Dear White People Vol. I

Greetings.

I know that this blog post was made two weeks after it was supposed be out, but yknow life happens sometimes. I was busy trying to get ready for graduation and survive the end of my senior year and also I've felt super not the best for a while.

Originally I was going to have this blog post be "Jamal" the conclusion to my name exploration series, a part of my exploration of self series. My first name means beautiful or handsome... I'm not feeling very beautiful right now, so I'm going to hold off on it for after I'm officially done with school. It will probably end up being my June blog post. I have a post planned for the end of May and it makes more sense to release that instead of "Jamal" at that point. I'll save my life update for then, one because I know this post is going to be particularly long, and two, because I don't have the capacity right now to think about all that I did in April.

This post is called "Dear White People Vol. I" because I'll probably do another, similar, post in the future. It fits on this blog My Search for a Purpose because it explores my role as a queer, black man; a racialized body, in tackling marginalization and oppression. This is my first public work in discussing race with my own, educated and academic viewpoints- it is not the last. My purpose is inclusive of fighting for equity and inclusion.

"Dear White People Vol. I" consists of a podcast that I made for a final project for my Islam & Race Class. Below I've included a link to access it and it's transcript, so that you may follow along or just read what I wrote instead.

But, before that, some context. The podcast might be difficult to follow along, considering y'all readers have most likely not read the materials that I drew from in making this project, but I'm going to provide you as much as I can.

This project was done for my Islam & Race class, like I said, which was taught by Professor Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst at the University of Vermont. It is the best class that I've taken at UVM and Ilyse is one of my favorite professors. I'm so glad that she's entered my life.

The Course Description & Rationale for the course, as provided by the syllabus: 
"Islam & Race is a new course in Religion and counts toward University D1 requirements. Why this
course? Why now?

Hate crimes are on the rise against every minority. We have seen calls to ban refugees, ban
immigrants, and ban Muslims. We talk about countries as “Muslim states.” When we hear “terrorist”
we think “Muslim.” Many Sikh Americans who wear turbans are victims of anti-Muslim crimes. The
FBI’s programs of surveillance were, in large part, developed for and against Black Muslims starting
in the mid-20th century.

All of these grim facts reflect a racialization of religion—a process that collapses many identities,
ethnicities, languages, nationalities into one overarching race. We can’t understand things like an
uptick in hate crimes, how Sikhs are prominent victims of anti-Muslim violence, how whole
countries can be seen as the same as each other because of religion, how very different communities are seen as the same, and how “Islamophobia” became real without understanding how Islam and race are conflated, constructed, and operate.

Islam is not a race—religions are not races—but Islam and religions can and are racialized. In this
course, we examine how Islam and Muslims (those who practice Islam) come to be seen as a cogent race. The racialization of Islam and Muslims is global, and in this course we will reference
transnational and historical patterns of race, religion, and Islam, but we focus on North America to
keep our scope maintainable. The course takes theoretical ideas (definitions of race and religion and the racialization of religion) and explores them in case studies related to Muslims—and those
imagined to be Muslims—in North America. We explore notions of “whiteness,” “brownness,” and
“blackness” as they play out for Muslims as well as Islamophobia, surveillance, and the category of
“Muslim” itself. This intermediate-level course asks questions about Islam and race in ways that are
consistent with contemporary methods and theories of the study of religion and the study of race,
preparing students to apply what they learn to other religion courses, other religious traditions, and
in daily experiences of a world marked by religious and racial identifiers"

Ending of the Informal Cover Letter I submitted along with this project:
"I had a really hard time staying motivated while writing the script for this, partly because the weather is so nice, partly because my mind is not in the best spot right now, and partly because I wrote it entirely at home in CT around my very distracting, but -I do want to spend time with them- family. I’m hoping that the work I produced is still compelling and still sends a message across, but at the same time I am also mindful of the many things I still need to learn to feel fully comfortable making the statements that I do make…. Or maybe I’ll never feel comfortable in that and I just have to learn to accept that? Idk

I don’t directly cite the articles or authors directly in my script or in the podcast, but they can be found at the end of this cover letter. This podcast relies heavily on the discussions that we had in class, the notes I took during those discussions, and a few quotes from the source material. When I eventually post this to my blog, I will make sure to include this works cited there as well. The course material was not the only inspiration for this work. I also drew upon Beyoncé’s Lemonade, a few times, as well as made a passing reference to Ericka Hart’s tweet about the Met Gala. I tried to invoke the power and energy that these black femmes project out and inspire me with.

My Unessay directly address the themes of racialization of Islam and Muslims and covers the three “chapters” of these themes: whiteness, brownness, and blackness. I’m confident that this is a medium that I’m comfortable with and am really thankful to have been given the opportunity to explore the course themes in this way. I’m hopeful that this project shows academic rigor as well as creatively articulates the points that I’m trying to drive home. I am also hopeful that it is somewhat enjoyable to listen to me speak for more than 15 minutes straight… but I’m aware that this may not be a guarantee."

Sources

Introduction:

Justin Simien “Dear White People.” Vol. 1, Chapter I

Beyoncé Lemonade

Whiteness Section:
Sara Ahmed “White Men”
Ana Croegaert, “#BiHInSolidarity/Be In Solidarity: Bosnian Americans, Islam, and Whiteness in Post 9/11 America”

Brownness/Gender Section:
Ericka Hart, tweet: https://twitter.com/iHartEricka/status/1125750881587290112
Nadine Naber, “’Look, Mohammad the Terrorist is Coming!’: Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism and the intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11”
Stanley Thangaraj, “Managing Race, Class, and Gender: Atlanta’s South Asian American Muslims and the Localized Management of the ‘Global War on Terror’”

Blackness/Self Identification Section:
Sylvia Chan-Malik, Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam
Sylvester Johnson, “The FBI and the Moorish Science Temple of America”

Podcast:
Dear White People Podcast

Transcript:

            To start off this podcast type thing, I’m going to paraphrase the very great, influential, but definitely fictional Samantha White from the eponymous show: “Dear White People is a misnomer. [This] show is meant to articulate the feelings of a misrepresented group outside the majority. I get it. The realization that you contribute to a racist society can be unsettling, but [y’all are grown-ass people].” I’m hoping that, through this podcast, I’m able to articulate a comprehensive view into exactly how dangerous and pervasive white supremacy is in our culture while also keeping the course, Islam & Race, materials and focus in mind. However, I want to acknowledge from the jump, how hesitant I am about labeling this cohesive. I have a lot of thoughts and quite a bit of ground I could cover; I’ve learned a lot about race, privilege, power, and my own body in this class and it will take me a very long time to understand more and more of these critical race concepts that we merely skimmed the surface of, and even more time to figure out my exact place in all of that. I’m hoping I can be an encourager of emotional development and intentional, critical thought for people; I’m hoping that, more personally, I can one day be “the alchemist” for my family; I want to spin gold out of this hard life,  conjure beauty from the things left behind, find healing where it does not live, discover the antidote in my own kitchen, and break the curse with my own two hands. As for this podcast right now, I’m hoping to not only condense the topics and materials in our class and address it to a non-academic audience, but also attempt to articulate my own place in this and weave both personal and global anecdotes throughout.  Let me first start by tackling this idea of whiteness.

            Dear White People… have you ever noticed your whiteness when you’re around other white people? Is this the first time you might be thinking of situations like that? Are you uncomfortable when, in rare situations, you end up being a minority in a group of people? I’ve had white friends tell me that the first thing they think about when they’re in public is their body and how it’s presented- whether this is fat or thin or masc, androgynous, or femme enough… or they think about their sexuality and how they interact with the people around them through that lens. People of color typically think of their bodies too, but in a different way.

            It’s been posed that “Whiteness is invisible to those who inhabit it. For those who don’t inhabit it, whiteness appears as a solid: a body with mass.” Whiteness is typically used, by those in power, the solid body with mass; white people, as a space of absence, a space of blank slate-ness, a space of normalcy. Those who differ from white norms, white culture, or whiteness are marginalized. This marginalization does not just include being treated as lesser or in the outer limits. This historically includes having culture stripped from you, having your land stolen, or being forced to assimilate to survive. It also includes having the culture that you built appropriated without powerful opposition or many negative consequences. It includes having to work twice as hard for half as much. Whiteness is set as a standard; whiteness is an institution, not only one built to oppress people that don’t fit its ideals, but also the “mechanisms that ensure the persistence of that structure.”

            Some of these mechanisms include the governing of bodies and the policing and controlling of what is the norm, but it’s also the continual presence of whiteness in society: in the media, in those who are chosen to represent the populace, and in those who have access to resources.

            When people of color step into a space that is dominated by whiteness, a space that doesn’t automatically allow the feelings of safety and comfort that affinity spaces can provide, these are the things they think about, the things that come up. They worry about their bodies, but not just how their bodies are presenting, but the safety of their bodies if they present how they want to. People of color have not only been denied opportunities, but have been killed for things like their hair, their apparent trustworthiness, the color of their skin, and other things that cannot be controlled in the same way behavior and actions can be; people of color face persecution for things that are innate. Along with this, many people of color are just recently, in the 21^st century, finding people of color in the media to look up to and who can provide a newer, more relatable standard of beauty, that is beauty through just, simply, existing and living your truth.

            In stating all this, I’m also thinking about the statement “…for some to become him is to pass into them.” Him, in this context, refers to the institution that is white men; what I’ve been calling whiteness throughout my discourse. Since whiteness is a standard and the gatekeeper of opportunities, those who can pass as white can reap the benefits it gives. At some point, the people that we look up to in the media had to pass “enough” to get to where they are; whether that be through educational accolades, “carefully articulated speech”, or money; all things that are associated with whiteness in our white supremist society, even when they inherently are not, necessarily, white.

            People can also pass as white, but not be given the same opportunities that whiteness allows. Proper religion has become a sort of requirement for proper whiteness, whether that be through the dominant Judeo-Christian values in our society, or through practicing Christian religiosity, difference from these ideals is seen as perverse and deviant. Bosnian Americans who practice Islam are examples of this. They are Europeans and their skin and hair is typically fair, but they can be white until fully revealed, meaning they are white, but their Muslimness acts as a disqualifier for proper whiteness, or proper belonging, because of Islam’s racialization in our society. Because of the media and ideology of the masses, Islam has become a “brown people” religion, despite it having existed in America among black slaves, and black people who were around before the mass immigration of people from Muslim-majority countries. This racialization of a religion further promotes the ideals of white supremacy; hate for people that practice that religion becomes justified because they run counterpoint to the norm. This racialization can become dangerous because of this justified hatred, especially among those susceptible to mass hysteria, which can be further perpetuated by the media.

The people who typically represent Islam in the media have been associated with violence or are displayed in a way for us to have a common enemy. The “better Muslims” that appear in the media often plead for Islam to be seen as its “true form”, a religion of peace and love. One of the things that Christianity is allowed is sects and denominations; many people can have different views and opinions on how to best practice the religion- whether that be extremist left or right, or violent, all of these different parts of Christianity are still allowed under the same umbrella. Albeit, not all of this Christianity falls under ideal (read: white) religiosity, but it is still allowed its place among the giant umbrella that is Christianity. In this, we must ask ourselves, what prevents Islam from being viewed in the same way?

Dear White People… race also informs gender norms. I’m not ever trying to play oppression Olympics, but whenever there is praise for “genderbending” at the Met Gala, have you noticed that this is usually in celebration of white queers or, more specifically, white twinks or even cishet white men who wore a little eye shadow? Meanwhile, “’the US state, having experienced a castration and penetration of its capitalist masculinity offers up narratives of emasculation as appropriate punishment for bin Laden, brown-skinned folks, and men in turbans’” White men are allowed to bend norms and be celebrated, but the way that the police punish some brown Muslim masculinities, whether bent or not, is with threats of sodomy or homophobic slurs. Masculinity, and the many ways in which it shows up, are okay for white folks to try on and off like a costume, but for brown people, it’s targeted by the government because of a reinforced and encouraged fear. Brown, Muslim, more specifically, Arab men are displayed as lascivious and sex-crazed, performers of deviant sex- so much so that even brown, foreign Disney villains are portrayed in this way, whether subtly or blatantly. These portrayals are part of those mechanisms of white supremacy that allow it to keep going- it reinforces who we should fear and who we should praise.

Furthering my point, white fraternity men are typically seen as fun dudebros who want to chillax, and are loved, and encouraged by many, despite the dangerous and reckless behaviors that occur within frats and at frat parities. The type of toxic-hypermasculinity displayed in some Greek life culture: being encouraged, or hazed to do reckless stunts to fit in, or to make barstool, outrageous stories of how Brad hooked up with 12 girls, or contests to see how much alcohol a person can consume, are all celebrated and rarely questioned. The type of hypermasculinity, whether toxic or not, that brown people are deemed to inhabit, boils down to the way they present: their beards are too long, even though they’re the same length as your hipster friend, their sex is too deviant, even when they’re practicing monogamy, their masculinity is a threat, even though they are not a terrorist; they just simply “look like one.” Hello! That’s fucking racist!! But I digress… this question of proper forms of masculinity is not only questioned in how brown Arab Muslim men are hypermasculinized, but also how brown South Asian Muslim men are feminized.

In the United States, Asian people are typically seen as perpetual foreigners- never quite belonging in the fabric made of indigenous people, the colonizers who laid claim on this country (white people), the people they forced over here (black people), and others who fit in other ways. This sense of not belonging, along with the femininity ascribed to men who practice piety, that is, providing for their family in ways deemed to be feminine, leads to this strong urge to perform masculinity through sport. Specifically, a sport that has been popularized by hyper-masculinized black men, basketball. “South Asian American men all stated vehemently that their places of worship were one of the instrumental sites where they encountered sport and assimilated in US society…” This claim to a specific form of masculinity removes South Asian American men from being seen as terrorists or nerdy, from their fellow Muslims or fellow South Asians, through an intentional, agential appropriation of Americanness through black forms of masculinity. This displays a gross need for acceptance and, specifically, acceptance through assimilation to survive in a culture so fixated on compartmentalizing the human condition into narrow social constructs of race, gender, and how they should interact with one another.

Dear White People… Anti-black racism is so prevalent in even some of the anti-white supremacist movements that y’all have created. Your feminist movement doesn’t include us, it lacks intersectionality. Western feminism sees religion, and, specifically, Islam as patriarchal; there’s a shaming of religiosity involved- a way of treating Muslim women almost like children who don’t understand why it’s “wrong” to cover themselves. For some Muslim women, the hijab, or other forms of pious covering are used as a form of radical feminism- why are you so unwilling and uncomfortable to accept that not everyone sees liberation of their bodies in the same way? Some black women even choose to be Muslim as part of black political discourse- for liberation, for insurgency, for self-protection through reclaiming beauty and bodily autonomy. To be a woman means that you are already politicized, to be a racialized body means that you are already politicized, to choose Islam means choosing to perform a certain politic. Black Muslim women use their faith, their bodies, their womanhood, their blackness, as tools to navigate through the world the way they want to. They also use their faith to join a community of “black women… [who] claimed Islam, not only because they believed in its teaching and tenets, but also because they felt protected and guided by its presence… Muslimness was fashioned in- and would come to mediate- the contact zone between their bodies and the cultural and political terrains they inhabited…” For them, religion offers a safe harbor, a protective, but still very political stance on bodily control. This use of religion as a tool for liberation is a common theme among black Muslims.

Dear White People… your fear of Islam does not necessarily stem from 9/11, merely 9/11 reinforced this fear of Islam as self-defense rhetoric, rather than the bigger picture and problem of racism within and, as a cause of, Islamophobia. The first people to be surveilled by the FBI, were an African American Muslim sect known as the Moorish Science Temple of America. “…long before Al-Qaeda and even before the Nation of Islam, the FBI was engaged in surveilling Muslims… by tracing this history, we can see that the FBI’s recent approach to the threat of Islamic terrorism did not develop in a vacuum after 9/11 but reflects a more deeply rooted and institutionalized pattern of behavior…” The Moorish Science Temple of America was surveilled and harassed because of the members’ blatant opposition to the political order of that time; their membership was filled with people interested in criticizing and going against white racism and supremacy, while embracing a form of US nationalism: “the belief that African Americans should seek and enjoy membership in the political body of the United States.” This enjoyment was through claiming Islam as a space of absolution from the rules and restrictions that black people had to face in the repressive post-slavery, pre-Civil Rights Movement, era.

In addition to this claim of Islam as an absolution from restriction, black Muslims also used Islam as a basis for a reclaiming of the self, something that remains important in black Islam today. Through this claiming of science in the name, the Moorish Science Temple of America, is able to identify themselves as a rational entity based in science. The act of identifying yourself the way you want to identify is a revolution against the culture that has been stripped away from Black people when our ancestors were forced to come to America as slaves… when they were separated from their families and tribal members so they couldn’t even completely communicate with the strangers that looked like them and who were going through the same process. Being able to define oneself and hold to those convictions, even when the majority tries to define you externally is important in black Islam. Islam, in this context, acts as anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, but not necessarily anti-nationalist.

Islam is politicized. Islam is racialized. It can be a space of danger, because of this, but it can also be a space for reclamation of self-identification. It can be a space for finding meaning. Islam performs different things for many different racialized bodies and people identify it in many different ways, but at the end of the day, Islam can only be defined by those who practice it.

            Dear White People… are you aware of your place in all of this? Your place is not only in feminism, or in queer rights. It’s in discussing race and it’s many effects too, as well as how all these social constructs intersect and play out.  It’s in not leaving this work to be done by people of color only. The professor of the class I wrote this for, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, is a prime example of what you could be doing as white people. She has told us that her job as a scholar of Islam is reparations work; she takes on this emotional, mental, and academic labor as a white lady because it’s not just the work of people of color to tell their stories. I challenge you, white people who want to do the “right thing” in terms of race relations, to use your bodies and take up the space that is given to you to talk about race where it isn’t talk about, to make people uncomfortable when they uphold white supremist values, in subtle ways and in larger ways. Question and challenge your own motivations, intentions, and actions in your daily life and stop feeling guilty or afraid of being racist. Realize and accept that, no matter what you do, your very existence upholds white supremacist values and you take part in white supremacy every day. If you still feel stuck and aren’t sure what to do, unless you are compensating them in some way, instead of putting the emotional and mental labor on a person of color to describe and explain racism and racist things, use Google! The internet is an invaluable tool filled to the brim with resources on critical race and ethnic theories. With it, you are fully capable of educating yourself.

            In all of this, I realize that my own calling is in doing some of this work, in educating myself with critical race and ethnic studies, queer and gender theory, and women’s studies, in order to educate, encourage, and inspire people to heal the world, not only from a perspective and experience as a queer black man, as I don’t represent all queer black men, but also with the knowledge and study of how these systems of power, privilege, and oppression came to be and my role in it. I’m working toward this goal and my role, but…

Dear White People… you have work to do too.

Peace.
Thanks for listening/reading.