Radical respect

This started as a post about Park51.

I wrote the post and asked a friend to read it, and then tried to revise it based on her feedback. It was a post where I showed a great counterexample of what I was saying. It was the post of a white person trying to tell other white people to stop being mean to non-white people. I don’t think such posts are categorically wrong, but it’s not what I mean.

So this post isn’t about Park51. It’s about radical respect, especially of the religious sort. It’s about how my medically treated anxiety intersects with the racism I was raised on, and creates a very uncomfortable storm in my head that I can only calm through the painful honesty of recognizing that that racism is now my own.

Okay, so maybe it’s a little bit about Park51.

I spent the weekend in Manhattan with my best friends from college – a New Jerseyan guy with Indian heritage, (we’ll call him Rouge), an Ashkenazi Israeli (Turquoise), and a white Alabaman who speaks fluent Arabic as well as some Hebrew and Persian (Daffodil). Then I spent two days with my very loud Italian-American family where each person is perfect and knows what’s best for everyone else. We’re mostly women, except those who married in or are under the age of ten. My brother and uncle weren’t there. My eldest cousin just had a very sweet, very cute baby, and there are four other mothers in the family.

We love each other fiercely, but for most of us, loving doesn’t mean trusting. Years ago, a playwright friend of mine wrote in Thorns of a Rose, “How can you think you know what’s best for me? I don’t even know what’s best for me.” We don’t trust each other to do what’s best for ourselves, or even to trust that we’ll be consulted if we can be a useful conversant. Instead of offering expertise, we are experts at jumping at the opportunity of someone else’s confusion to posit our own opinion, hoping it will be accepted out of sudden lucidity or perhaps simply out of exhaustion. We want to be right; rather, we know we’re right, so we want the shortest route to making you realize it. So we ignore that confusion and struggle are the midwives of intentionality, and get right to our preferred end while ignoring the means. Get people at their most vulnerable, and you don't have to worry about their personhood; you can conveniently supplant their needs with your own.

Fear-mongering uses this same method. Marriage in trouble (as many, many marriages often are)? Blame it on the gays. Crime statistics got you down? Blame it on “urban youth.” Worried about the havoc wreaked by drug addiction? Blame it on gangs in Mexico. Business going down the tubes? Blame it on a federal worker bee who happens to be black. Evangelical methods no longer catching the eye of the vulnerable? Blame it on another religion. Embarrassed that other fear-mongers have succeeded in making you scared? Take it out on Muslims. Rest assured that once you reduce the power of the gays, the urban youth, the entire country of Mexico, all black federal employees (or all black folks entirely?), all other religions, and especially all Muslims, your marriage, property, family, business, religion, and bravado will once again be in tact.

I tend to give the fear-mongers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they really are afraid; they came by their fear honestly. They know they're right, and they want the shortest path to making sure you know that too. It scares me to think this way, because it means we're fighting something genuine, no matter how abhorrent. It seems easier to dismiss people when you assume they're just evil.

What scares me the most is when I see this in myself. I have been raised in a racist* society, and I try to claim my part in upholding the racism that I’ve ingested, willingly or unwillingly. Still, I am alarmed when I catch myself doing the very things that I abhor. Rouge regularly gets selected for extra screening at airports, especially if he hasn’t shaved in a few days. While boarding the flight to Newark last week, a white family behind him in line seemed especially concerned when he began talking to his mother on the phone in Punjabi.

Every time I board a plane, especially if I am flying alone, I look around to see who the other passengers are. I get shaky if I see a young brown man. In my life, I’ve flown most to Newark, Orlando, and Detroit, in that order. Young brown men are pretty common passengers on those flights, as all three states have significant populations of people from Middle Eastern, Indian, and Hispanic families.

Yesterday I boarded a train in Newark that stopped in New York’s Penn Station before continuing on to points north and east, eventually ending in Boston. I found myself having the same fears, stoking the racist flame that I try on other days to ignore. I forced myself to hide it, but the racist fears kept dogging me.

At the same time, my mind whirled. I chastised myself, I felt terrible, I wondered how I could call myself an ally when clearly I’m part of the problem. So long as one part of me knows what's right, I can make proclamations, hoping the "fake it til you make it" method will eventually mean that I'm entirely free of racism simply by saying that I am. If I focus outward, I never have to focus on myself.

This post began as a way to say that Muslims have more of a right than anybody to build a mosque at Ground Zero [despite the fact that no such thing has been suggested] because 9/11 has been used as an excuse to kill millions of Muslims. Yes, of course I believe that to be true. But no, that is not my struggle.

My struggle is that it’s working. The fear-mongering – if not from this particular nontroversy, then from all of the rest of it – has worked. It’s worked despite the defenses I put up and the steel bubble I have built. It's worked despite the fact that I can make a convincing and spirited argument against racial profiling. It's worked despite the fact that my friends, the chosen family who I describe as being part of my soul, are the ones I would be afraid of. It's worked, and I can't make it stop working just by acting as if I'm immune.

I said this post was about radical respect. Radical respect is starting from a place of conscious love, edification, and respect, and honoring others by fighting my own demons. Radical respect is about being intentional. It's about falling back on my belief that other people know what is best for them. It's about trusting that people make decisions rooted in their own experiences. It's about trusting my cousin to be the kind of mother she wants to be, and trusting that she will tell us when she needs something. It's about squelching the urge to grandstand when I want to hide my guilt. It's about fighting my susceptibility to fear-mongering. It's about becoming one fewer person who can be affected by fear-mongers. It's about being proactive about how to be a better part of this world. It's about knowing that "a better world" means a world where individuals treat each other with love, compassion, and respect.

 

*I’m currently using “racist” to be a bit of a catch-all for xenophobia and islamophobia because the way we “determine” who to be scared of is often by what race or ethnicity we assume them to be.
**I expect to be editing this for a while, despite the many many edits it's gone through.