't smiling.
I, Phobic.
We must stop with the guise of only feeling positive things for every group all the time. We must refrain from telling ourselves that being a decent human means never expressing anything that is less than admirable. There are many who feel that admitting prejudicial feelings and speaking them out loud is the beginning of life as a bigot. I couldn't disagree more. If you are speaking them in an effort to comprehend them and confront them, admitting prejudical feelings is the beginning of the end of life as a bigot.
We must stop with the guise of only feeling positive things for every group all the time. We must refrain from telling ourselves that being a decent human means never expressing anything that is less than admirable. There are many who feel that admitting prejudicial feelings and speaking them out loud is the beginning of life as a bigot. I couldn't disagree more. If you are speaking them in an effort to comprehend them and confront them, admitting prejudical feelings is the beginning of the end of life as a bigot.
In my time on this planet, I have inhaled and exhaled breath that held anti-gay sentiments, anti-white sentiments, anti-Arab sentiments, anti-male sentiments. At the same that I experienced these feelings, there are individuals I would've gone to the mat for from every one of these groups. Passive prejudice often does not exist in a vacuum. Our emotions are not so easily compartmentalized, which is what can make prejudice so tricky to recognize. I have ploughed through a lot of mud in order to sit in fertile soil, and I have allowed myself to experience the very best of our species which has flooded my heart with respect for every type of human being under the sun. I am more acutely connected to love now, because I have deep-sea dived into the moments when the love in me went cold. Having seen flashes of my own ugliness has made me more empathetic, less naive, more raw, more real. I see this. I know this.
I, Tanisha.
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TT
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