As salaam alaikum,
I was going to write about depression and NVC next, but I want to take a break from that to voice my reaction to an article in The Atlantic that I just read about the two young people, now convicted of terrorism, Muhammad "Moe" Dakhlalla and Jaelyn Young.
For as long as I've had this blog, on this site and the previous one on Xanga, I have tried to steer clear of politics. My quest in Islam was personal, and although I did have real opinions on issues across the Muslim world, I felt too poorly read and ill-informed to make this place a platform to voice them. Granted, I know that doesn't stop many other people from sharing their two cents on the internet, but I didn't want to contribute to that pool. So this didn't become the place where I decried wars, crimes against Muslims, Islamophobia or condemned terrorism in its many forms and specifics regularly.
The exception I made a year and a half ago was my entry on the San Bernadino attack, in which I expressed my fear about the rise of ISIS and how Americans seemed to be spontaneously radicalizing to attack such mundane venues as a company Christmas party. I remember as a post-9/11 teenager scoffing at security measures at a college football game. Terrorists weren't going to target Nowheresville, USA. With the rise of IS and its sympathizers, I was wrong.
I know little about IS and their propaganda other than they exist and they are terrorists who primarily target other Muslims in Muslim majority countries but whose sympathizers have carried out attacks in Europe as well. I feel as the majority of Muslims do--that these amoral individuals carrying out monstrosities in the name of Islam do not represent the true nature of our faith and way of life. I remember hearing about these two young people, Muhammad and Jaelyn, in passing a couple of years ago. I read of their arrest and their intent to join ISIS abroad. I looked at their pictures. I wondered how a young, mixed couple, in particular, a young, African American revert to Islam, got mixed up in ISIS. In particular, for Jaelyn, I wondered how a young American woman could aspire to such an existence. What were they telling them?
I read The Atlantic article and it gave me pause for another reason. Jaelyn's story sounded so familiar to me, especially her growing up story. It could have been mine. Smart, nerdy but isolated kid in high school. Very strict parents. Untreated depression. Cluster B tendencies. Increased interest in Islam in college, starting to don hijab then. The only difference is that she bought into ISIS propaganda, and I didn't.
The other difference was that of 10 years.
When I was her age and searching the internet for everything I could about Islam, posting in my blog, trying my best to join the MSA, YouTube was nascent, Facebook was The Facebook and was open to Ivys and specific colleges like the University of Michigan only, and MySpace was hanging on. There was no Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat. Message boards were on their way out. My online quest was limited to reading online translations of the Qur'an on the go, browsing Hadith collections and cruising (painfully) through online fatwa banks. Video sermons and online imams were not as ubiquitous as they are now.
No one knows what is in this woman's heart and what was in her intentions but she and God, and I'm not trying to defend her at all. I'm just startled at how much the beginning of her story sounds like the beginning of my own. I don't think it could have been me, but could it have?
It also gives a sinister spin to my novel in progress, A Rose Much Desired, with the two Muslim young adults, Nisreen and Mo, trying to figure out their next steps. Their stories begin separate and as innocently as my story characters. My characters do make a series of mistakes and ultimately crash and burn, but they do not radicalize. Mo and Nisreen's story is entangled in the new world of social media as well. How much of a reality would this be for my characters if they were young 20-somethings now and not in 2007?
I also recognize that for that one Jaelyn, there are hundreds of thousands of other young black women who grew up isolated nerds with strict parents and resultant depression that do not end up attempting to joint ISIS. No one knows what happened there. And given that the FBI were the makers of COINTELPRO, my trust of that institution is thin, if any. We will not know in this life where their influence began with either of these young people.
But what I do know is that this did not have to be. This never has to be. We, as Muslims, have to stop shutting out too many people as other, not of us. At some point, many current day terrorists were one of us, people we wouldn't hesitate to call Muslims. Some of them were once children, and therefore our responsibility to guide. I am not a parent yet and I do not have answers. But saying that these people are not Muslim is not enough. Once they were, and now they are not, and maybe some of us had a hand in that doing. Socially, our religious institutions are not exempt from structural violence, and by belonging to the religion, we are sometimes its agents.
It's hard with social media, though. In its earliest iteration for young people, AIM, I would spend hours at night IMing friends, paragraphs, monologues, soliloquies about our lives. AIM is the reason that I'm able to type so fast today. It was a world we created of our own. My parents barely knew it existed except to comment on the sound of me "raining on the keyboard" when typing to my friends. In a similar way, young people, especially those who have gone off to college, have a world of their own with many more modalities to communicate on, separate from their parents, guardians and mentors, that they can never infiltrate.
I know the answer is love and connection, and we're going to have to figure out all of the essential spaces in which it needs to be placed.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Monday, May 8, 2017
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
They Don't Care About Us
Salaam,
As much as I love the Brasil version, this one is the more powerful. No wonder it was banned in the US at the time (and still is?).
And bashed in the NYT. How can saying that "they don't care about us" be bigoted. I don't understand that. To say that such an expression is bigoted is to evoke shame in one who reveals that their benevolent leader is less than caring.
No, "they" don't care about "us," and if we sleep too long, no movement, no matter how strong will keep "them" at bay from destroying "us."
Throughout history, that is the way it is. By time, man is in loss. We have to be constantly vigilant to protect ourselves and those we love from essential slavery, whether it is physical, emotional or mental.
I hear people have been playing this during marches. Some of us just now realizing what's been going on under our noses for some time.
As much as I love the Brasil version, this one is the more powerful. No wonder it was banned in the US at the time (and still is?).
And bashed in the NYT. How can saying that "they don't care about us" be bigoted. I don't understand that. To say that such an expression is bigoted is to evoke shame in one who reveals that their benevolent leader is less than caring.
No, "they" don't care about "us," and if we sleep too long, no movement, no matter how strong will keep "them" at bay from destroying "us."
Throughout history, that is the way it is. By time, man is in loss. We have to be constantly vigilant to protect ourselves and those we love from essential slavery, whether it is physical, emotional or mental.
I hear people have been playing this during marches. Some of us just now realizing what's been going on under our noses for some time.
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Nigeria Wasn't Ready
Salaam,
"Nigeria was not ready for the white man to leave."
Continuing my delve into racial politics...
My parents recently visited a cousin of ours, from my Nigerian side, no less, who was actually integral in my parents' first meeting. Dr. Nwachukwu, or Doc as they knew him, was the head of the Department of Afro-, Afro-American and Chicano Studies (or something like that) at the University of Michigan, Flint in the 1970s when my mother, a recent graduate from the University, was his receptionist for a time. My father, a young, 20-something chemical engineering student, used to visit his cousin Doc and nod to his young secretary before entering the room.
The young secretary would not pay this man much attention until they were set up on a blind date in a party in Flint years later. And the rest is history.
Anyway, after over 30 years, my family reunited with Doc, who now lives with his second wife and children on the east coast. My parents drove their with my Nigerian Uncle and Aunt.
Besides my grandfather's death, it has been a summer of reunions--reunions of brothers after 30 years (my father hadn't been back to Nigeria since 1984, so quite literally), reunion of much of my mother's family to celebrate the life of my grandfather, and now, reunion of family for the first time after my parents marriage made him family to her.
My parents had a great time at Doc's home. One of the things that he did was share his perspective of Nigeria years after independence to the state that the country is in now. And his thoughts were as above. That Nigeria was not ready for the white man to have left.
To hear that from a Nigerian, though second hand, was astounding.
After living in the United States and being not only a full professor, but a head of a department for some time, Doc decided on two occasions to move back to Nigeria. Once in 1980, but then he returned to the United States, and another time in 1989. Between those two visits, he saw what was of Nigeria's infrastructure continue to crumble and democratic governance cease (as Nigeria was well into dictatorship by the second visit).
Of all of the descriptions of decrepit infrastructure, weakening culture and fractured politics that he must have told, my mother clung to the following example:
Doc was in a Nigerian university, a full professor there, trained in the United States, everything, walking into the building. Ahead of him was a graduate-level instructor who also happened to be white. As the white instructor entered the building, the students hailed him, cheering for him, enthusiastic for his arrival. As Doc walked into the building, the students turned their backs on him.
My mother's reaction is perhaps the topic for another post. But the long version of her reaction was that...maybe he is right. If these students' reaction says anything about the sentiments of the larger society as a whole, maybe they were not ready for the white man to leave! Maybe whatever tribal divisions that lead to genocide and war in the 1960s, that continue to this day under the guise of religion, keep Nigeria from the good governance that would ultimately lead to their further development. Whatever petty issue kept the students from revering their black professor over the white TA are perhaps borne out in larger society, and if it's going to be like that, maybe things would run better if the President of Nigeria were a white man, unconnected to tribal politics and not any other type of brown person.
And coming to that conclusion is really, really sad.
However, this is the opinion of one man, one Nigerian-born professor who ultimately decided to make his permanent home in the United States.
But what is it? Was Nigeria not ready for their independence? A whole lot points to yes. And does that inherently mean that they were not ready for the British to leave?
Then there comes the key question--would it have been better for the British to have never come to Nigeria, or the Europeans never having come to Africa, colonized, anything? And if so, what would the continent look like now? What would the world look like now? Would there even be a United States of America without African slaves' backs on which to build it on?
These questions and assumptions are all fraught with problems, the main problem being that we are in the present now. Independence has been declared. The arbitrary lines have been drawn on maps and groups of people who previously had nothing to do with each other have been called Nigerians for 54 years this October 1. Not ready to be independent or not, not ready to be ruled by themselves, with all of the tribal baggage that survived 60 years of colonization, this is the present reality. And brain drain is a mug.
They weren't ready, okay, but now what? What kind of leadership is needed, what kind of reform is needed, how to you combat corruption that is near institutionalized?
Since my father left, I will always be an outsider, looking in. And while my cousins seem to be more concerned about what the existence of ISIS means about the second coming of Christ and upholding homosexuality bans for the sake of Nigeria, I'm not sure they have any concrete aspirations for elevating the political situation of Nigeria, of improving infrastructure, actually.
These are just my family members, though.
I would love to read contemporary Nigerian political thinkers and their take on the state of Nigeria and the best direction of the future. If any of my readers have some resources for me, I'd like to read them. I recognize that the disappointed musings of an ex-pat must pale in comparison to people who are living Nigeria as a reality.
Or is it really that the only way that Nigeria will work as a country is if it is run by white people?
"Nigeria was not ready for the white man to leave."
Continuing my delve into racial politics...
My parents recently visited a cousin of ours, from my Nigerian side, no less, who was actually integral in my parents' first meeting. Dr. Nwachukwu, or Doc as they knew him, was the head of the Department of Afro-, Afro-American and Chicano Studies (or something like that) at the University of Michigan, Flint in the 1970s when my mother, a recent graduate from the University, was his receptionist for a time. My father, a young, 20-something chemical engineering student, used to visit his cousin Doc and nod to his young secretary before entering the room.
The young secretary would not pay this man much attention until they were set up on a blind date in a party in Flint years later. And the rest is history.
Anyway, after over 30 years, my family reunited with Doc, who now lives with his second wife and children on the east coast. My parents drove their with my Nigerian Uncle and Aunt.
Besides my grandfather's death, it has been a summer of reunions--reunions of brothers after 30 years (my father hadn't been back to Nigeria since 1984, so quite literally), reunion of much of my mother's family to celebrate the life of my grandfather, and now, reunion of family for the first time after my parents marriage made him family to her.
My parents had a great time at Doc's home. One of the things that he did was share his perspective of Nigeria years after independence to the state that the country is in now. And his thoughts were as above. That Nigeria was not ready for the white man to have left.
To hear that from a Nigerian, though second hand, was astounding.
After living in the United States and being not only a full professor, but a head of a department for some time, Doc decided on two occasions to move back to Nigeria. Once in 1980, but then he returned to the United States, and another time in 1989. Between those two visits, he saw what was of Nigeria's infrastructure continue to crumble and democratic governance cease (as Nigeria was well into dictatorship by the second visit).
Of all of the descriptions of decrepit infrastructure, weakening culture and fractured politics that he must have told, my mother clung to the following example:
Doc was in a Nigerian university, a full professor there, trained in the United States, everything, walking into the building. Ahead of him was a graduate-level instructor who also happened to be white. As the white instructor entered the building, the students hailed him, cheering for him, enthusiastic for his arrival. As Doc walked into the building, the students turned their backs on him.
My mother's reaction is perhaps the topic for another post. But the long version of her reaction was that...maybe he is right. If these students' reaction says anything about the sentiments of the larger society as a whole, maybe they were not ready for the white man to leave! Maybe whatever tribal divisions that lead to genocide and war in the 1960s, that continue to this day under the guise of religion, keep Nigeria from the good governance that would ultimately lead to their further development. Whatever petty issue kept the students from revering their black professor over the white TA are perhaps borne out in larger society, and if it's going to be like that, maybe things would run better if the President of Nigeria were a white man, unconnected to tribal politics and not any other type of brown person.
And coming to that conclusion is really, really sad.
However, this is the opinion of one man, one Nigerian-born professor who ultimately decided to make his permanent home in the United States.
But what is it? Was Nigeria not ready for their independence? A whole lot points to yes. And does that inherently mean that they were not ready for the British to leave?
Then there comes the key question--would it have been better for the British to have never come to Nigeria, or the Europeans never having come to Africa, colonized, anything? And if so, what would the continent look like now? What would the world look like now? Would there even be a United States of America without African slaves' backs on which to build it on?
These questions and assumptions are all fraught with problems, the main problem being that we are in the present now. Independence has been declared. The arbitrary lines have been drawn on maps and groups of people who previously had nothing to do with each other have been called Nigerians for 54 years this October 1. Not ready to be independent or not, not ready to be ruled by themselves, with all of the tribal baggage that survived 60 years of colonization, this is the present reality. And brain drain is a mug.
They weren't ready, okay, but now what? What kind of leadership is needed, what kind of reform is needed, how to you combat corruption that is near institutionalized?
Since my father left, I will always be an outsider, looking in. And while my cousins seem to be more concerned about what the existence of ISIS means about the second coming of Christ and upholding homosexuality bans for the sake of Nigeria, I'm not sure they have any concrete aspirations for elevating the political situation of Nigeria, of improving infrastructure, actually.
These are just my family members, though.
I would love to read contemporary Nigerian political thinkers and their take on the state of Nigeria and the best direction of the future. If any of my readers have some resources for me, I'd like to read them. I recognize that the disappointed musings of an ex-pat must pale in comparison to people who are living Nigeria as a reality.
Or is it really that the only way that Nigeria will work as a country is if it is run by white people?
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Some Truths
As salaam alaikum,
"The one thing we did right was the day we started to fight. Keep your eyes on that prize, hold on." - "Eyes on That Prize"
I don't usually get political. On this blog or anywhere else online, really. Definitely not Facebook. But one of my co-residents posted something about Ferguson, and how we should keep talking, and while I agree, more than just talking needs to be done.
More than just media showboating needs to be done.
I posted in the Facebook comment box that we have a militarized police force that has been in full force and growing since the 1980s institution of the War on Drugs. I told her to read The New Jim Crow, which I have to read in pieces because it makes me angry. I told her that post-civil rights is a fallacy. The Civil Rights movement didn't end, it died. It died with a lot of its key leaders who were assassinated, thanks in part to our own FBI. To this day, I don't understand how more people don't know about COINTELPRO. Even if there were only evidence linking the FBI to the death of one Black Panther (and I believe there is more evidence than that), isn't that bad enough?
The movement was posthumously declared over. There was still work to be done and Malcolm X had just found Islam and that shaped the way he saw the movement, Martin Luther King had more than just a dream, he was a man of ideas made tangible and wanted to move to overall social justice and poverty next. So many leaders and non-leaders, young people, killed, so many deaths without justice.
Post-civil rights movement is a fallacy and that's exactly how Michael Brown could be shot with his arms up, feet away from the police officer so many times into his poor body and left dead in a pool of his own blood on the streets of Ferguson for hours in the sun, like a dog.
Black life is not valued in this country, never has, and if we do nothing, never will. Some black people do not value black life. That's how my cousin was murdered and left for dead in a pool of his own blood while trying to go to work to provide for his young family. For a few dollar bills. And the killer has not been found. That's how another cousin killed in cold blood and will spend the rest of his life in prison. That's how Emmit Till and thousands of other black men had their bodies destroyed for sport. That's how Eric Garner was choked to death in public and that's how Michael Brown was shot and left for dead.
Left like a dog. Or worse than that, because someone would have handled the body of even a stray dog.
I could say so much more, but this is not the only issue out there right now. This summer was a hard Ramadan for many because of injustice and death so many places in the world, most notably in Gaza. I don't like to get political mainly because I don't have time, during my training, to be part of the grander solution. I don't have time to be well read and therefore the best spoken here, and I don't put my prose to its best use, which I do not believe is an online blog that few people read. I believe that is mobilizing people who have the tools and the drive to affect legislation.
My parents have also always feared my online presence, especially as a Muslimah, because long before we knew about NSA, my mother, as a former black nationalist, knew about the NSA. In the sense that she knew after 9/11 there were most certainly governmental bodies that had the power to tap into our lives as the NSA has. Call that some old NOI conspiracy theorizing, but it was true, and now folks acting shocked.
I could say so much more, but instead, I choose to end this entry with a series of truths. This goes beyond Ferguson. This goes beyond the other string of innocent black men that were killed before Michael Brown this year and were killed after. This is about Civil Rights.
1. The militarized police are here to stay and will continue to use excessive force unless meaningful and deep rooted legislative action happens to eradicate it, much of which is firmly based in the War on Drugs. Our legislative bodies have not been in a state to affect that type of change and won't be in the foreseeable future.
2. The 1960s were a horrendous decade, not only because so many people were killed, but because the government lied, step by step, over and over and over again.
3. The Civil Rights movement should not have been over when it was. There were many victories but the status quo is not a victory we can declare post-civil rights worthy by any stretch of the imagination.
4. As Affirmative Action programs have ended over the country over the last 10 years, the "playing field" is still far from "level," as long as predominantly black schools remain predominantly poor, meaning the majority of black kids get substandard education to inhibit college success.
5. SCOTUS knew exactly what they were doing in voting down the Voting Rights Act, and that "country has come so far" rhetoric was a cover. Poor blacks won't be counting marbles in a jar to get the vote but there will surely be other restrictive measures popping back up, and it won't be restricted to the South.
6. Speaking of the value of black life, some black people also do not value black life, this is true. The reality of white-on-white crime aside, black self-violence is apparent not only in crimes and murders committed but in our own music, our entertainment, our leisure. This must stop because, fair or not, there is a group of people who will not value our lives because they figure we also don't value our own. And we will continue to die in our own hands and in the hands of others, on the street, in pools of blood for hours, worse than dogs.
7. Regardless of the above, it is egregious to blame the victim, and every time a young black man is killed, the victim is blamed, it is justified based on circumstantial issues that really are not worth dying over. Like Trayvon and weed. Like Emmit Till and flirting with a white woman. The latter should sound as ridiculous as reasons to die as Michael Brown stealing candy and Eric Garner selling taxless cigarette singles, except even more so because it was carried out by law enforcement.
8. COINTELPRO is real and it's declassified. And just because its now declassified doesn't mean that our government wouldn't and hasn't had similar endeavors, so to speak.
9. We talk about how our healthcare system is broken, and it is, but moreso our penal system is broken, broken and costlier than the education of our children, which further feeds into the system. The disregarded black bodies that are not slaughtered spend some time in the penitentiary, if not the majority of their lives, most of them for petty drug offenses, spending time and tax payer money in a place that has no reformatory value and leave unable to make lives for themselves because of ex-con status.
10. Injustices such as these will continue to happen, in spite of peaceful protest and marching in Ferguson until our government takes thing seriously enough and do as they did during the movement and sign the needed changes into law.
I think 10 is a nice round number. There are probably others that I could include.
It's been more than a month since my grandfather passed, and I feel even more emboldened to try to take over where he left off before a stroke and an ICU stay in the 1970s changed him from the outspoken member of his local black nationalist organization to a quiet man whose memory of injustice often suffered in silence as he changed his focus to his growing family of grandchildren.
"The one thing we did wrong was stay in the wilderness a day too long."
Let's not let time pass after Ferguson, security set in, and we wander back to the wilderness.
"The one thing we did right was the day we started to fight. Keep your eyes on that prize, hold on." - "Eyes on That Prize"
I don't usually get political. On this blog or anywhere else online, really. Definitely not Facebook. But one of my co-residents posted something about Ferguson, and how we should keep talking, and while I agree, more than just talking needs to be done.
More than just media showboating needs to be done.
I posted in the Facebook comment box that we have a militarized police force that has been in full force and growing since the 1980s institution of the War on Drugs. I told her to read The New Jim Crow, which I have to read in pieces because it makes me angry. I told her that post-civil rights is a fallacy. The Civil Rights movement didn't end, it died. It died with a lot of its key leaders who were assassinated, thanks in part to our own FBI. To this day, I don't understand how more people don't know about COINTELPRO. Even if there were only evidence linking the FBI to the death of one Black Panther (and I believe there is more evidence than that), isn't that bad enough?
The movement was posthumously declared over. There was still work to be done and Malcolm X had just found Islam and that shaped the way he saw the movement, Martin Luther King had more than just a dream, he was a man of ideas made tangible and wanted to move to overall social justice and poverty next. So many leaders and non-leaders, young people, killed, so many deaths without justice.
Post-civil rights movement is a fallacy and that's exactly how Michael Brown could be shot with his arms up, feet away from the police officer so many times into his poor body and left dead in a pool of his own blood on the streets of Ferguson for hours in the sun, like a dog.
Black life is not valued in this country, never has, and if we do nothing, never will. Some black people do not value black life. That's how my cousin was murdered and left for dead in a pool of his own blood while trying to go to work to provide for his young family. For a few dollar bills. And the killer has not been found. That's how another cousin killed in cold blood and will spend the rest of his life in prison. That's how Emmit Till and thousands of other black men had their bodies destroyed for sport. That's how Eric Garner was choked to death in public and that's how Michael Brown was shot and left for dead.
Left like a dog. Or worse than that, because someone would have handled the body of even a stray dog.
I could say so much more, but this is not the only issue out there right now. This summer was a hard Ramadan for many because of injustice and death so many places in the world, most notably in Gaza. I don't like to get political mainly because I don't have time, during my training, to be part of the grander solution. I don't have time to be well read and therefore the best spoken here, and I don't put my prose to its best use, which I do not believe is an online blog that few people read. I believe that is mobilizing people who have the tools and the drive to affect legislation.
My parents have also always feared my online presence, especially as a Muslimah, because long before we knew about NSA, my mother, as a former black nationalist, knew about the NSA. In the sense that she knew after 9/11 there were most certainly governmental bodies that had the power to tap into our lives as the NSA has. Call that some old NOI conspiracy theorizing, but it was true, and now folks acting shocked.
I could say so much more, but instead, I choose to end this entry with a series of truths. This goes beyond Ferguson. This goes beyond the other string of innocent black men that were killed before Michael Brown this year and were killed after. This is about Civil Rights.
1. The militarized police are here to stay and will continue to use excessive force unless meaningful and deep rooted legislative action happens to eradicate it, much of which is firmly based in the War on Drugs. Our legislative bodies have not been in a state to affect that type of change and won't be in the foreseeable future.
2. The 1960s were a horrendous decade, not only because so many people were killed, but because the government lied, step by step, over and over and over again.
3. The Civil Rights movement should not have been over when it was. There were many victories but the status quo is not a victory we can declare post-civil rights worthy by any stretch of the imagination.
4. As Affirmative Action programs have ended over the country over the last 10 years, the "playing field" is still far from "level," as long as predominantly black schools remain predominantly poor, meaning the majority of black kids get substandard education to inhibit college success.
5. SCOTUS knew exactly what they were doing in voting down the Voting Rights Act, and that "country has come so far" rhetoric was a cover. Poor blacks won't be counting marbles in a jar to get the vote but there will surely be other restrictive measures popping back up, and it won't be restricted to the South.
6. Speaking of the value of black life, some black people also do not value black life, this is true. The reality of white-on-white crime aside, black self-violence is apparent not only in crimes and murders committed but in our own music, our entertainment, our leisure. This must stop because, fair or not, there is a group of people who will not value our lives because they figure we also don't value our own. And we will continue to die in our own hands and in the hands of others, on the street, in pools of blood for hours, worse than dogs.
7. Regardless of the above, it is egregious to blame the victim, and every time a young black man is killed, the victim is blamed, it is justified based on circumstantial issues that really are not worth dying over. Like Trayvon and weed. Like Emmit Till and flirting with a white woman. The latter should sound as ridiculous as reasons to die as Michael Brown stealing candy and Eric Garner selling taxless cigarette singles, except even more so because it was carried out by law enforcement.
8. COINTELPRO is real and it's declassified. And just because its now declassified doesn't mean that our government wouldn't and hasn't had similar endeavors, so to speak.
9. We talk about how our healthcare system is broken, and it is, but moreso our penal system is broken, broken and costlier than the education of our children, which further feeds into the system. The disregarded black bodies that are not slaughtered spend some time in the penitentiary, if not the majority of their lives, most of them for petty drug offenses, spending time and tax payer money in a place that has no reformatory value and leave unable to make lives for themselves because of ex-con status.
10. Injustices such as these will continue to happen, in spite of peaceful protest and marching in Ferguson until our government takes thing seriously enough and do as they did during the movement and sign the needed changes into law.
I think 10 is a nice round number. There are probably others that I could include.
It's been more than a month since my grandfather passed, and I feel even more emboldened to try to take over where he left off before a stroke and an ICU stay in the 1970s changed him from the outspoken member of his local black nationalist organization to a quiet man whose memory of injustice often suffered in silence as he changed his focus to his growing family of grandchildren.
"The one thing we did wrong was stay in the wilderness a day too long."
Let's not let time pass after Ferguson, security set in, and we wander back to the wilderness.
Friday, August 2, 2013
Sad
Salaam,
Today, I am sad. I sat before an old friend of mine and I became sad. I feel like I've finally come to terms with so many things that I've given up on that maybe I shouldn't have, so many ways that I've lost faith in things that maybe I shouldn't have, at least not this early.
The world for me became a much more jagged, ugly place for me more rapidly than it ever has been before. The fact that I could read The New Jim Crow and not become enraged tells me that I am disaffected. It could be worse. I could want to do nothing about it.
But it's not as bad as it could be. It's more like the opposite. I want to do everything about it.
But I don't know where to begin.
Today, I am sad. I sat before an old friend of mine and I became sad. I feel like I've finally come to terms with so many things that I've given up on that maybe I shouldn't have, so many ways that I've lost faith in things that maybe I shouldn't have, at least not this early.
The world for me became a much more jagged, ugly place for me more rapidly than it ever has been before. The fact that I could read The New Jim Crow and not become enraged tells me that I am disaffected. It could be worse. I could want to do nothing about it.
But it's not as bad as it could be. It's more like the opposite. I want to do everything about it.
But I don't know where to begin.
Saturday, July 20, 2013
A Stick, A Stone / é pau, é pedra
As salaam alaikum,
I just listened to Obama's full speech reflecting on the Trayvon Martin case. As one of my friends said on facebook, "My President is Black." And honestly, this is one of the first times that I have felt that in a positive way in a while.
As in, I recognize my president is black and not because of hateful comparisons to monkeys or reference to as the antichrist or anything overtly racist like that. And not because of the many covertly racist ways that he is regarded.
He explained so eloquently why the case is so painful for us, black people, in a way that was appropriately delicate but detailed.
I'll say it this way. I'm called to mind of my grandfather, who in his youth was instructed to act like he had a developmental disability if a white woman tried to talk to him so he would not face violence from her white relations (i.e. lynching and the like). See the case of Emmett Till. Spoiler alert: those who killed him were acquitted. And I think, will I have to teach my sons to fall to the ground, face down, with their hands raised if confronted by a white man who appears to feel threatened by them? Is that really what's going on here?
It's bad enough that I may have to defend my sons against teachers who, by the age of five, believe my sons to be aggressive, out of control, and want to kick them out of the classroom, expel them, enroll them in special ed. It's bad enough that I'll have to fear for my sons' life at the hands of peers, depending on where they live.
This case sent a dangerous precedent that set race relations in this country back decades. Back to the time of the Emmett Till murder, back to the time when the last black body swung from a tree.
As I thought of this, however, the following words came to my mind: é pau, é pedra, é o fim do caminho...
It's a twig, it's a rock, it's the end of the road...
Or, as the English version goes, "A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road."
My favorite song of all time is "Aguas de Março" by Tom Jobim. My favorite version of it is Elis Regina's, though I like almost every version of the song, ever.
And I thought of the song, and it took on new meaning to me.
I love that I can shift and think in another language. I love that I'm fluent in Spanish and can hold my own in Portuguese. I love that I can slide fluidly into this world and meld with a people whose mindset is different about race (far from perfect, far from racial utopia, just different) and escape from the brand of ugly we have here.
I love that I can shift into a language with it's own music with unique lyrics and sentiments I haven't necessarily heard in English-language songs. And today, "Aguas de Março" expressed a sentiment that it hadn't for me before, that I don't think I could find in another English-language song.
It's a long version of my SO's "oh well" when something falls outside of his hands, though is regretable.
A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road, it's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone.
I learned all of the words in Portuguese, which took me months, but now I know it by heart. Categorically naming all of the objects in his surrounding, from a cut on his toe to the car stuck in the mud...and the mud, and the mud...then carefully translated into English, using no words that had Latin roots, Tom Jobim ingeniously crafted the Waters of March with an arrangement that sounds like a gentle but persistent rain.
Each of these little objects makes up a landscape, the psychological landscape of the Waters of March. The song tonight sounds to me like surrender...peaceful, wet, gradual surrender, piecemeal, to life, to reality, to beauty in pieces. Still existing in spite of the rain, in spite of the end of summer.
They're the waters of March, closing the summer. It's the promise of life in my heart.
I listened to the speech by Obama and it gave me hope. It made me feel less desperate. Seeing so many of my non-black friends applauding it on facebook made me feel less alone. Not that I needed their validation, but I'm glad to see black people weren't the only ones who cared. And seeing Obama, who I have personally felt has compromised many of what he said were his values in the name of maintaining his position, be real in front of the press and explain what it felt like to be black and hear that verdict--the world isn't quite as bleak as I thought it was for a while.
It's part of the human condition that we make life bleak for one another. But it is excellence of the human condition when we are able to do right by each other, bring each other up.
But Trayvon is dead, George Zimmerman is acquitted, several other unarmed black boys and young men died because they were suspicious, even more black boys and young men died because of senseless violence, and so many black boys and young men are in jail, out of jail or on the conveyor belt to jail. What I experienced tonight was beauty, but beauty is always bittersweet in the face of sorrow.
And that's what a lot of Brazilian music is for me. Bittersweet beauty in the face of sorrow. The beauty is always lovely sounding to those who don't understand the lyrics. In the lyrics is the pain.
So "Aguas" breaks it down for me...it makes that beauty elemental. A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road, it's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone. It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun, it is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun...
On a slightly related note, the video of the children expressing shock about that controversial Cheerios ad renewed my intense desire to have children of my own. So cute! Little people are amazing.
I just listened to Obama's full speech reflecting on the Trayvon Martin case. As one of my friends said on facebook, "My President is Black." And honestly, this is one of the first times that I have felt that in a positive way in a while.
As in, I recognize my president is black and not because of hateful comparisons to monkeys or reference to as the antichrist or anything overtly racist like that. And not because of the many covertly racist ways that he is regarded.
He explained so eloquently why the case is so painful for us, black people, in a way that was appropriately delicate but detailed.
I'll say it this way. I'm called to mind of my grandfather, who in his youth was instructed to act like he had a developmental disability if a white woman tried to talk to him so he would not face violence from her white relations (i.e. lynching and the like). See the case of Emmett Till. Spoiler alert: those who killed him were acquitted. And I think, will I have to teach my sons to fall to the ground, face down, with their hands raised if confronted by a white man who appears to feel threatened by them? Is that really what's going on here?
It's bad enough that I may have to defend my sons against teachers who, by the age of five, believe my sons to be aggressive, out of control, and want to kick them out of the classroom, expel them, enroll them in special ed. It's bad enough that I'll have to fear for my sons' life at the hands of peers, depending on where they live.
This case sent a dangerous precedent that set race relations in this country back decades. Back to the time of the Emmett Till murder, back to the time when the last black body swung from a tree.
As I thought of this, however, the following words came to my mind: é pau, é pedra, é o fim do caminho...
It's a twig, it's a rock, it's the end of the road...
Or, as the English version goes, "A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road."
My favorite song of all time is "Aguas de Março" by Tom Jobim. My favorite version of it is Elis Regina's, though I like almost every version of the song, ever.
And I thought of the song, and it took on new meaning to me.
I love that I can shift and think in another language. I love that I'm fluent in Spanish and can hold my own in Portuguese. I love that I can slide fluidly into this world and meld with a people whose mindset is different about race (far from perfect, far from racial utopia, just different) and escape from the brand of ugly we have here.
I love that I can shift into a language with it's own music with unique lyrics and sentiments I haven't necessarily heard in English-language songs. And today, "Aguas de Março" expressed a sentiment that it hadn't for me before, that I don't think I could find in another English-language song.
It's a long version of my SO's "oh well" when something falls outside of his hands, though is regretable.
A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road, it's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone.
I learned all of the words in Portuguese, which took me months, but now I know it by heart. Categorically naming all of the objects in his surrounding, from a cut on his toe to the car stuck in the mud...and the mud, and the mud...then carefully translated into English, using no words that had Latin roots, Tom Jobim ingeniously crafted the Waters of March with an arrangement that sounds like a gentle but persistent rain.
Each of these little objects makes up a landscape, the psychological landscape of the Waters of March. The song tonight sounds to me like surrender...peaceful, wet, gradual surrender, piecemeal, to life, to reality, to beauty in pieces. Still existing in spite of the rain, in spite of the end of summer.
They're the waters of March, closing the summer. It's the promise of life in my heart.
I listened to the speech by Obama and it gave me hope. It made me feel less desperate. Seeing so many of my non-black friends applauding it on facebook made me feel less alone. Not that I needed their validation, but I'm glad to see black people weren't the only ones who cared. And seeing Obama, who I have personally felt has compromised many of what he said were his values in the name of maintaining his position, be real in front of the press and explain what it felt like to be black and hear that verdict--the world isn't quite as bleak as I thought it was for a while.
It's part of the human condition that we make life bleak for one another. But it is excellence of the human condition when we are able to do right by each other, bring each other up.
But Trayvon is dead, George Zimmerman is acquitted, several other unarmed black boys and young men died because they were suspicious, even more black boys and young men died because of senseless violence, and so many black boys and young men are in jail, out of jail or on the conveyor belt to jail. What I experienced tonight was beauty, but beauty is always bittersweet in the face of sorrow.
And that's what a lot of Brazilian music is for me. Bittersweet beauty in the face of sorrow. The beauty is always lovely sounding to those who don't understand the lyrics. In the lyrics is the pain.
So "Aguas" breaks it down for me...it makes that beauty elemental. A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road, it's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone. It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun, it is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun...
On a slightly related note, the video of the children expressing shock about that controversial Cheerios ad renewed my intense desire to have children of my own. So cute! Little people are amazing.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
My Reaction to "Is Marriage for White People?"
Salaam,
I'm super late, I know, but I finally picked up a (Kindle) copy of Is Marriage for White People? by Ralph Richard Banks and read essentially over a couple of OB shifts on my latest rotation. It was an enthralling read that enraged me at once and consoled me in other moments. I felt vulnerable as every single insecurity I've had about having a European SO came to the forefront in other women's narratives. For all of the scholarly research that went into the making of the book, I felt that the solution (wish it had been plural) proposed by Banks were incomplete, but I appreciated someone actually spending time with black women and telling the very unique stories of our struggles finding a mate.
I could talk on and on about the things that made me angry. I think the thing that made me angriest is that essentially the high rates of STIs and HIV among black women more than any other group in the US is secondary to something Banks calls "man sharing," which to me sounded like man whoredom. Essentially, black men are more likely than any other race of men to engage in "long-term concurrent relationships." Infidelity is the term I'm comfortable with, but I understand the diplomacy of vocabulary of a liberal discourse. Black women do not have more sexual partners than the general population, but black men, the men they almost exclusively relate to, do.
Also, the fact that abortion rates are highest amongst black women not because they have higher rates of unplanned pregnancies when they are single, it's just that that many black women in a population are single...was also telling.
I could also talk about what was consoling. That those various Okcupid and other online dating site studies that show that black women are the least sought after of any race or gender, even amongst black men, are not the whole story, was consoling. I don't have to be considered among the most beautiful group of women in the world...but it does do something to your spirit when you have studies showing you are the least desired.
What I felt was incomplete about Banks' book is that his solution to the critical shortage of marriageable men for black women was for more black women to "marry out." I don't actually take issue to that and I feel like if everyone were more comfortable marrying outside of the bounds of race, we would be a happier people. But it's not that easy. In fact, it's hard as hell.
And Banks does acknowledge this by doing lip service to the years of trauma of slavery and the sometimes comparable institutionalized racism that infected our country thereafter and what impact that had on black women and the implications of dating and marrying, specifically, white men, and not ending up with black men. Lip service because someone could write their doctoral thesis on black women and the way we relate to men based on slavery and institutionalized racism, not just a few paragraphs. And I don't really take issue to that, either. He acknowledges it while illustrating with a few vignettes happy interracial couples that are happy not because they don't struggle sometimes with issues of race, but happy because they've found a way to relate to each other in spite of it.
My problem, then, and what I find incomplete is that he says that in order to strengthen black relationships and bring black marriage back, some black women are just going to have to "marry out" so the rest can pursue their passion for black men.
And then the book ended, and I was left like, what?
Really, Richard Banks, really?
I mean, I appreciated the pages and pages of data, the relation of all of these vignettes of real women and their experience as black women in the dating and marriage market. The fact that so much resonated with me rang true. I guess that in the book was really more a gathering of data than a proposition of multiple solutions.
His thought was...the more (specifically middle class) black women open themselves up to non-black men and pursue these relationships, the less black women there will be in the pool for (middle-class, high achieving) black men to mess over (essentially). Reducing the pool of black women for these men to choose from would mean that there would be more competition for the black women left in the pool that did not seek interracial relationships, and then black men would treat the women better in this relationships because they were competing more for their affections. More black women seeking interracial relationships would therefore even the marriage gap in the middle-class, meaning more middle-class, high achieving black men would seek to marry comparable black women, less of these women would "marry down" and less would seek working-class black men as they are now (in statistically unsuccessful marriages and relationships), and more of those men would be available for their lower class black women, and...
I'm not sure how this is really benefiting lower class black women. Most of his focus and all of his interviews are focused on middle class black women, and lower class black women are left to victim status. I feel like he represents them as past the point of rescue, showing statistically that marriage has ceased to exist for poor blacks.
His treatment of this lower class is at times other in a way that his defense sometimes feels patronizing. In this narrative, I feel like they are, again, the invisible victims that the likes of Bill Cosby, a now disconnected, old-school middle class black, and Barack Obama (where do you begin?) cannot understand when they call on black fathers to take more responsibility for the children they begot.
Even though he expresses shock that black women bear so much of the burden internally on trying to keep the race together, essentially--they are concerned with preserving blackness in their children, both culturally and phenotypically (a thought process I can identify with), preserving the community by supporting "our" men, all sentiments that are not shared so readily by our male counterparts--the best solution he has after all that data, so it seems, is that some black women take it for the team and marry out.
I say this all the while being the type of black woman that, in spite of feeling a strong sense of duty towards the black community, has never limited herself conceptually to black men. The first man I ever loved, the man I loved the hardest, was South Asian. Nor have I completely tuned out black men. I am not only attracted to black men. But there are ways in which it is easier and more automatic for me to be attracted to people of color, I must admit.
So I can understand how a black woman would be uniquely attracted to black men, as many of the women in the book expressed.
In the face of how many black women prefer black men, suggesting (middle class) black women to marry out does feel like taking one for the team.
It's all back in the hands of black women. Black men, with their propensity for "man sharing" and all other foolishness, their lack of sense of duty of racial preservation (not all, but enough that the surplus of interracial relationships with black men ending up with non-black women contributes to the partner shortage for black women), are no active player in the solution at all. They are just passive actors, persuaded to actually commit to intelligent, accomplished black women only after they see that non-black men are sweeping them up and there's less of them to come by.
I certainly thing that more people should consider interracial relationships. That will help break down barriers and gradually make it easier, as it already is easier for those of us than it was just decades ago. But placing the fate of relationships and marriage in women's hands is irresponsible. There are certainly other solutions that involve men being better people.
The name of the book, in fact, comes from a group of young black boys asking how to be better fathers, and presented with the idea of meeting with married couples to explore that. The boy who asked the question said he wasn't interested in hearing about marriage, and his friend said, "Marriage is for white people." Telling, that this is the origin of the book, young black boys not feeling a connection to marriage, and yet, the solution lies in mature black women.
How about addressing those concerns of those young black boys, getting to the bottom of why they think marriage is for white people, and helping them to find a paradigm where marriage, or if not marriage, long-term committed relationships, could be for them, too? Little black boys, some of them who will grow up to be working class, some middle class, who will inherit attitudes about women and relationships from the very men who are leaving so many black women single.
I don't think it lies only in the boys, but I think we need to pay more attention to our boys. That's where my focus lies. I don't see our men as past the point of rescue but, for my own mental health, I don't see myself as the one who will be doing the rescuing. I see for myself, now more than ever, the greatest likelihood of happiness in a long-term relationship with a non-black man. I don't exclude the possibility of such a relationship with a black man, but it has not been my experience that black men are interested in that kind of relationship with me.
On the eve of possibly ending up with a white man at that, I have not given up on the cause. I still feel duty to my community. I am the only black physician in a clinic that serves a large black population. My patients remind me of my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. They remind me of the girls and boys I went to school with who are now men and women. These are my people, regardless of who I marry, if God so wills that I marry. My focus is on the children, making sure they have the tools to be, if they so choose, responsible and loving adults.
And I believe that is the more apt solution to bolstering the black community and preventing our ruin. I'm not concerned about the phenotype of my potential children or how much they'll identify as black, per se, as I am the plight of the black children that exist now and will continue to exist in a world where they are marginalized.
I wish, for all of those statistics and his mention of his own sons, that Banks had thought more about mentorship.
Because what if those little black boys that thought that marriage was for white people and their cohort resoundingly grow up to graduate high school and not enter prison, unlike the current fate of so many of our boys?
Even after this very specific, pointed criticism, I must say that I overall appreciated the experience of reading this book. While I am critical of the only proposed solution to the very complicated issue of the black marriage decline (and the marriage decline in general), I would not go as far as this Jezebel blogger who does not appear to be black who defends black women's right to love whoever they want in an incomplete assessment of Bank's argument.
I knew I wouldn't like the article from the picture. The woman in the picture harkens back to the time that the black women represented in media were all fair and mixed-looking. And the picture looks like that of a woman who regrets having fallen into the hands of leering generic white man.
Then the article simplifies the argument in implying that Banks is saying white men will be black women's savior.
Umm...yes, only if white men are the only non-black men that black women could marry.
And when we are talking about heterosexual women who desire marriage and children, yes, actually, a man is necessarily part of the solution.
In the end, I can relate to what many of the women said. When I imagined myself marrying and starting a family, I imagined myself doing it younger. I imagined it being with someone my parents approved of and who fit into my extended family easily, like many of my cousins' husbands, to the point that I would call them cousin. Grossly, a man of African descent would best fit this. But I am more complicated than my blackness, as all of us are.
Such a man who would fit into my nuclear and extended family would have to be Christian to appease my father, understanding if not a big-brother figure to my brother, attractive enough for my mother to approve of him entering the family, and able to brush off the bull slung around by my uncles and cousins.
So actually, I was never going to have that. If just by the assumption that a Christian man would not be content with my being Muslim.
In the course of this year I discovered that I have to be somewhat of a pioneer in my family in order to not end up alone, or else I will continue to watch my non-black friends marry and I will be, year after year, single.
I'm super late, I know, but I finally picked up a (Kindle) copy of Is Marriage for White People? by Ralph Richard Banks and read essentially over a couple of OB shifts on my latest rotation. It was an enthralling read that enraged me at once and consoled me in other moments. I felt vulnerable as every single insecurity I've had about having a European SO came to the forefront in other women's narratives. For all of the scholarly research that went into the making of the book, I felt that the solution (wish it had been plural) proposed by Banks were incomplete, but I appreciated someone actually spending time with black women and telling the very unique stories of our struggles finding a mate.
I could talk on and on about the things that made me angry. I think the thing that made me angriest is that essentially the high rates of STIs and HIV among black women more than any other group in the US is secondary to something Banks calls "man sharing," which to me sounded like man whoredom. Essentially, black men are more likely than any other race of men to engage in "long-term concurrent relationships." Infidelity is the term I'm comfortable with, but I understand the diplomacy of vocabulary of a liberal discourse. Black women do not have more sexual partners than the general population, but black men, the men they almost exclusively relate to, do.
Also, the fact that abortion rates are highest amongst black women not because they have higher rates of unplanned pregnancies when they are single, it's just that that many black women in a population are single...was also telling.
I could also talk about what was consoling. That those various Okcupid and other online dating site studies that show that black women are the least sought after of any race or gender, even amongst black men, are not the whole story, was consoling. I don't have to be considered among the most beautiful group of women in the world...but it does do something to your spirit when you have studies showing you are the least desired.
What I felt was incomplete about Banks' book is that his solution to the critical shortage of marriageable men for black women was for more black women to "marry out." I don't actually take issue to that and I feel like if everyone were more comfortable marrying outside of the bounds of race, we would be a happier people. But it's not that easy. In fact, it's hard as hell.
And Banks does acknowledge this by doing lip service to the years of trauma of slavery and the sometimes comparable institutionalized racism that infected our country thereafter and what impact that had on black women and the implications of dating and marrying, specifically, white men, and not ending up with black men. Lip service because someone could write their doctoral thesis on black women and the way we relate to men based on slavery and institutionalized racism, not just a few paragraphs. And I don't really take issue to that, either. He acknowledges it while illustrating with a few vignettes happy interracial couples that are happy not because they don't struggle sometimes with issues of race, but happy because they've found a way to relate to each other in spite of it.
My problem, then, and what I find incomplete is that he says that in order to strengthen black relationships and bring black marriage back, some black women are just going to have to "marry out" so the rest can pursue their passion for black men.
And then the book ended, and I was left like, what?
Really, Richard Banks, really?
I mean, I appreciated the pages and pages of data, the relation of all of these vignettes of real women and their experience as black women in the dating and marriage market. The fact that so much resonated with me rang true. I guess that in the book was really more a gathering of data than a proposition of multiple solutions.
His thought was...the more (specifically middle class) black women open themselves up to non-black men and pursue these relationships, the less black women there will be in the pool for (middle-class, high achieving) black men to mess over (essentially). Reducing the pool of black women for these men to choose from would mean that there would be more competition for the black women left in the pool that did not seek interracial relationships, and then black men would treat the women better in this relationships because they were competing more for their affections. More black women seeking interracial relationships would therefore even the marriage gap in the middle-class, meaning more middle-class, high achieving black men would seek to marry comparable black women, less of these women would "marry down" and less would seek working-class black men as they are now (in statistically unsuccessful marriages and relationships), and more of those men would be available for their lower class black women, and...
I'm not sure how this is really benefiting lower class black women. Most of his focus and all of his interviews are focused on middle class black women, and lower class black women are left to victim status. I feel like he represents them as past the point of rescue, showing statistically that marriage has ceased to exist for poor blacks.
His treatment of this lower class is at times other in a way that his defense sometimes feels patronizing. In this narrative, I feel like they are, again, the invisible victims that the likes of Bill Cosby, a now disconnected, old-school middle class black, and Barack Obama (where do you begin?) cannot understand when they call on black fathers to take more responsibility for the children they begot.
Even though he expresses shock that black women bear so much of the burden internally on trying to keep the race together, essentially--they are concerned with preserving blackness in their children, both culturally and phenotypically (a thought process I can identify with), preserving the community by supporting "our" men, all sentiments that are not shared so readily by our male counterparts--the best solution he has after all that data, so it seems, is that some black women take it for the team and marry out.
I say this all the while being the type of black woman that, in spite of feeling a strong sense of duty towards the black community, has never limited herself conceptually to black men. The first man I ever loved, the man I loved the hardest, was South Asian. Nor have I completely tuned out black men. I am not only attracted to black men. But there are ways in which it is easier and more automatic for me to be attracted to people of color, I must admit.
So I can understand how a black woman would be uniquely attracted to black men, as many of the women in the book expressed.
In the face of how many black women prefer black men, suggesting (middle class) black women to marry out does feel like taking one for the team.
It's all back in the hands of black women. Black men, with their propensity for "man sharing" and all other foolishness, their lack of sense of duty of racial preservation (not all, but enough that the surplus of interracial relationships with black men ending up with non-black women contributes to the partner shortage for black women), are no active player in the solution at all. They are just passive actors, persuaded to actually commit to intelligent, accomplished black women only after they see that non-black men are sweeping them up and there's less of them to come by.
I certainly thing that more people should consider interracial relationships. That will help break down barriers and gradually make it easier, as it already is easier for those of us than it was just decades ago. But placing the fate of relationships and marriage in women's hands is irresponsible. There are certainly other solutions that involve men being better people.
The name of the book, in fact, comes from a group of young black boys asking how to be better fathers, and presented with the idea of meeting with married couples to explore that. The boy who asked the question said he wasn't interested in hearing about marriage, and his friend said, "Marriage is for white people." Telling, that this is the origin of the book, young black boys not feeling a connection to marriage, and yet, the solution lies in mature black women.
How about addressing those concerns of those young black boys, getting to the bottom of why they think marriage is for white people, and helping them to find a paradigm where marriage, or if not marriage, long-term committed relationships, could be for them, too? Little black boys, some of them who will grow up to be working class, some middle class, who will inherit attitudes about women and relationships from the very men who are leaving so many black women single.
I don't think it lies only in the boys, but I think we need to pay more attention to our boys. That's where my focus lies. I don't see our men as past the point of rescue but, for my own mental health, I don't see myself as the one who will be doing the rescuing. I see for myself, now more than ever, the greatest likelihood of happiness in a long-term relationship with a non-black man. I don't exclude the possibility of such a relationship with a black man, but it has not been my experience that black men are interested in that kind of relationship with me.
On the eve of possibly ending up with a white man at that, I have not given up on the cause. I still feel duty to my community. I am the only black physician in a clinic that serves a large black population. My patients remind me of my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. They remind me of the girls and boys I went to school with who are now men and women. These are my people, regardless of who I marry, if God so wills that I marry. My focus is on the children, making sure they have the tools to be, if they so choose, responsible and loving adults.
And I believe that is the more apt solution to bolstering the black community and preventing our ruin. I'm not concerned about the phenotype of my potential children or how much they'll identify as black, per se, as I am the plight of the black children that exist now and will continue to exist in a world where they are marginalized.
I wish, for all of those statistics and his mention of his own sons, that Banks had thought more about mentorship.
Because what if those little black boys that thought that marriage was for white people and their cohort resoundingly grow up to graduate high school and not enter prison, unlike the current fate of so many of our boys?
Even after this very specific, pointed criticism, I must say that I overall appreciated the experience of reading this book. While I am critical of the only proposed solution to the very complicated issue of the black marriage decline (and the marriage decline in general), I would not go as far as this Jezebel blogger who does not appear to be black who defends black women's right to love whoever they want in an incomplete assessment of Bank's argument.
I knew I wouldn't like the article from the picture. The woman in the picture harkens back to the time that the black women represented in media were all fair and mixed-looking. And the picture looks like that of a woman who regrets having fallen into the hands of leering generic white man.
Then the article simplifies the argument in implying that Banks is saying white men will be black women's savior.
Umm...yes, only if white men are the only non-black men that black women could marry.
And when we are talking about heterosexual women who desire marriage and children, yes, actually, a man is necessarily part of the solution.
In the end, I can relate to what many of the women said. When I imagined myself marrying and starting a family, I imagined myself doing it younger. I imagined it being with someone my parents approved of and who fit into my extended family easily, like many of my cousins' husbands, to the point that I would call them cousin. Grossly, a man of African descent would best fit this. But I am more complicated than my blackness, as all of us are.
Such a man who would fit into my nuclear and extended family would have to be Christian to appease my father, understanding if not a big-brother figure to my brother, attractive enough for my mother to approve of him entering the family, and able to brush off the bull slung around by my uncles and cousins.
So actually, I was never going to have that. If just by the assumption that a Christian man would not be content with my being Muslim.
In the course of this year I discovered that I have to be somewhat of a pioneer in my family in order to not end up alone, or else I will continue to watch my non-black friends marry and I will be, year after year, single.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Extinction
As salaam alaikum,
Interestingly, someone arrived at my site by searching to see if Esperanza Spalding is Muslim. Probably got to the site because I frequently post about my musical spirit sister and I'm Muslim. Whoever it was probably heard the lyrics to "Vague Suspicions," and thought, a person who writes lyrics like this, so sympathetic to Muslims, recognizing that Christians and Muslims in fact do worship the same God must be Muslim.
Not necessarily, hehe, but nice thought.
I feel like every few years, there's some celebrity that we get excited about being Muslim. Like we're seeking validation. I'm not mad at that, but I'm much happier to hear the sympathy in her lyrics for civilian victims of this Orwellian war (as well as sympathy for the young men and women from our country that have their blood senselessly on their hands), to hear her belief and struggle-with-belief in God so poetically expressed in song. She is so right on with that song.
I'll post the lyrics at the end of this entry, because people don't seem to be understanding what she's saying on any of the lyrics sites I visited, haha.
But I also had Esperanza's arrangement of "Endagered Species" in my mind on Sunday morning when I woke up and felt like I'm slowly going extinct.
I was alarmed when Islamicity calculated 'Isha' for midnight and fajr for a little after 2am here in Seattle, knowing that the days are just going to get longer for a while. I started going to mosque sites in the Seattle area to confirm an alternate prayer time calculation that I saw that is more reasonable ('isha' a bit after 11, fajr around 3am). I didn't just want to go with one because it suited me better, so I had to make sure it was something the mosques in the area were following.
As I investigated the prayer time calculations (they seem to go with ISNA), I explored some of the mosque websites. I checked out one site's "women's activities," and it talked about the various halaqas. Besides the introductory halaqas for new Muslimahs or Muslimahs hoping to review the basics, the only other one is in Arabic. They were to address the woman "molding" herself into "the ideal Muslimah."
That, and the fact that the page had not been updated since 2005, got me discouraged.
For some time, I've not been interested in other people's opinions of what an ideal Muslimah is and how I should be her. I tried that. The good Muslims of my community still did not have space for me. It was disappointing. And an ideal Muslimah is not ideal if she exists in isolation.
What sense does it make for anyone, man or woman, to exist in isolation? It doesn't
I was tired of, "Well, maybe if I just do this, if I just do that...then I'll fit." Where was I?
Where am I?
I've been back for a while, rebuilding my identity, stumbling my way through Erikson's Identity vs. Role Confusion and am now fully to Intimacy vs. Isolation.
Intimacy vs. Isolation.
Intimacy. No one loves me for my Islam. Men are either interested in me in spite of the Islam or in ignorance of the Islam. Yes, even Muslim men, on both counts. In spite of me not being Muslim enough, in spite of me being Muslim, whichever your pleasure. And if my submission to God is the biggest part of me, don't I deserve to be with someone who loves that about me? Not I like it, but...I don't understand it, it bothers me, it's insufficient, it could be better for my tastes, I could do without it.
Isolation. It's easiest for me to be Muslim in isolation. Meaning, it's easiest for me to submit to the will of God if I do so alone. The world outside is so toxic, toxic on both sides, the Muslim and the non. It's clearly the work of the devil that our communities are so rent asunder that someone like me struggles to find a place for herself. That so many of us are slipping in and out of obscurity just to keep our heads above water, just to hold onto the faith, the way of being that injects our lives with beauty, hope and God's grace.
It's a shame.
At the same time, I feel like I'm slowly going extinct. I feel like I'm slipping into irrelevance in this world, that I don't make sense, never have, and will continue to do so, because of the way I live and the way that I choose to submit to God.
Have faith, stay strong, pray, they all say. The earliest believers went through trials that you cannot imagine. I know. The Qur'an tells us that we'd best believe that those before us suffered trials and pleaded with God, wondering when He would come through (2:214). And for the believer, there is many a lonely road, but also life abundant (4:100). Alhamdulillah, I have abundant life, even as I trek my lonely road.
So this must be a trial for me. This must be a trial for me but I can't help but think that I'm going extinct. That my existence in this life is as a shadow, that I'm a shell. I'm someone whose purpose is for others, for others, for others, and rarely for me.
That what I've allocated for myself is just a stipend to keep me alive and healthy to continue to serve others.
And don't get me wrong, I live to serve others. I believe that's a big part of all of our purposes of life...to seek out ways to help our fellow human beings through this life. Allahu a'lam. But for a change, I want something for myself. I want companionship. I want a partner who loves me for my Islam. That's the only thing that I want that is mine. Service and self-service all in one. And while I recognize that my desire to have children isn't entirely alturistic, motherhood would be another realm in which I'm giving of myself, of myself, of myself, and little for myself.
I want a man who loves God and, by extension, loves my Islam, for myself.
Because if I don't get it, I'll go extinct. I'll live life going through the motions, a living shell that works for others and that stipend that just sustains her, day after day, month after month...
In the name of God, I'm going extinct.
Vague Suspicions - Esperanza Spalding
On the neon news, they won't be talking about his life
That was still unfolding when he had to fly
Toward, toward God
May this war end, insha'Allah, he knelt to pray
When a dusty troop misjudged and blew him away
Strangers, same God
They are faceless numbers in the headlines we all read
Drone strike leaves thirteen civilians dead
Hold that thought
My God!
Maybe your heart is seized with passing pitty for the dead
And vague suspicions creep into your head
Am I part of one?
And what is God for?
Next, on channel four, celebrity gossip
Interestingly, someone arrived at my site by searching to see if Esperanza Spalding is Muslim. Probably got to the site because I frequently post about my musical spirit sister and I'm Muslim. Whoever it was probably heard the lyrics to "Vague Suspicions," and thought, a person who writes lyrics like this, so sympathetic to Muslims, recognizing that Christians and Muslims in fact do worship the same God must be Muslim.
Not necessarily, hehe, but nice thought.
I feel like every few years, there's some celebrity that we get excited about being Muslim. Like we're seeking validation. I'm not mad at that, but I'm much happier to hear the sympathy in her lyrics for civilian victims of this Orwellian war (as well as sympathy for the young men and women from our country that have their blood senselessly on their hands), to hear her belief and struggle-with-belief in God so poetically expressed in song. She is so right on with that song.
I'll post the lyrics at the end of this entry, because people don't seem to be understanding what she's saying on any of the lyrics sites I visited, haha.
But I also had Esperanza's arrangement of "Endagered Species" in my mind on Sunday morning when I woke up and felt like I'm slowly going extinct.
I was alarmed when Islamicity calculated 'Isha' for midnight and fajr for a little after 2am here in Seattle, knowing that the days are just going to get longer for a while. I started going to mosque sites in the Seattle area to confirm an alternate prayer time calculation that I saw that is more reasonable ('isha' a bit after 11, fajr around 3am). I didn't just want to go with one because it suited me better, so I had to make sure it was something the mosques in the area were following.
As I investigated the prayer time calculations (they seem to go with ISNA), I explored some of the mosque websites. I checked out one site's "women's activities," and it talked about the various halaqas. Besides the introductory halaqas for new Muslimahs or Muslimahs hoping to review the basics, the only other one is in Arabic. They were to address the woman "molding" herself into "the ideal Muslimah."
That, and the fact that the page had not been updated since 2005, got me discouraged.
For some time, I've not been interested in other people's opinions of what an ideal Muslimah is and how I should be her. I tried that. The good Muslims of my community still did not have space for me. It was disappointing. And an ideal Muslimah is not ideal if she exists in isolation.
What sense does it make for anyone, man or woman, to exist in isolation? It doesn't
I was tired of, "Well, maybe if I just do this, if I just do that...then I'll fit." Where was I?
Where am I?
I've been back for a while, rebuilding my identity, stumbling my way through Erikson's Identity vs. Role Confusion and am now fully to Intimacy vs. Isolation.
Intimacy vs. Isolation.
Intimacy. No one loves me for my Islam. Men are either interested in me in spite of the Islam or in ignorance of the Islam. Yes, even Muslim men, on both counts. In spite of me not being Muslim enough, in spite of me being Muslim, whichever your pleasure. And if my submission to God is the biggest part of me, don't I deserve to be with someone who loves that about me? Not I like it, but...I don't understand it, it bothers me, it's insufficient, it could be better for my tastes, I could do without it.
Isolation. It's easiest for me to be Muslim in isolation. Meaning, it's easiest for me to submit to the will of God if I do so alone. The world outside is so toxic, toxic on both sides, the Muslim and the non. It's clearly the work of the devil that our communities are so rent asunder that someone like me struggles to find a place for herself. That so many of us are slipping in and out of obscurity just to keep our heads above water, just to hold onto the faith, the way of being that injects our lives with beauty, hope and God's grace.
It's a shame.
At the same time, I feel like I'm slowly going extinct. I feel like I'm slipping into irrelevance in this world, that I don't make sense, never have, and will continue to do so, because of the way I live and the way that I choose to submit to God.
Have faith, stay strong, pray, they all say. The earliest believers went through trials that you cannot imagine. I know. The Qur'an tells us that we'd best believe that those before us suffered trials and pleaded with God, wondering when He would come through (2:214). And for the believer, there is many a lonely road, but also life abundant (4:100). Alhamdulillah, I have abundant life, even as I trek my lonely road.
So this must be a trial for me. This must be a trial for me but I can't help but think that I'm going extinct. That my existence in this life is as a shadow, that I'm a shell. I'm someone whose purpose is for others, for others, for others, and rarely for me.
That what I've allocated for myself is just a stipend to keep me alive and healthy to continue to serve others.
And don't get me wrong, I live to serve others. I believe that's a big part of all of our purposes of life...to seek out ways to help our fellow human beings through this life. Allahu a'lam. But for a change, I want something for myself. I want companionship. I want a partner who loves me for my Islam. That's the only thing that I want that is mine. Service and self-service all in one. And while I recognize that my desire to have children isn't entirely alturistic, motherhood would be another realm in which I'm giving of myself, of myself, of myself, and little for myself.
I want a man who loves God and, by extension, loves my Islam, for myself.
Because if I don't get it, I'll go extinct. I'll live life going through the motions, a living shell that works for others and that stipend that just sustains her, day after day, month after month...
In the name of God, I'm going extinct.
Vague Suspicions - Esperanza Spalding
On the neon news, they won't be talking about his life
That was still unfolding when he had to fly
Toward, toward God
May this war end, insha'Allah, he knelt to pray
When a dusty troop misjudged and blew him away
Strangers, same God
They are faceless numbers in the headlines we all read
Drone strike leaves thirteen civilians dead
Hold that thought
My God!
Maybe your heart is seized with passing pitty for the dead
And vague suspicions creep into your head
Am I part of one?
And what is God for?
Next, on channel four, celebrity gossip
Friday, June 8, 2012
American Gender, Part IV
As salaam alaikum,
I think I started this series after reflecting about the quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that I posted a bit ago in my journal. I'm so used to interpreting quotes that say "man" as "humankind," and so used to, as a woman who is not a wife and mother, positioning myself in what may be regarded as a man's place because I don't have those two very important responsibilities...that it sounded daunting to me. There are quite a few truths to be stood for today...why wasn't I standing for them? I rationalized that, by choosing to go into medicine in spite of the fact that the system is very broken, going into primary care as many threaten that it may be a thing of the past for physicians, I am standing for one of those truths, although in a very passive way.
Should I take a more active stance, stand out in the street, yell, scream and demand justice? Should I not fear for my career, my safety? Should I not fear indefinite detainment with no trial?
Or was King's message only for men, really?
As a woman at 27 who prefers to keep herself safe, to secure her career, rather than put my career and freedom on the line to speak for these truths in the face of tyranny, corruption and greed in this country and indeed the global economy...am I dead at 27? Or does my gender not carry with it the same obligation?
Despite being a woman whose primary aspiration for so long has been marriage and child-rearing, I must say...the idea that I am exempt certain obligations because I am a woman, and especially those ideas within Islam, have been, admittedly, hard to palate. Don't get me wrong, I completely understand it, and it makes logical sense. Say I were a mother right now. No, absolutely not will I take to the streets without fear of my fate while leaving children behind. And to require that of mothers would be illogical and immoral on several levels, but at base it would be harmful for the sake of society. I totally understand that.
But what about me? I am unmarried (and not for lack of trying, haha!) and I have no children. Is the exemption from obligation just for the sake of that essential societal role that we play in production and maintenance of the next generation? Or, to be blunt, is it the fact that I have a fertile womb that determines my exemption, regardless of whether or not I am a mother?
I'm not trying to be flip. I'm trying to understand something that bothers me...my relative complacence. Complacence in the face of what? Injustices that we all should be taking to the street for, but most of us don't...most of us, unfortunately, out of ignorance. Because we're kept dumb by reality television, and the various media that should inform us misinforms us. If we knew all that was going on, we'd be taking to the street...
...so, does my gender dictate that I should protect myself? For the sake of myself, my childbearing potential, the future of the human race? Is that really what it's all about? That it takes less than the sperm on the head of a pin to fertilize a bunch of women (I forget the stat, haha) but with a paucity of wombs, what is the race to do?
I don't know.
After so long of not limiting my career aspirations because of my gender, while tailoring them because of my desire to raise children in a similar way that some of my male counterparts have tailored their careers...it seems so weird to consider myself exempt from such an important social responsibility, just because.
I don't think it's just because, of course. There is eternal wisdom hidden beneath tradition and cultural influence that governs how most of our societies determine gender roles. A lot of us look for it, and in trying so hard to see it, to see God's face, I think we err on the sides of extremes and fail to realize the flexibility there actually is in the roles that we adopt for our specific family's, community's and society's needs.
So, in the post-apocalypic society that I created in the story for my friend, the character A was just one of several other women who aspired to join their nations' militias to battle for prominence in the land. She was seen as no more or less woman for the choice she made in fighting over remaining home with children, protecting them as the nations battled in close proximity to the settlements. Her activism was clear. C took on another type of activism, opting for peaceful abstention from the battles, taking societies of mainly women and some children away from the warring nations, salvaging parts of the old world in hopes of creating something sustainable, and fiercely defending themselves from being violated by the men of the nations.
In the story, A and C's suitor end up close battle partners, and C gives her suitor up for lost. Not that A and the suitor have a romantic relationship, but A takes a place with the suitor that C cannot, the love of battle, and she knows that she would never feel as if she were sufficiently relating to the man without being able to share with him this element that is very important to him. The suitor gets so caught up with his new battle partner, his nation's new secret weapon, that he doesn't even notice that C's dropped him, as her society moves on. And A, while thankful to her childhood friend, barely has time for a goodbye as she realize her dream. C takes her society on to safer, higher grounds.
And she's seen as no more or no less of a woman than her childhood friend.
My friend, who was A, is now the only female orthopedic surgery resident in her class at her program. She got her masters in engineering, so she's used to being in a male-majority field. The little warrior that she is, she had some setbacks, fretted over her shortcomings, but was able to match at a great program in the end and is on her way to become an orthopedic surgeon. It works out. She's a former jock. She fits right into the stereotype.
After a fairly smooth academic course, majoring in biology and Spanish in college, I am on my way with my public health degree in tow to become a family physician. I look forward to delivering babies, attending to pregnant and new mothers, promoting women's health and providing competent care to people and families of all ages who need it the most.
I think our roles in the story were pretty accurate of who we would grow up to be.
And these were expressions of my American gender.
I think I started this series after reflecting about the quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that I posted a bit ago in my journal. I'm so used to interpreting quotes that say "man" as "humankind," and so used to, as a woman who is not a wife and mother, positioning myself in what may be regarded as a man's place because I don't have those two very important responsibilities...that it sounded daunting to me. There are quite a few truths to be stood for today...why wasn't I standing for them? I rationalized that, by choosing to go into medicine in spite of the fact that the system is very broken, going into primary care as many threaten that it may be a thing of the past for physicians, I am standing for one of those truths, although in a very passive way.
Should I take a more active stance, stand out in the street, yell, scream and demand justice? Should I not fear for my career, my safety? Should I not fear indefinite detainment with no trial?
Or was King's message only for men, really?
As a woman at 27 who prefers to keep herself safe, to secure her career, rather than put my career and freedom on the line to speak for these truths in the face of tyranny, corruption and greed in this country and indeed the global economy...am I dead at 27? Or does my gender not carry with it the same obligation?
Despite being a woman whose primary aspiration for so long has been marriage and child-rearing, I must say...the idea that I am exempt certain obligations because I am a woman, and especially those ideas within Islam, have been, admittedly, hard to palate. Don't get me wrong, I completely understand it, and it makes logical sense. Say I were a mother right now. No, absolutely not will I take to the streets without fear of my fate while leaving children behind. And to require that of mothers would be illogical and immoral on several levels, but at base it would be harmful for the sake of society. I totally understand that.
But what about me? I am unmarried (and not for lack of trying, haha!) and I have no children. Is the exemption from obligation just for the sake of that essential societal role that we play in production and maintenance of the next generation? Or, to be blunt, is it the fact that I have a fertile womb that determines my exemption, regardless of whether or not I am a mother?
I'm not trying to be flip. I'm trying to understand something that bothers me...my relative complacence. Complacence in the face of what? Injustices that we all should be taking to the street for, but most of us don't...most of us, unfortunately, out of ignorance. Because we're kept dumb by reality television, and the various media that should inform us misinforms us. If we knew all that was going on, we'd be taking to the street...
...so, does my gender dictate that I should protect myself? For the sake of myself, my childbearing potential, the future of the human race? Is that really what it's all about? That it takes less than the sperm on the head of a pin to fertilize a bunch of women (I forget the stat, haha) but with a paucity of wombs, what is the race to do?
I don't know.
After so long of not limiting my career aspirations because of my gender, while tailoring them because of my desire to raise children in a similar way that some of my male counterparts have tailored their careers...it seems so weird to consider myself exempt from such an important social responsibility, just because.
I don't think it's just because, of course. There is eternal wisdom hidden beneath tradition and cultural influence that governs how most of our societies determine gender roles. A lot of us look for it, and in trying so hard to see it, to see God's face, I think we err on the sides of extremes and fail to realize the flexibility there actually is in the roles that we adopt for our specific family's, community's and society's needs.
So, in the post-apocalypic society that I created in the story for my friend, the character A was just one of several other women who aspired to join their nations' militias to battle for prominence in the land. She was seen as no more or less woman for the choice she made in fighting over remaining home with children, protecting them as the nations battled in close proximity to the settlements. Her activism was clear. C took on another type of activism, opting for peaceful abstention from the battles, taking societies of mainly women and some children away from the warring nations, salvaging parts of the old world in hopes of creating something sustainable, and fiercely defending themselves from being violated by the men of the nations.
In the story, A and C's suitor end up close battle partners, and C gives her suitor up for lost. Not that A and the suitor have a romantic relationship, but A takes a place with the suitor that C cannot, the love of battle, and she knows that she would never feel as if she were sufficiently relating to the man without being able to share with him this element that is very important to him. The suitor gets so caught up with his new battle partner, his nation's new secret weapon, that he doesn't even notice that C's dropped him, as her society moves on. And A, while thankful to her childhood friend, barely has time for a goodbye as she realize her dream. C takes her society on to safer, higher grounds.
And she's seen as no more or no less of a woman than her childhood friend.
My friend, who was A, is now the only female orthopedic surgery resident in her class at her program. She got her masters in engineering, so she's used to being in a male-majority field. The little warrior that she is, she had some setbacks, fretted over her shortcomings, but was able to match at a great program in the end and is on her way to become an orthopedic surgeon. It works out. She's a former jock. She fits right into the stereotype.
After a fairly smooth academic course, majoring in biology and Spanish in college, I am on my way with my public health degree in tow to become a family physician. I look forward to delivering babies, attending to pregnant and new mothers, promoting women's health and providing competent care to people and families of all ages who need it the most.
I think our roles in the story were pretty accurate of who we would grow up to be.
And these were expressions of my American gender.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Strength in Weakness, Faith and Critique
As salaam alaikum,
At the "Expressions of Islam in Contemporary African American Communities" conference (yes, I was conferencing it up before I left Boston!), we touched upon so many topics. Feminism in Islam was not excluded, nor were issues of race for non-black converts to Islam, the so-called immigrant vs. indigenous dichotomy, cultural imperialism, Muslim chaplaincy and the future of Muslim leadership...it was awesome.
One thing we talked about after Mustafa Davis screened his film was the Ta'leef Collective, and how an organization that was established to support converts came to be made up of a vast majority of what I call "Muslims on the fringe" who come to weekly sessions to find open places to discuss their place in Islam.
In discussing the film and discussing Ta'leef, we discussed the inflexibility of many of our communities and probably many of our world views to accept weakness in Islam.
What do I mean by that? I was raised differently, but in college I came up in Islam believing that any emotion that was not happiness, any of the DSM-IV diagnosable psychiatric disorders were actually diseases of the heart. Diseases of the Heart. I read that collection before medical school, earnestly seeking a firm backbone for my spiritual support of my mental health, believing that this was the way. Depression, I believed, was at its root ingratitude. Ingratitude or otherwise some sign of low iman. There is much to be done. There are special duas, fasting, charity...there is so much to be done.
For less pathological emotions, like loneliness, as discussed in the conference, many Muslims are afraid to pronounce. Some of us feel afraid to admit in our communities that our faith isn't satisfying all of the time. I can say personally that I was afraid to express any discontent with Islam before my father, lest he uses that crack in my faith to try to squeeze Christianity in.
And I also know that I've felt that any loneliness I feel is my own fault, because the religion is perfect. My loneliness in undergrad in the face of a very ethnically divided MSA was my fault for not "putting myself out there" to meet with other sisters, because everyone was busy and everyone was a student and I couldn't expect anyone to just embrace me. And so on...
Okay, well, maybe it's not all our faults, the feelings that we feel. Maybe not every negative or disordered emotion we feel is reflective of weak faith. Maybe it's okay to admit, I feel lonely in Islam so much.
Because I do. I feel lonely more often than I feel any benefit of brother or sisterhood. But God told us in the Qur'an that for the believer, we are bound to encounter lonely roads, as well as life abundant, so I keep on trucking, but that does not take away the fact that being Muslim can be a very lonely, isolating experience.
And this conference gave me permission to express this, and be loud about it!
With Mustafa Davis and with contributions of a great audience, we discussed how it's actually empowering to allow people to talk about their loneliness and their discontent with the religion. So often, for whatever reason, people don't feel like their allowed to express such sentiments. Like we're somehow afraid that admitting such things will send us down a spiral of religion rejection.
Or we're afraid of others questioning our faith.
While, quiet as it's kept, we all struggle. I don't think any of us have found that perfect faith sweet spot. I guess that's just one of the things like evil and the otherwise haram that people are afraid to noise about. But when it's for the purpose of helping a fellow human being, or self-discovery, or strengthening (yes!) one's faith, then...I don't see what the problem is.
I felt stronger in my faith when I felt free to admit the down times. Thereafter, I was more free to reflect and discover that Islam, in its perfect form is never at fault because that Islam has never existed on the face of this earth. It did in spirit during revelation, but as all the reforms the Qur'an called for were not fully implemented by the end of revelation, even then did Islam in its perfect form not exist on this earth. We've had generations do the best they can, and generations do less than the best that they can, and that conglomeration of ancestral tradition (yes) and consensus interpretations of the text is the Islam we have now, as imperfect as its human vectors.
The loneliness I feel is in part due to relative dysfunction that results from people attempting to but not achieving the practice of a perfect faith. It is not unique to Muslims and can be found among other groups of people approximating the form of the perfect faith that cannot exist in our realm. That itself makes me feel a whole lot less alone, and expands my community of believers in one way of many ways that has helped to expand my world.
And I am unapologetic.
There is strength in admitting weakness, laying it out bare. I'm not reveling in it, flaunting it as one would do, say, ignorance. I'm not laying it out there for judgment or begging for it to be fixed. It's admitting to ourselves that in our striving for that perfect faith all of us know we can't attain, we're not only going to be imperfect sometimes, but we're going to make mistakes, have setbacks, lose spirit, lose faith, miss prayers, pray on empty, commit haram, repent and fall into sin again...and we don't have to be lonely or noise too much about it to know that we're not the only ones, and we're not bad people for doing so. We are humans, God is Merciful beyond any mercy we can imagine on earth, more merciful than any jurist, no matter how versed, can be, more merciful than any fiqh said jurist can decree for order on this earth, His order is infinitely more just, and...
Realizing that even at our worst, we are realizing our creation, realizing the purpose that God put us here for (yes), being exactly as He created us, as the angels questioned God why He'd put us on earth, with our tendency to rape, pillage and spread corruption in the world whereas the angels are perfect in exhaulting God. Like Adam, we are cast down, but His guidance never eludes us. The Prophet (saw) told us to try to be as perfect as we could while recognizing that religion is very, very easy.
Very, very easy?
There's strength in admitting weakness. If something of Islam is too hard, if something of religion doesn't satisfy, then there's another way to approach it, there's another way for it to be done. Just as we don't thrash our children with the thought that it will make their studies any easier, we should not thrash ourselves into making religion easier. It won't in either case. We may get better, but not without a healthy dose of fear and the need for negative reinforcers to keep us on our way, and that was not God's intent for us on this earth.
And that is not the path to God.
There is strength in admitting weakness, in being mindful of it, in recognizing that it's a natural part of our existence as God created us. Acknowledging it is submitting to God in a way. Submitting that He is Greater. Submitting that we need help.
As soon as I admitted I was lonely, people in the conference came up to me and provided me with contacts to the Muslim community in Seattle. I met a Muslim/Unitarian Universalist chaplain who offered to be my mentor. I prayed beside an older woman who practices much like I do, giving me a vision into what my future could be as a practicing Muslimah, and I was encouraged.
This ended up more flow-of-consciousness than I initially had hoped. Oh well. I was inspired after watching an episode of Colbert Report in which he, once again, criticized the Catholic Church while being what some would consider a devout Catholic himself. I thought about where he must be in his faith, teaching Sunday school and meanwhile creating parody that criticizes policies and sometimes the very structure of the Church. I wondered how he could exist so comfortably and fluidly in a state of such critique of his own religion...
And then I realized, oh snap, I think I'm there!
At the "Expressions of Islam in Contemporary African American Communities" conference (yes, I was conferencing it up before I left Boston!), we touched upon so many topics. Feminism in Islam was not excluded, nor were issues of race for non-black converts to Islam, the so-called immigrant vs. indigenous dichotomy, cultural imperialism, Muslim chaplaincy and the future of Muslim leadership...it was awesome.
One thing we talked about after Mustafa Davis screened his film was the Ta'leef Collective, and how an organization that was established to support converts came to be made up of a vast majority of what I call "Muslims on the fringe" who come to weekly sessions to find open places to discuss their place in Islam.
In discussing the film and discussing Ta'leef, we discussed the inflexibility of many of our communities and probably many of our world views to accept weakness in Islam.
What do I mean by that? I was raised differently, but in college I came up in Islam believing that any emotion that was not happiness, any of the DSM-IV diagnosable psychiatric disorders were actually diseases of the heart. Diseases of the Heart. I read that collection before medical school, earnestly seeking a firm backbone for my spiritual support of my mental health, believing that this was the way. Depression, I believed, was at its root ingratitude. Ingratitude or otherwise some sign of low iman. There is much to be done. There are special duas, fasting, charity...there is so much to be done.
For less pathological emotions, like loneliness, as discussed in the conference, many Muslims are afraid to pronounce. Some of us feel afraid to admit in our communities that our faith isn't satisfying all of the time. I can say personally that I was afraid to express any discontent with Islam before my father, lest he uses that crack in my faith to try to squeeze Christianity in.
And I also know that I've felt that any loneliness I feel is my own fault, because the religion is perfect. My loneliness in undergrad in the face of a very ethnically divided MSA was my fault for not "putting myself out there" to meet with other sisters, because everyone was busy and everyone was a student and I couldn't expect anyone to just embrace me. And so on...
Okay, well, maybe it's not all our faults, the feelings that we feel. Maybe not every negative or disordered emotion we feel is reflective of weak faith. Maybe it's okay to admit, I feel lonely in Islam so much.
Because I do. I feel lonely more often than I feel any benefit of brother or sisterhood. But God told us in the Qur'an that for the believer, we are bound to encounter lonely roads, as well as life abundant, so I keep on trucking, but that does not take away the fact that being Muslim can be a very lonely, isolating experience.
And this conference gave me permission to express this, and be loud about it!
With Mustafa Davis and with contributions of a great audience, we discussed how it's actually empowering to allow people to talk about their loneliness and their discontent with the religion. So often, for whatever reason, people don't feel like their allowed to express such sentiments. Like we're somehow afraid that admitting such things will send us down a spiral of religion rejection.
Or we're afraid of others questioning our faith.
While, quiet as it's kept, we all struggle. I don't think any of us have found that perfect faith sweet spot. I guess that's just one of the things like evil and the otherwise haram that people are afraid to noise about. But when it's for the purpose of helping a fellow human being, or self-discovery, or strengthening (yes!) one's faith, then...I don't see what the problem is.
I felt stronger in my faith when I felt free to admit the down times. Thereafter, I was more free to reflect and discover that Islam, in its perfect form is never at fault because that Islam has never existed on the face of this earth. It did in spirit during revelation, but as all the reforms the Qur'an called for were not fully implemented by the end of revelation, even then did Islam in its perfect form not exist on this earth. We've had generations do the best they can, and generations do less than the best that they can, and that conglomeration of ancestral tradition (yes) and consensus interpretations of the text is the Islam we have now, as imperfect as its human vectors.
The loneliness I feel is in part due to relative dysfunction that results from people attempting to but not achieving the practice of a perfect faith. It is not unique to Muslims and can be found among other groups of people approximating the form of the perfect faith that cannot exist in our realm. That itself makes me feel a whole lot less alone, and expands my community of believers in one way of many ways that has helped to expand my world.
And I am unapologetic.
There is strength in admitting weakness, laying it out bare. I'm not reveling in it, flaunting it as one would do, say, ignorance. I'm not laying it out there for judgment or begging for it to be fixed. It's admitting to ourselves that in our striving for that perfect faith all of us know we can't attain, we're not only going to be imperfect sometimes, but we're going to make mistakes, have setbacks, lose spirit, lose faith, miss prayers, pray on empty, commit haram, repent and fall into sin again...and we don't have to be lonely or noise too much about it to know that we're not the only ones, and we're not bad people for doing so. We are humans, God is Merciful beyond any mercy we can imagine on earth, more merciful than any jurist, no matter how versed, can be, more merciful than any fiqh said jurist can decree for order on this earth, His order is infinitely more just, and...
Realizing that even at our worst, we are realizing our creation, realizing the purpose that God put us here for (yes), being exactly as He created us, as the angels questioned God why He'd put us on earth, with our tendency to rape, pillage and spread corruption in the world whereas the angels are perfect in exhaulting God. Like Adam, we are cast down, but His guidance never eludes us. The Prophet (saw) told us to try to be as perfect as we could while recognizing that religion is very, very easy.
Very, very easy?
There's strength in admitting weakness. If something of Islam is too hard, if something of religion doesn't satisfy, then there's another way to approach it, there's another way for it to be done. Just as we don't thrash our children with the thought that it will make their studies any easier, we should not thrash ourselves into making religion easier. It won't in either case. We may get better, but not without a healthy dose of fear and the need for negative reinforcers to keep us on our way, and that was not God's intent for us on this earth.
And that is not the path to God.
There is strength in admitting weakness, in being mindful of it, in recognizing that it's a natural part of our existence as God created us. Acknowledging it is submitting to God in a way. Submitting that He is Greater. Submitting that we need help.
As soon as I admitted I was lonely, people in the conference came up to me and provided me with contacts to the Muslim community in Seattle. I met a Muslim/Unitarian Universalist chaplain who offered to be my mentor. I prayed beside an older woman who practices much like I do, giving me a vision into what my future could be as a practicing Muslimah, and I was encouraged.
This ended up more flow-of-consciousness than I initially had hoped. Oh well. I was inspired after watching an episode of Colbert Report in which he, once again, criticized the Catholic Church while being what some would consider a devout Catholic himself. I thought about where he must be in his faith, teaching Sunday school and meanwhile creating parody that criticizes policies and sometimes the very structure of the Church. I wondered how he could exist so comfortably and fluidly in a state of such critique of his own religion...
And then I realized, oh snap, I think I'm there!
Monday, April 2, 2012
Muslim Women and the Challenge of Authority Conference
As salaam alaikum,
This weekend, I attended this conference. What can I say, except...wow! What an awesome conference! It definitely helped exercise the humanities side of my brain that I haven't used in a while (except, to blog, heh), but it brought up key issues about what it means to be a woman in Islam domestically and internationally and some of the things that are holding us back. I would probably write more about it if I hadn't reflected extensively with two of my friends the day of the conference, but suffice it to say, I really enjoyed it.
Plus, I got to meet one of the contributors to the anthology. We totally missed our photo opportunity because I had to run out of the conference for a previous engagement...
But this was the third sign I got this week that my next spiritual endeavor will be exploring my role as a woman in Islam. The first sign was the finale of Big Love, which pertained to Barb's quest throughout the season (if not also the season before) to be a priesthood holder. The second sign was one of my best friends asking me if I ever considered becoming an imama, and how loaded of a question that was for me that brought questions into my own mind about Muslim woman leadership and my...being too intimidated to talk to most imams about anything...
And then this conference brought it all together for me.
And I'm not talking...I want to go out, attain some scholarship and become an imama right now. No. Alhamdulillah, I accept that medicine is my field and a worthy career and I'm sticking to it. I'm just talking about ways in which I think, consciously and subconsciously, my own religious pursuits were curtailed because I learned that there are certain things that women aren't required to do...in the sense that we are "spared." Oh, well, you don't have to go to Jummah like men do, and it's a mercy for you. This article in Altmuslimah on Islam and menstruation also gave me pause, and the fact that some men consider our spirituality inferior because we have to break salat and fasting for something that enables us to, oh, I don't know, carry children, the most important part of carrying on the human race as God intends?
Because really, when I'm menstruating during the year, what comes of that week? We're given little guidance about what we can do to not wreck our spiritual continuity during time of menses. I guess it's up to us to come up with that on our own, but I feel like on this and many other issues, we Muslim women are left to fend for ourselves in ways that seem incongruous to the amount of guidance other aspects of our daily lives is afforded in practice.
One woman in the audience talked about making Hajj and being in a women's tent where they were left alone to perform prayers. As you know, according to one's madhab, some women opine that a woman should not lead a congregational prayer, even of other women. So eventually, the most learned woman among them took over the leading of prayer. However, she had several rules for herself...that her voice should not be raised beyond a certain decibel because of her consideration of the female's voice as awrah, thus making it impractical for her to lead prayers because no one could hear her. Another woman was a hafiza and did not want to lead prayer because she believed she could not recite the Qur'an out loud as a woman. I guess they eventually figured something out...
"...although they had almost left it undone!" (2:71)
That story was heartbreaking. Here are women on Hajj who could not accomplish something as simple as salat because we have been so limited in our practice...we are to avert our eyes, not raise our voices, be unassuming and sit behind curtains in the masjid so men cannot see us...or better yet, stay in our homes! What do we do when we are alone?
When I learned that there were women of some madhab who don't subscribe to women praying together, I was heartbroken. Really? So I can be in a house of sisters and we all pray separately. What happened to the blessings of praying in jama'ah? Is that, too, only for men?
Yes, I remember hearing this, when I was coming into Islam and I was sweating about the fact that I hadn't attended Jummah since I was 11 years old, and I didn't know how to go about it...what it entailed, proper Jummah etiquette, etc. I looked it up on the internet to learn before I went to the first campus Jummah to find an article that said that Jummah was only obligatory for men and optional for a woman. They believed this to be so to not be a burden on women who had children at home to tend to. It went as far as saying that a woman perhaps attained greater blessing if she stayed home.
And me, confused, but too embarrassed or intimidated to ask anyone, gave in, and the time for Jummah came and went and I didn't go to campus Jummah.
And in my learning about Islam, which was very much online much of the time because I am not a convert and I was embarrassed to ask the very basic things that I felt like I should know...I read a lot of things like this that yes, curtailed my practice. Though me not making Jummah these days is more about my not being able to leave my hospital or rotation to get to a place...what if I were a practicing male Muslim student? I would have felt a greater obligation to talk to my course directors to make allowances for my religious beliefs, right? And this would probably make me more comfortable about piecing out at opportune times to pray in the hospital's chapel...
In the end, I'm not really blaming my own deficiencies in practice on the complex (and corrupt) gender politics of Muslims. More, I'm recognizing how they influenced me and I will shape my future practice being mindful of the fact that this particular gender politic is not absolute and not necessarily condoned by Allah (swt).
The conference was excellent. It began with the story of Khawla bint Tha'labah, her questioning of the Prophet (saw) and what that should mean we as Muslims should do in the face of contemporary problems in our society. The first panel was on Qur'an hermeneutics, a word that I have never used and will never use again, probably. Panelists spoke about ayah 4:34, what it means to be a Muslim feminist, if that is the correct term to use at all, and of feminist interpretations of the Qur'an, leading me to have to read Dr. Amina Wudud's book, Qur'an and Woman. My favorite paper in the panel was by Dr. Aysha Hidayatullah and her piece "Women's Experience as a Source of Scriptural Authority." There, she set up an argument that we as Muslim women, and indeed, we as Muslims period, are well within our right to question, discuss and challenge interpretations of the Qur'an because the Qur'an, though our ultimate textual authority, is not to be equated with the Word of God inasmuch as we recognize that the Qur'an is, in fact, limited as we humans are limited. It's limited by the language and is also limited by the time and context in which it was revealed, whereas the Word of God is Greater and is beyond all of the wisdom in the Qur'an. A powerful concept, but a difficult one to swallow and one I would most certainly not offer in mixed Muslim company, haha!
Next was an excellent keynote address by Dr. Amina Wudud. Just a word here...I haven't yet read any of Dr. Wudud's work because, coming into Islam, I immediately understood her to be controversial and one overstepping the bounds. Why was she pushing so hard to be an imama? I believed that God laid out the gender roles clear in Qur'an and Sunnah, and if we follow these sources so closely in determining how we pray, why should we then disregard them when it comes to female's role. I just understood that my role as a Muslimah was not to be one of leadership in the Muslim community, and that Dr. Wudud was creating fitna at the very least.
Having now lived as a practicing Muslimah for almost 9 years and feeling my practice curtailed by other things I'm supposed to do or not do, supposedly in the name of God...I have been questioning things as late. This is, after all, the religion of those who think...
The next panel was on Prayer and Authority. This panel may have been the most relevant to me. Dr. Aisha Geissinger discussed the history of texts about how woman should pray, something that I've always wondered about. I've seen so many different sources discuss how women's salat is different than men, and in relearning salat from the way my mother did it, I learned to keep my fingers closer together and bear my body closer to the ground than my mother did, because I thought this is what women were supposed to do. Dr. Geissinger discussed this, the separation of men and women in prayer spaces over time since the time of the Prophet (saw) to the periods after, and traced the gradual increased separation of the sexes more. At the end, she offered that she was a historian and not a theologian to be able to speak about "what was right," but just hearing this history makes me wonder if these were not differences that weren't just arbitrarily chosen over time in an act of relegating the female body...
"...although they had almost left it undone!" (2:71)
Chaplain Bilal Ansari's work for helping to enable worship for practicing Muslim female inmates really brought out why the prevailing Muslim gender politic is is impractical, if not dysfunctional.
On a side note...arrrrgghh! I know Muslim men shouldn't wear gold, but can you wear silver instead? I feel like it's wrong for brothers to not wear some sort of wedding band...anyway, hehe, digression...
The next panel...yeah...the next panel was the Pious Movements Panel, which was a very interesting look into Muslim female leadership into various religious movements overseas. The last panel was on Sufi women and leadership. Both panels brought up the interesting question of whether these women, in denying at all being feminist organizations, had a sort of agency and what this agency took the shape of. One of the presenters, Dr. Joseph Hill, posited that the women, in assuming what could be construed as "traditional," deferent roles in the community and their own homes (ex. woman as homemaker) were actually, covertly, expressing their agency...as if they were pretending to go along with the gender-role program while, within these confines, being somewhat revolutionary.
The whole while, I was thinking about a story idea that's been brewing for a while whose working title is "Black Widow," which will likely morph into something else. It's precisely about a woman who assumes a very deferent role in her marriage but in fact each of her actions, decisions and attitudes toward her husband are coolly calculated...or, at least the way her daughter sees it. ...anyway...digression again. This is why it's hard for me to read books. I get my own ideas and then I want to run off and write...
And those two panels concluded an excellent conference!
I'm still processing what all of this meant for me and will mean for me. It will probably be a topic in this blog for days to come. Stay tuned!
This weekend, I attended this conference. What can I say, except...wow! What an awesome conference! It definitely helped exercise the humanities side of my brain that I haven't used in a while (except, to blog, heh), but it brought up key issues about what it means to be a woman in Islam domestically and internationally and some of the things that are holding us back. I would probably write more about it if I hadn't reflected extensively with two of my friends the day of the conference, but suffice it to say, I really enjoyed it.
Plus, I got to meet one of the contributors to the anthology. We totally missed our photo opportunity because I had to run out of the conference for a previous engagement...
But this was the third sign I got this week that my next spiritual endeavor will be exploring my role as a woman in Islam. The first sign was the finale of Big Love, which pertained to Barb's quest throughout the season (if not also the season before) to be a priesthood holder. The second sign was one of my best friends asking me if I ever considered becoming an imama, and how loaded of a question that was for me that brought questions into my own mind about Muslim woman leadership and my...being too intimidated to talk to most imams about anything...
And then this conference brought it all together for me.
And I'm not talking...I want to go out, attain some scholarship and become an imama right now. No. Alhamdulillah, I accept that medicine is my field and a worthy career and I'm sticking to it. I'm just talking about ways in which I think, consciously and subconsciously, my own religious pursuits were curtailed because I learned that there are certain things that women aren't required to do...in the sense that we are "spared." Oh, well, you don't have to go to Jummah like men do, and it's a mercy for you. This article in Altmuslimah on Islam and menstruation also gave me pause, and the fact that some men consider our spirituality inferior because we have to break salat and fasting for something that enables us to, oh, I don't know, carry children, the most important part of carrying on the human race as God intends?
Because really, when I'm menstruating during the year, what comes of that week? We're given little guidance about what we can do to not wreck our spiritual continuity during time of menses. I guess it's up to us to come up with that on our own, but I feel like on this and many other issues, we Muslim women are left to fend for ourselves in ways that seem incongruous to the amount of guidance other aspects of our daily lives is afforded in practice.
One woman in the audience talked about making Hajj and being in a women's tent where they were left alone to perform prayers. As you know, according to one's madhab, some women opine that a woman should not lead a congregational prayer, even of other women. So eventually, the most learned woman among them took over the leading of prayer. However, she had several rules for herself...that her voice should not be raised beyond a certain decibel because of her consideration of the female's voice as awrah, thus making it impractical for her to lead prayers because no one could hear her. Another woman was a hafiza and did not want to lead prayer because she believed she could not recite the Qur'an out loud as a woman. I guess they eventually figured something out...
"...although they had almost left it undone!" (2:71)
That story was heartbreaking. Here are women on Hajj who could not accomplish something as simple as salat because we have been so limited in our practice...we are to avert our eyes, not raise our voices, be unassuming and sit behind curtains in the masjid so men cannot see us...or better yet, stay in our homes! What do we do when we are alone?
When I learned that there were women of some madhab who don't subscribe to women praying together, I was heartbroken. Really? So I can be in a house of sisters and we all pray separately. What happened to the blessings of praying in jama'ah? Is that, too, only for men?
Yes, I remember hearing this, when I was coming into Islam and I was sweating about the fact that I hadn't attended Jummah since I was 11 years old, and I didn't know how to go about it...what it entailed, proper Jummah etiquette, etc. I looked it up on the internet to learn before I went to the first campus Jummah to find an article that said that Jummah was only obligatory for men and optional for a woman. They believed this to be so to not be a burden on women who had children at home to tend to. It went as far as saying that a woman perhaps attained greater blessing if she stayed home.
And me, confused, but too embarrassed or intimidated to ask anyone, gave in, and the time for Jummah came and went and I didn't go to campus Jummah.
And in my learning about Islam, which was very much online much of the time because I am not a convert and I was embarrassed to ask the very basic things that I felt like I should know...I read a lot of things like this that yes, curtailed my practice. Though me not making Jummah these days is more about my not being able to leave my hospital or rotation to get to a place...what if I were a practicing male Muslim student? I would have felt a greater obligation to talk to my course directors to make allowances for my religious beliefs, right? And this would probably make me more comfortable about piecing out at opportune times to pray in the hospital's chapel...
In the end, I'm not really blaming my own deficiencies in practice on the complex (and corrupt) gender politics of Muslims. More, I'm recognizing how they influenced me and I will shape my future practice being mindful of the fact that this particular gender politic is not absolute and not necessarily condoned by Allah (swt).
The conference was excellent. It began with the story of Khawla bint Tha'labah, her questioning of the Prophet (saw) and what that should mean we as Muslims should do in the face of contemporary problems in our society. The first panel was on Qur'an hermeneutics, a word that I have never used and will never use again, probably. Panelists spoke about ayah 4:34, what it means to be a Muslim feminist, if that is the correct term to use at all, and of feminist interpretations of the Qur'an, leading me to have to read Dr. Amina Wudud's book, Qur'an and Woman. My favorite paper in the panel was by Dr. Aysha Hidayatullah and her piece "Women's Experience as a Source of Scriptural Authority." There, she set up an argument that we as Muslim women, and indeed, we as Muslims period, are well within our right to question, discuss and challenge interpretations of the Qur'an because the Qur'an, though our ultimate textual authority, is not to be equated with the Word of God inasmuch as we recognize that the Qur'an is, in fact, limited as we humans are limited. It's limited by the language and is also limited by the time and context in which it was revealed, whereas the Word of God is Greater and is beyond all of the wisdom in the Qur'an. A powerful concept, but a difficult one to swallow and one I would most certainly not offer in mixed Muslim company, haha!
Next was an excellent keynote address by Dr. Amina Wudud. Just a word here...I haven't yet read any of Dr. Wudud's work because, coming into Islam, I immediately understood her to be controversial and one overstepping the bounds. Why was she pushing so hard to be an imama? I believed that God laid out the gender roles clear in Qur'an and Sunnah, and if we follow these sources so closely in determining how we pray, why should we then disregard them when it comes to female's role. I just understood that my role as a Muslimah was not to be one of leadership in the Muslim community, and that Dr. Wudud was creating fitna at the very least.
Having now lived as a practicing Muslimah for almost 9 years and feeling my practice curtailed by other things I'm supposed to do or not do, supposedly in the name of God...I have been questioning things as late. This is, after all, the religion of those who think...
The next panel was on Prayer and Authority. This panel may have been the most relevant to me. Dr. Aisha Geissinger discussed the history of texts about how woman should pray, something that I've always wondered about. I've seen so many different sources discuss how women's salat is different than men, and in relearning salat from the way my mother did it, I learned to keep my fingers closer together and bear my body closer to the ground than my mother did, because I thought this is what women were supposed to do. Dr. Geissinger discussed this, the separation of men and women in prayer spaces over time since the time of the Prophet (saw) to the periods after, and traced the gradual increased separation of the sexes more. At the end, she offered that she was a historian and not a theologian to be able to speak about "what was right," but just hearing this history makes me wonder if these were not differences that weren't just arbitrarily chosen over time in an act of relegating the female body...
"...although they had almost left it undone!" (2:71)
Chaplain Bilal Ansari's work for helping to enable worship for practicing Muslim female inmates really brought out why the prevailing Muslim gender politic is is impractical, if not dysfunctional.
On a side note...arrrrgghh! I know Muslim men shouldn't wear gold, but can you wear silver instead? I feel like it's wrong for brothers to not wear some sort of wedding band...anyway, hehe, digression...
The next panel...yeah...the next panel was the Pious Movements Panel, which was a very interesting look into Muslim female leadership into various religious movements overseas. The last panel was on Sufi women and leadership. Both panels brought up the interesting question of whether these women, in denying at all being feminist organizations, had a sort of agency and what this agency took the shape of. One of the presenters, Dr. Joseph Hill, posited that the women, in assuming what could be construed as "traditional," deferent roles in the community and their own homes (ex. woman as homemaker) were actually, covertly, expressing their agency...as if they were pretending to go along with the gender-role program while, within these confines, being somewhat revolutionary.
The whole while, I was thinking about a story idea that's been brewing for a while whose working title is "Black Widow," which will likely morph into something else. It's precisely about a woman who assumes a very deferent role in her marriage but in fact each of her actions, decisions and attitudes toward her husband are coolly calculated...or, at least the way her daughter sees it. ...anyway...digression again. This is why it's hard for me to read books. I get my own ideas and then I want to run off and write...
And those two panels concluded an excellent conference!
I'm still processing what all of this meant for me and will mean for me. It will probably be a topic in this blog for days to come. Stay tuned!
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
The Truth in "The Message"
As salaam alaikum,
I hadn't listened to this song the whole way through in a while...that was some hard-hitting stuff! Please note that I do not endorse of the use of the homophobic slurs, including the other F bomb, but it's kind of telling of where the society was in 1982.
Otherwise, brilliance. The ghetto is the same. It hasn't changed in 30 years, and it hadn't changed in 30 years from then, either...or 50 years for that matter. Let the story of the likes of Detroit Red tell it...very similar thing.
Between the case of Trayvon Martin and hearing about the FBI infiltrating Orange County Muslim communities with the call to seduce and have sex with Muslim women, like Grandmaster Flash, I'm trying not to loose my head. Haha ha ha ha.
And like ODB said in, "Baby I Got Your Money," "FBI don't you be watching me." From COINTELPRO to now...I don't know who would disagree.
I hadn't listened to this song the whole way through in a while...that was some hard-hitting stuff! Please note that I do not endorse of the use of the homophobic slurs, including the other F bomb, but it's kind of telling of where the society was in 1982.
Otherwise, brilliance. The ghetto is the same. It hasn't changed in 30 years, and it hadn't changed in 30 years from then, either...or 50 years for that matter. Let the story of the likes of Detroit Red tell it...very similar thing.
Between the case of Trayvon Martin and hearing about the FBI infiltrating Orange County Muslim communities with the call to seduce and have sex with Muslim women, like Grandmaster Flash, I'm trying not to loose my head. Haha ha ha ha.
And like ODB said in, "Baby I Got Your Money," "FBI don't you be watching me." From COINTELPRO to now...I don't know who would disagree.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Nigerian Privilege?
As salaam alaikum,
This was one of the mornings I just stayed up after fajr. I'm so excited about moving to Seattle now and starting residency! In three short years, insha'Allah, I'll be a trained family physician, ready to save the world in my own little way. I'm so excited to (finally) have a strong panel of black patients while still getting to have my Latino patients, though yo viajo del caribe para México with my new patient population (I miss speaking Spanish!). And maybe I'll pick up a little Amharic along the way...
And then, one of my friends posted this article on his facebook page: Data show Nigerians most educated in the US. This was from a Houston periodical.
I posted this on my facebook page, to be met with three posts from one of my facebook friends, one of which was this article: Hidden Discrimination Against African Americans and Asians In Ivy League Admissions.
My friend posted two comments, one from a friend of hers and her own take, but she concluded something that was very troubling to me: that "non-slave descended success" was different from "slave descended success."
That comment tried to rip my identities asunder, man!
So, what is my success? I have a Nigerian father and an African-American mother? Was my 3.985 GPA in high school with 7 AP classes, graduating top 5% of my class and getting into all of the colleges I applied to more because of my slave or non-slave heritage? Was my graduating top 10% from my college and getting into Harvard for medical school slave or non-slave? My success at HMS? Slave? Non-slave? Was it more slave because I grew up around my mother's side of the family, and we are all slave-descended? Or was it more non-slave because I grew up with a Nigerian immigrant head of household, carry a Nigerian first and last name, ate Nigerian food but had nothing but phone contact with my non-slave descended family?
You see how ugly that sounds? I mean, I know what she's saying, but damn, can we find another way to say it? And seriously, where does that place me? With the Nigerian name, am I the product of Nigerian privilege? Did I come this far because I'm half Nigerian?
Okay, enough with the rhetorical. I don't think so, that's the answer!
Let's look at the African-American side of the family. My mother is one of 10 in a family that was part of the great migration. Her mother went as far as the 8th grade and her father got his GED and her father's education was interrupted by WWII. He served in Germany as an engineer and always aspired to higher education. They were sharecroppers in Arkansas. My Grandmother's side can trace their origins back to Harris Farm in Mississippi, the plantation where my ancestors came from. They moved from the village of Hensley, Arkansas to Detroit than Flint, MI, where Grandfather worked in the plant while Grandmother cared for their family. They were very poor, living in a two-bedroom house that was later demolished to make room for a highway in Flint. The boys slept in the living room. My mother and her siblings all attended some college, and several of them graduated with bachelors and a few with masters degrees in education, social work and administration. My mother was one who graduated with her Masters of Social Work. They were simultaneously the first generation to complete high school, college and graduate school education. If there was arriving to be had, my mother and her siblings arrived and then some. Because of their experiences with the Jim Crow south and racism, my grandparents would come to adhere to the Nation of Islam form of black nationalism, and took in with them all 10 of their children. In the late 1970s, the family converted to Islam, making possible the birth in 1985 of this Invisible Muslimah.
Let's look at the Nigerian side of my family. My grandfather was born in 1896 and remembers when "the white man" first came to his village. His mother ran away with him in her arms to try to escape. After a bout of smallpox in 1918 in which he felt himself healed by prayer alone, he converted from Anglican to Faith Tabernacle, a denomination that did not believe in medicine. He raised his family in the church, and their home was connected to the church. My father, the youngest, was born to him when he was in his 50s. They were not poor in Nigeria. They had a car, which was a sign of wealth, because as the head of the Faith Tabernacle church in Nigeria, my grandfather had to travel. The family later fled their home with only a few pictures after the war started. My father left his boarding school for a while and had to continue his education later. In the interim, he lost his mother to cancer. Biafra, made up of my father's ethnic group, which tried to secede from Nigeria, lost the war. He arrived to the United States in 1975 on a scholarship from the Nigerian government to pursue his university education here, after attending some university there in Nigeria. Excited to go to a school dedicated to technology, he stopped first at Michigan Tech in the UP before his cousin, a professor at the University of Michigan- Flint convinced him to matriculate at the Ann Arbor campus, for less snow. He got his masters degree in Chemical Engineering and met my mother, a fellow graduate student in the School of Social Work, and the rest is history.
My success is neither slave or non-slave descended. My success, of course, is first by the grace of God. My parents were some of his agents. I grew up in a loving household with strong, opinionated and strict parents. When my father learned what we were doing in math, when he came home from work and on the weekends, he would teach me ahead in math from the time I was in first grade onward. My mother would read with me at home when she discovered that some of my reading skills were weak and encouraged me to write and expand my vocabulary. My parents made sure that my education was enriched with their own strengths as I went through a small, community, majority-black school. And when they sensed that the school no longer challenged me and would not suit my brother's special education needs, we moved to another school district. My parents taught me to work hard. My mother taught me as a black person, I would have to perform above and beyond in order to get what I deserved at base. My father taught me that there was no difference between me and my Asian classmates, that none of had two heads, and pushed me harder, to not accept the A- on tests even when it was an accelerated class and the grade was scaled up.
My success is neither slave nor non-slave. My mother's success is not slave. How limiting of ourselves it is to ever think of it that way! Yes, she and her siblings succeeded, overcoming her personal family history of discrimination on several levels, from the failures of Reconstruction for the black community to Jim Crow, from segregation to redlining. And non-slave is a grossly oversimplified way to express my father's success as a black African in this country, with the complex history of Nigeria that he lived in his lifetime, from independence to civil war, from dictatorship to corruption and ethnic strife.
Yes, there are ugly truths about the country and this very ugly social construct of race, but whether or not black people are getting into Ivy League schools where they do not receive adequate academic and career support anyway should not be the primary area of focus. Nor should black college admissions in general be the only area of focus. College admission is a shallow victory and, in my opinion, an inadequate measure of success. Successful college attendance and graduation is a better measure of success. We get to these schools and I can say first hand, no, you are not especially supported. I went to college and advised myself until my last year when I had a premedical adviser help me know that my MCAT scores were competitive and helped me with my personal statement, but that was it. If you are taking someone from a poor public school and placing them in a competitive college environment without intense guidance and mentorship, whatever Affirmative Action you have in place will most likely fail to achieve any intended outcomes.
So, in the spirit of my public health school education, what are solutions? I didn't even tough on the Asian-American discrimination piece...that is a problem that I know many of my Asian friends have felt when trying to get into prestigious schools...I must say, however, the issue with them is very different than the issue with African Americans. Most of my Asian and Asian-American friends got into great schools, even if they weren't Ivies. Few of my black friends went to these schools. Some did not go to college at all.
For Asians and Asian-Americans, I think California's race-free admissions policy is best extended everywhere, even if it means, yes, Asians will be grossly over-represented in higher education. They work hard, they deserve it. I don't think African immigrants will be hurt by this policy, because many of us also do well with grades, extra-curriculars and standardized testing.
For African Americans...what needs to happen is that Affirmative Action as it used to stand (as it is being largely abolished) cannot stand alone. Short of revamping the entire public educational system in the United States, intense mentorship and enrichment programs need to be put in place at the primary school level for black students in bad school districts. We need to cut the prison pipeline and get everyone in between the drop out to college continuum as well. The key is quality of education and whether our kids will be equipped to handle competitive college campuses, even if admissions relaxes grade and test score requirements to take into account the poor quality schools our kids are coming from.
For example, because of the rigorous education at my public school, I felt like college was easy. I also got a tuition scholarship because of my academic achievement, so I didn't have to worry about finding a job since my parent's income didn't qualify me for work-study so I could take 16-18 out of the max 18 credits per semester. I had supportive parents who enriched me and mentored me in elementary school and went to secondary school in a rigorous environment and pushed through even after guidance counselors told me that I probably had a low IQ but got good grades because I worked hard.
I celebrate the success of Nigerians as I celebrate the success of any African-descendant peoples in this country or around the world. I'm so proud of us showing that we can succeed in spite of the curse that this society placed on us because of our skin color, in spite of our bad reputation worldwide. To bicker about whether this success is worthy or not as if my lauding that success is functioning like, "See, black people, we're better than you," is short-sighted and a little bit insular. Nobody even said anything about that in the article! So it's like, what? One group can't acknowledge their success without us talking about failures in our community?
We need to get less sensitive and instead of basically taking away what I believe to be deserved merit from a group that has their own independent set of circumstances, we can see what we can learn from that group. The greatest thing having a Nigerian father did for me was something that an African American father in the same circumstance as my mother could have given to me. I will say, though, having the Nigerian name of my father and the religion of the mother often gave me a difference that gave me courage to break from the crowd and be the nerd I needed to be to get where I am today...
Anyway...those are my thoughts.
This was one of the mornings I just stayed up after fajr. I'm so excited about moving to Seattle now and starting residency! In three short years, insha'Allah, I'll be a trained family physician, ready to save the world in my own little way. I'm so excited to (finally) have a strong panel of black patients while still getting to have my Latino patients, though yo viajo del caribe para México with my new patient population (I miss speaking Spanish!). And maybe I'll pick up a little Amharic along the way...
And then, one of my friends posted this article on his facebook page: Data show Nigerians most educated in the US. This was from a Houston periodical.
I posted this on my facebook page, to be met with three posts from one of my facebook friends, one of which was this article: Hidden Discrimination Against African Americans and Asians In Ivy League Admissions.
My friend posted two comments, one from a friend of hers and her own take, but she concluded something that was very troubling to me: that "non-slave descended success" was different from "slave descended success."
That comment tried to rip my identities asunder, man!
So, what is my success? I have a Nigerian father and an African-American mother? Was my 3.985 GPA in high school with 7 AP classes, graduating top 5% of my class and getting into all of the colleges I applied to more because of my slave or non-slave heritage? Was my graduating top 10% from my college and getting into Harvard for medical school slave or non-slave? My success at HMS? Slave? Non-slave? Was it more slave because I grew up around my mother's side of the family, and we are all slave-descended? Or was it more non-slave because I grew up with a Nigerian immigrant head of household, carry a Nigerian first and last name, ate Nigerian food but had nothing but phone contact with my non-slave descended family?
You see how ugly that sounds? I mean, I know what she's saying, but damn, can we find another way to say it? And seriously, where does that place me? With the Nigerian name, am I the product of Nigerian privilege? Did I come this far because I'm half Nigerian?
Okay, enough with the rhetorical. I don't think so, that's the answer!
Let's look at the African-American side of the family. My mother is one of 10 in a family that was part of the great migration. Her mother went as far as the 8th grade and her father got his GED and her father's education was interrupted by WWII. He served in Germany as an engineer and always aspired to higher education. They were sharecroppers in Arkansas. My Grandmother's side can trace their origins back to Harris Farm in Mississippi, the plantation where my ancestors came from. They moved from the village of Hensley, Arkansas to Detroit than Flint, MI, where Grandfather worked in the plant while Grandmother cared for their family. They were very poor, living in a two-bedroom house that was later demolished to make room for a highway in Flint. The boys slept in the living room. My mother and her siblings all attended some college, and several of them graduated with bachelors and a few with masters degrees in education, social work and administration. My mother was one who graduated with her Masters of Social Work. They were simultaneously the first generation to complete high school, college and graduate school education. If there was arriving to be had, my mother and her siblings arrived and then some. Because of their experiences with the Jim Crow south and racism, my grandparents would come to adhere to the Nation of Islam form of black nationalism, and took in with them all 10 of their children. In the late 1970s, the family converted to Islam, making possible the birth in 1985 of this Invisible Muslimah.
Let's look at the Nigerian side of my family. My grandfather was born in 1896 and remembers when "the white man" first came to his village. His mother ran away with him in her arms to try to escape. After a bout of smallpox in 1918 in which he felt himself healed by prayer alone, he converted from Anglican to Faith Tabernacle, a denomination that did not believe in medicine. He raised his family in the church, and their home was connected to the church. My father, the youngest, was born to him when he was in his 50s. They were not poor in Nigeria. They had a car, which was a sign of wealth, because as the head of the Faith Tabernacle church in Nigeria, my grandfather had to travel. The family later fled their home with only a few pictures after the war started. My father left his boarding school for a while and had to continue his education later. In the interim, he lost his mother to cancer. Biafra, made up of my father's ethnic group, which tried to secede from Nigeria, lost the war. He arrived to the United States in 1975 on a scholarship from the Nigerian government to pursue his university education here, after attending some university there in Nigeria. Excited to go to a school dedicated to technology, he stopped first at Michigan Tech in the UP before his cousin, a professor at the University of Michigan- Flint convinced him to matriculate at the Ann Arbor campus, for less snow. He got his masters degree in Chemical Engineering and met my mother, a fellow graduate student in the School of Social Work, and the rest is history.
My success is neither slave or non-slave descended. My success, of course, is first by the grace of God. My parents were some of his agents. I grew up in a loving household with strong, opinionated and strict parents. When my father learned what we were doing in math, when he came home from work and on the weekends, he would teach me ahead in math from the time I was in first grade onward. My mother would read with me at home when she discovered that some of my reading skills were weak and encouraged me to write and expand my vocabulary. My parents made sure that my education was enriched with their own strengths as I went through a small, community, majority-black school. And when they sensed that the school no longer challenged me and would not suit my brother's special education needs, we moved to another school district. My parents taught me to work hard. My mother taught me as a black person, I would have to perform above and beyond in order to get what I deserved at base. My father taught me that there was no difference between me and my Asian classmates, that none of had two heads, and pushed me harder, to not accept the A- on tests even when it was an accelerated class and the grade was scaled up.
My success is neither slave nor non-slave. My mother's success is not slave. How limiting of ourselves it is to ever think of it that way! Yes, she and her siblings succeeded, overcoming her personal family history of discrimination on several levels, from the failures of Reconstruction for the black community to Jim Crow, from segregation to redlining. And non-slave is a grossly oversimplified way to express my father's success as a black African in this country, with the complex history of Nigeria that he lived in his lifetime, from independence to civil war, from dictatorship to corruption and ethnic strife.
Yes, there are ugly truths about the country and this very ugly social construct of race, but whether or not black people are getting into Ivy League schools where they do not receive adequate academic and career support anyway should not be the primary area of focus. Nor should black college admissions in general be the only area of focus. College admission is a shallow victory and, in my opinion, an inadequate measure of success. Successful college attendance and graduation is a better measure of success. We get to these schools and I can say first hand, no, you are not especially supported. I went to college and advised myself until my last year when I had a premedical adviser help me know that my MCAT scores were competitive and helped me with my personal statement, but that was it. If you are taking someone from a poor public school and placing them in a competitive college environment without intense guidance and mentorship, whatever Affirmative Action you have in place will most likely fail to achieve any intended outcomes.
So, in the spirit of my public health school education, what are solutions? I didn't even tough on the Asian-American discrimination piece...that is a problem that I know many of my Asian friends have felt when trying to get into prestigious schools...I must say, however, the issue with them is very different than the issue with African Americans. Most of my Asian and Asian-American friends got into great schools, even if they weren't Ivies. Few of my black friends went to these schools. Some did not go to college at all.
For Asians and Asian-Americans, I think California's race-free admissions policy is best extended everywhere, even if it means, yes, Asians will be grossly over-represented in higher education. They work hard, they deserve it. I don't think African immigrants will be hurt by this policy, because many of us also do well with grades, extra-curriculars and standardized testing.
For African Americans...what needs to happen is that Affirmative Action as it used to stand (as it is being largely abolished) cannot stand alone. Short of revamping the entire public educational system in the United States, intense mentorship and enrichment programs need to be put in place at the primary school level for black students in bad school districts. We need to cut the prison pipeline and get everyone in between the drop out to college continuum as well. The key is quality of education and whether our kids will be equipped to handle competitive college campuses, even if admissions relaxes grade and test score requirements to take into account the poor quality schools our kids are coming from.
For example, because of the rigorous education at my public school, I felt like college was easy. I also got a tuition scholarship because of my academic achievement, so I didn't have to worry about finding a job since my parent's income didn't qualify me for work-study so I could take 16-18 out of the max 18 credits per semester. I had supportive parents who enriched me and mentored me in elementary school and went to secondary school in a rigorous environment and pushed through even after guidance counselors told me that I probably had a low IQ but got good grades because I worked hard.
I celebrate the success of Nigerians as I celebrate the success of any African-descendant peoples in this country or around the world. I'm so proud of us showing that we can succeed in spite of the curse that this society placed on us because of our skin color, in spite of our bad reputation worldwide. To bicker about whether this success is worthy or not as if my lauding that success is functioning like, "See, black people, we're better than you," is short-sighted and a little bit insular. Nobody even said anything about that in the article! So it's like, what? One group can't acknowledge their success without us talking about failures in our community?
We need to get less sensitive and instead of basically taking away what I believe to be deserved merit from a group that has their own independent set of circumstances, we can see what we can learn from that group. The greatest thing having a Nigerian father did for me was something that an African American father in the same circumstance as my mother could have given to me. I will say, though, having the Nigerian name of my father and the religion of the mother often gave me a difference that gave me courage to break from the crowd and be the nerd I needed to be to get where I am today...
Anyway...those are my thoughts.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
[uncensored]: Muslimah Beauty, Part II
As salaam alaikum,
You know what I just realized? And if anyone says "No duh," sorry, I never thought of it this way before...
Among Muslims (both men and women), our appearance is so extra-scrutinized in a way that is never done with men. We need to do something about this.
What is to be done? I don't know. The more I think about certain things I don't like about how Muslims around me live Islam, the more I think forming a community of my own and disseminating that example to the outside for other Muslims to take note is the purpose of my life. Seriously. Some things I read by Muslims so disgust me that I almost, almost wish that I weren't Muslim. That I could just call myself a Submitter to God, follow the Qur'an and Sunnah and not associate with some of these people...gosh!
Anyway, I digress...this is not one such topic, but I can get passionate.
What do I mean by extra-scrutinized. It's not just the traditional, "Pious women wear hijab, pious men wear beards." So, men may be called out for not wearing a beard, not having it a certain length, not trimming it a certain way, or not applying henna, I suppose. They may also be called out for maybe the length of their hair and...I don't know, wearing clothing with logos or animals on it to the mosque? Tattoos and piercings are an issue for both genders, I would think. But, for the most part, Muslim men are invisible.
When it comes to women...gah-lee! And I'm not giving credence to the pop-Western "oh my gosh, these women are oppressed" spiel. No. It's not just about whether a woman is donning hijab or not. There are so many degrees of whether she is doing it correctly. Is it tied correctly? Is it covering all it should? Is some of your hair sticking out? Is your scarf too sheer? Should it cover your chin a little? Does it cover your chest, even if your clothing covers your chest? And speaking of clothing, how long are your sleeves? How tight is your shirt? How tight are your pants? Shouldn't you wear a skirt? These clothes need to be less colorful. Your hijab shouldn't have these colors and prints. All of this should be covered by a jilbab. It should be plain, it should be brown, it should be black. It should be unassuming. You shouldn't show your feet. You shouldn't show your feet or hands. You shouldn't show your feet, face and hands because they are all considered attractive, and you should not at all be attractive. You should not show too much around your eyes with your niqab. You should not show your eyes. As a matter of fact, it's better for you to be inside so I don't have to see you at all!
And that's not even touching accessories. Is painting nails sunnah or haram? Your earrings are showing or not? No makeup, no shaping eyebrows. No extensions, weaves or wigs because that is deception.
For non-Muslims who are reading this, no, these are not definitive mandates for how Muslim women should dress. These are just things that I've heard upon coming into Islam. This is what some Muslims encourage and believe, yes. So much energy, over and over, is put into regulating how a woman dresses. I think this is un-Islamic.
Yes, I said it. It is un-Islamic. What authority do I have to say this? No more than any other practicing Muslim that calls out someone as committing haram precipitously does, which happens a lot, so yes, I'm adding to the pool.
Why? Well, what at first seemed like a hadith that could only lead to dysfunctional gender relations comes into play with this issue. "The first look is for you, the second look is against you." But now, I can see some wisdom in that!
If you are worrying too much about what a particular sister is wearing, you are way past your first look. That is now on you and not on the sister who is not dressed to your liking...which you shouldn't have a liking, because to develop a liking, you have to look a lot!
There! This argument was inspired by a facebook meme, hehe.
The thing is, of course, the solution is not as easy as this. This is not a case of misogyny. Muslim men and women are partners in scrutinizing what a Muslim woman wears. I know, in the spirit of sisterhood, we should keep each other on the moderate path, right? Right?
Yes! But I feel like there's a thin line between advising and self-righteous scolding.
Not much I can say. That will come as it comes, though most of the sisters in my community are good about not making the hijab vs. no hijab criticism.
But, you know what...people are always setting out to deconstruct stereotypes about Muslims, and that's awesome. But I feel like we have an internal thwarting mechanism going on. What is that mechanism? Other Muslims!
People, in defense of Islam, try to say that Islam is a tolerant and open religion, and I belong to a group of women on facebook in which certain members proclaim, "No, Islam is not open, it's exclusive. Only certain people can be Muslims." Dismay face.
We try to defend Islam as a peaceful religion, and then random Muslims somewhere commit acts of terrorism that we condemn, but of course the people who say Muslims aren't condemning these things do not read Muslim media sources and if they did, they'd spam all articles with Islamophobic garbage. But the fact is, there are Muslims all over the globe doing horrible things in the name of Islam as we attempt to defend our religion.
And as we continue to act as apologists and laud the position of Islam in the scheme of women's rights...Muslim men and women, every day, in so many different contexts, relegate women. Oppress women. Injure, maim and kill women, restrict women.
Damn it! Seriously?
And this is one of those things that is not as extreme. The way we scrutinize the way we, Muslim women, dress. Personal stories of one's own journey to and/or from hijab aside, we purport that Islam is great for women...and yet we give women a hard time at too many levels of her self-realization.
Yet, in all of these examples, there is nothing wrong with Islam. One would say, how could there be nothing wrong with a religion that causes people to act this way? Who said the religion causes people to act this way? I think the manifestation of the violence and misogyny that we see in the "Muslim" world more reflects tribal conflicts and cultural tendencies towards certain types of violence, misogyny and immorality. The fact that we see such things as honor killings, child marriage, and female infanticide across religious boundaries in these regions of the world point that out clearly.
There is nothing wrong with Islam, but there is a lot wrong with Muslims. So much, it's not even just on the human level, it's disgusting. And relegating Musilm women is not even the thing that disgusts me...
It just reminds me...
Muslims, we have to do better.
We can't simply say, "Oh, they're not really Muslims." As true as that may be, they may still pray five times a day like us, frequent the masjid like we may or may not, fast Ramadan like we do, aspire to or have already made Hajj, give zakat...and they've done these horrible things that have us branded on the butt like cattle on the evening news, like, "Oh, look what this backwards-assed group of people did this time."
And some people are like, whatever, I don't have to defend myself against unbelievers. I'm not even going to use the k word, because I hate it! And true as that may be, we live in a society of people of the book, our monotheistic brothers and sisters, and yes, unbelievers, and the safety and livelihood of our Muslim brothers and sisters on this planet right now, yes, depends on our self-defense. And simpler than that, our religion deserves defense from people from all angles who smear it, not only non-Muslims, but Muslims as well.
Don't sit idly by, content that your life is good and the next life is better than this!
For the sake of our religion, for the sake of fellow striving brothers and sisters, many of whom struggle in isolation and are "educated" by media portrayals of us, yes, be apologists! Yes, speak out against the injustices and violence committed by Muslims! Yes!
Spend your time and energy doing that, as much as it may pain you to see that sister with her hijab tied just so a third of her highlighted hair is showing, or the sister with the earrings on the outside of her scarf, or the sister with the colorful hijab in the masjid...
Can you say, bigger fish to fry?
You know what I just realized? And if anyone says "No duh," sorry, I never thought of it this way before...
Among Muslims (both men and women), our appearance is so extra-scrutinized in a way that is never done with men. We need to do something about this.
What is to be done? I don't know. The more I think about certain things I don't like about how Muslims around me live Islam, the more I think forming a community of my own and disseminating that example to the outside for other Muslims to take note is the purpose of my life. Seriously. Some things I read by Muslims so disgust me that I almost, almost wish that I weren't Muslim. That I could just call myself a Submitter to God, follow the Qur'an and Sunnah and not associate with some of these people...gosh!
Anyway, I digress...this is not one such topic, but I can get passionate.
What do I mean by extra-scrutinized. It's not just the traditional, "Pious women wear hijab, pious men wear beards." So, men may be called out for not wearing a beard, not having it a certain length, not trimming it a certain way, or not applying henna, I suppose. They may also be called out for maybe the length of their hair and...I don't know, wearing clothing with logos or animals on it to the mosque? Tattoos and piercings are an issue for both genders, I would think. But, for the most part, Muslim men are invisible.
When it comes to women...gah-lee! And I'm not giving credence to the pop-Western "oh my gosh, these women are oppressed" spiel. No. It's not just about whether a woman is donning hijab or not. There are so many degrees of whether she is doing it correctly. Is it tied correctly? Is it covering all it should? Is some of your hair sticking out? Is your scarf too sheer? Should it cover your chin a little? Does it cover your chest, even if your clothing covers your chest? And speaking of clothing, how long are your sleeves? How tight is your shirt? How tight are your pants? Shouldn't you wear a skirt? These clothes need to be less colorful. Your hijab shouldn't have these colors and prints. All of this should be covered by a jilbab. It should be plain, it should be brown, it should be black. It should be unassuming. You shouldn't show your feet. You shouldn't show your feet or hands. You shouldn't show your feet, face and hands because they are all considered attractive, and you should not at all be attractive. You should not show too much around your eyes with your niqab. You should not show your eyes. As a matter of fact, it's better for you to be inside so I don't have to see you at all!
And that's not even touching accessories. Is painting nails sunnah or haram? Your earrings are showing or not? No makeup, no shaping eyebrows. No extensions, weaves or wigs because that is deception.
For non-Muslims who are reading this, no, these are not definitive mandates for how Muslim women should dress. These are just things that I've heard upon coming into Islam. This is what some Muslims encourage and believe, yes. So much energy, over and over, is put into regulating how a woman dresses. I think this is un-Islamic.
Yes, I said it. It is un-Islamic. What authority do I have to say this? No more than any other practicing Muslim that calls out someone as committing haram precipitously does, which happens a lot, so yes, I'm adding to the pool.
Why? Well, what at first seemed like a hadith that could only lead to dysfunctional gender relations comes into play with this issue. "The first look is for you, the second look is against you." But now, I can see some wisdom in that!
If you are worrying too much about what a particular sister is wearing, you are way past your first look. That is now on you and not on the sister who is not dressed to your liking...which you shouldn't have a liking, because to develop a liking, you have to look a lot!
There! This argument was inspired by a facebook meme, hehe.
The thing is, of course, the solution is not as easy as this. This is not a case of misogyny. Muslim men and women are partners in scrutinizing what a Muslim woman wears. I know, in the spirit of sisterhood, we should keep each other on the moderate path, right? Right?
Yes! But I feel like there's a thin line between advising and self-righteous scolding.
Not much I can say. That will come as it comes, though most of the sisters in my community are good about not making the hijab vs. no hijab criticism.
But, you know what...people are always setting out to deconstruct stereotypes about Muslims, and that's awesome. But I feel like we have an internal thwarting mechanism going on. What is that mechanism? Other Muslims!
People, in defense of Islam, try to say that Islam is a tolerant and open religion, and I belong to a group of women on facebook in which certain members proclaim, "No, Islam is not open, it's exclusive. Only certain people can be Muslims." Dismay face.
We try to defend Islam as a peaceful religion, and then random Muslims somewhere commit acts of terrorism that we condemn, but of course the people who say Muslims aren't condemning these things do not read Muslim media sources and if they did, they'd spam all articles with Islamophobic garbage. But the fact is, there are Muslims all over the globe doing horrible things in the name of Islam as we attempt to defend our religion.
And as we continue to act as apologists and laud the position of Islam in the scheme of women's rights...Muslim men and women, every day, in so many different contexts, relegate women. Oppress women. Injure, maim and kill women, restrict women.
Damn it! Seriously?
And this is one of those things that is not as extreme. The way we scrutinize the way we, Muslim women, dress. Personal stories of one's own journey to and/or from hijab aside, we purport that Islam is great for women...and yet we give women a hard time at too many levels of her self-realization.
Yet, in all of these examples, there is nothing wrong with Islam. One would say, how could there be nothing wrong with a religion that causes people to act this way? Who said the religion causes people to act this way? I think the manifestation of the violence and misogyny that we see in the "Muslim" world more reflects tribal conflicts and cultural tendencies towards certain types of violence, misogyny and immorality. The fact that we see such things as honor killings, child marriage, and female infanticide across religious boundaries in these regions of the world point that out clearly.
There is nothing wrong with Islam, but there is a lot wrong with Muslims. So much, it's not even just on the human level, it's disgusting. And relegating Musilm women is not even the thing that disgusts me...
It just reminds me...
Muslims, we have to do better.
We can't simply say, "Oh, they're not really Muslims." As true as that may be, they may still pray five times a day like us, frequent the masjid like we may or may not, fast Ramadan like we do, aspire to or have already made Hajj, give zakat...and they've done these horrible things that have us branded on the butt like cattle on the evening news, like, "Oh, look what this backwards-assed group of people did this time."
And some people are like, whatever, I don't have to defend myself against unbelievers. I'm not even going to use the k word, because I hate it! And true as that may be, we live in a society of people of the book, our monotheistic brothers and sisters, and yes, unbelievers, and the safety and livelihood of our Muslim brothers and sisters on this planet right now, yes, depends on our self-defense. And simpler than that, our religion deserves defense from people from all angles who smear it, not only non-Muslims, but Muslims as well.
Don't sit idly by, content that your life is good and the next life is better than this!
For the sake of our religion, for the sake of fellow striving brothers and sisters, many of whom struggle in isolation and are "educated" by media portrayals of us, yes, be apologists! Yes, speak out against the injustices and violence committed by Muslims! Yes!
Spend your time and energy doing that, as much as it may pain you to see that sister with her hijab tied just so a third of her highlighted hair is showing, or the sister with the earrings on the outside of her scarf, or the sister with the colorful hijab in the masjid...
Can you say, bigger fish to fry?
Saturday, January 14, 2012
What if the President Were White?
As salaam alaikum,
My last interview was yesterday, alhamdulillah! Now on to the task of making the decision...which is one that I will make very carefully...but I think I already know how it will line up. Me aguarde!
I got this email from my uncle this morning that detailed what the author felt was the racist climate surrounding and somewhat impeding the progress of President Obama and maybe even tarnishing his legacy. It was one of these chain emails, so who knows who the original author is...I don't have a ton of respect for such things. I'd rather see such material in a good op-ed or at least in an established blog with a known author and a voice than forwarded in email chains, but let's face it...this is how a lot of people get their information.
I feel like an op-ed has a greater peer-review factor, but anyway...I also have not written an op-ed, so I guess I can't talk.
Anyway, the chain email brought up some good points about the climate of racism surrounding this administration, and how what's seen in the GOP goes without saying (but is said so many times over)...it's its appearance in mainstream media outlets in covert ways and also leftist media outlets that is disturbing to this author.
And, I mean, I'm not at all surprised at the events as they've gone down. Someone can call it playing the race card, but I fully expected overt racism from the right, for sure, and from other places. I expected President Obama to not accomplish all that much in the first four years in terms of making a dent in the economic downturn, in terms of debt, in terms of a lot of the hot-button topics. I must say he exceeded my expectations for health care and disappointed me on the side of civil liberties in terms of the indefinite detention legislation. But I have overall been pleased that I have a President who is, yes, far from perfect but I feel comfortable criticizing, because the criticism is constructive and intelligent after growing up under George W. Bush and a GOP that was growing more and more hateful.
But this author argued that covert racism is coming from the middle ground, and even for the left, for this President. Things like, people being more likely to call him Obama than President, lack of respect, people calling him and the first lady uppity, arrogant...
While I do agree that he could be more gutsy (I respect him enough to leave his gonads out of this discussion), I also recognize what happened to our gutsier young presidents who are no longer with us. I also recognize that GOP governors were foretelling of President Obama's assassination before he was even elected, and apparently still are (sorry, just can't get over that).
It's deep. His election was an exciting time and a scary time for me because I didn't know if he would survive to serve four terms...literally and figuratively. And, even though he's made mistakes on the way and hasn't been as strong as many of us hoped he would be in some of his stances, he did survive, and more than survive, I'd argue.
But what of this racism from the center and from the left? Racism everywhere? The only way that we can analyze it is if we thought for a second, wait a minute...what if the President were white?
What if everything were the same inasmuch as it could be, and he were white? What if his father was Barry O'Brien, a white Kenyan with a Muslim background (haha, okay, stretch, but bear with me!) who met and married his mother, left little Barry behind when the couple divorced. Barry O'Brien. What if he grew up in Hawaii, and all else was the same in terms of his family's multicultural heritage, his mother still on food stamps, he still lived abroad, still had the Muslim step-father, all remained true. Say he still went to Harvard Law... Say he was still a community organizer, still attended church spottily, still was charasmatic and full of ideas and still all the yes-we-can that we knew him to be as he was campaigning, but that instead of a handsome, young black man, he's a handsome young white man.
Say he won the primaries against Hilary Clinton.
Would he have been elected over John McCain? Would Sarah Palin still be chosen as McCain's running mate? Would we still have the surge of the tea party? In office, would he have faces as much opposition from the right? Would we be critical of him in the same ways? Would the GOP be so foretelling of his assassination? What would be different, what would be the same?
I know for one thing, I still would have voted for Barry O'Brien because of his platform. I wouldn't have been excited about the election as I was, no, because I was excited about the history-changing moment when Americans successfully elected a black man into office. Outside of that, I would probably expect less from Barry O'Brien than I do Barack Obama, just because I expect the world out of black people because of in-group affection. I would expect strong opposition from the right in the partisan climate of politics that has been developing over the last several years, but I wouldn't, of course, expect the racism from the GOP that we've seen...
Barry O'Brien, like Barack Obama, I would regard no Kennedy, and that's fine. Kennedy was also killed. I don't need my leaders to be sacrificial lambs for my own political convictions, I need them to be effective in the political climate we have to make some positive change that's realistic in the face of opposition. And I need them to be alive to do that...
So, I don't know. I'm definitely not of the black people who like the President no matter what he does, but I'm also not the pessimist who thinks he's done nothing. I admit, yes, some of my affection for him is precisely because he is black. But I am also more critical of him and have higher hopes for him because he's black.
I can't say that there is definite racism on the left in people's analyses of the President, because I haven't been attentive to that. I just think a worthwhile exercise is to imagine if the President were white, and would any of your feelings about him change...
My last interview was yesterday, alhamdulillah! Now on to the task of making the decision...which is one that I will make very carefully...but I think I already know how it will line up. Me aguarde!
I got this email from my uncle this morning that detailed what the author felt was the racist climate surrounding and somewhat impeding the progress of President Obama and maybe even tarnishing his legacy. It was one of these chain emails, so who knows who the original author is...I don't have a ton of respect for such things. I'd rather see such material in a good op-ed or at least in an established blog with a known author and a voice than forwarded in email chains, but let's face it...this is how a lot of people get their information.
I feel like an op-ed has a greater peer-review factor, but anyway...I also have not written an op-ed, so I guess I can't talk.
Anyway, the chain email brought up some good points about the climate of racism surrounding this administration, and how what's seen in the GOP goes without saying (but is said so many times over)...it's its appearance in mainstream media outlets in covert ways and also leftist media outlets that is disturbing to this author.
And, I mean, I'm not at all surprised at the events as they've gone down. Someone can call it playing the race card, but I fully expected overt racism from the right, for sure, and from other places. I expected President Obama to not accomplish all that much in the first four years in terms of making a dent in the economic downturn, in terms of debt, in terms of a lot of the hot-button topics. I must say he exceeded my expectations for health care and disappointed me on the side of civil liberties in terms of the indefinite detention legislation. But I have overall been pleased that I have a President who is, yes, far from perfect but I feel comfortable criticizing, because the criticism is constructive and intelligent after growing up under George W. Bush and a GOP that was growing more and more hateful.
But this author argued that covert racism is coming from the middle ground, and even for the left, for this President. Things like, people being more likely to call him Obama than President, lack of respect, people calling him and the first lady uppity, arrogant...
While I do agree that he could be more gutsy (I respect him enough to leave his gonads out of this discussion), I also recognize what happened to our gutsier young presidents who are no longer with us. I also recognize that GOP governors were foretelling of President Obama's assassination before he was even elected, and apparently still are (sorry, just can't get over that).
It's deep. His election was an exciting time and a scary time for me because I didn't know if he would survive to serve four terms...literally and figuratively. And, even though he's made mistakes on the way and hasn't been as strong as many of us hoped he would be in some of his stances, he did survive, and more than survive, I'd argue.
But what of this racism from the center and from the left? Racism everywhere? The only way that we can analyze it is if we thought for a second, wait a minute...what if the President were white?
What if everything were the same inasmuch as it could be, and he were white? What if his father was Barry O'Brien, a white Kenyan with a Muslim background (haha, okay, stretch, but bear with me!) who met and married his mother, left little Barry behind when the couple divorced. Barry O'Brien. What if he grew up in Hawaii, and all else was the same in terms of his family's multicultural heritage, his mother still on food stamps, he still lived abroad, still had the Muslim step-father, all remained true. Say he still went to Harvard Law... Say he was still a community organizer, still attended church spottily, still was charasmatic and full of ideas and still all the yes-we-can that we knew him to be as he was campaigning, but that instead of a handsome, young black man, he's a handsome young white man.
Say he won the primaries against Hilary Clinton.
Would he have been elected over John McCain? Would Sarah Palin still be chosen as McCain's running mate? Would we still have the surge of the tea party? In office, would he have faces as much opposition from the right? Would we be critical of him in the same ways? Would the GOP be so foretelling of his assassination? What would be different, what would be the same?
I know for one thing, I still would have voted for Barry O'Brien because of his platform. I wouldn't have been excited about the election as I was, no, because I was excited about the history-changing moment when Americans successfully elected a black man into office. Outside of that, I would probably expect less from Barry O'Brien than I do Barack Obama, just because I expect the world out of black people because of in-group affection. I would expect strong opposition from the right in the partisan climate of politics that has been developing over the last several years, but I wouldn't, of course, expect the racism from the GOP that we've seen...
Barry O'Brien, like Barack Obama, I would regard no Kennedy, and that's fine. Kennedy was also killed. I don't need my leaders to be sacrificial lambs for my own political convictions, I need them to be effective in the political climate we have to make some positive change that's realistic in the face of opposition. And I need them to be alive to do that...
So, I don't know. I'm definitely not of the black people who like the President no matter what he does, but I'm also not the pessimist who thinks he's done nothing. I admit, yes, some of my affection for him is precisely because he is black. But I am also more critical of him and have higher hopes for him because he's black.
I can't say that there is definite racism on the left in people's analyses of the President, because I haven't been attentive to that. I just think a worthwhile exercise is to imagine if the President were white, and would any of your feelings about him change...
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