Читать книгу White Christian Privilege - Khyati Y. Joshi - Страница 10

There are many different types of religious oppression in our society, of which the most well-known are probably antisemitism and the anti-Muslim sentiment sometimes referred to as “Islamophobia.” Atheists, agnostics, practitioners of Native Americans traditions, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and others also frequently face religious oppression in various forms. From the Jew whose synagogue was vandalized to the Sikh man killed in a post-9/11 “backlash” attack, to the Muslim woman who doesn’t get a job because she wears a hijab, religious oppression is present wherever we find privilege: in legal policies and structures, in social designs and cultural practices, and at the level of individual discrimination.¹³

Long before September 11, 2001, and even more so since then, discussions about terrorism and depictions of terrorists have tended to invoke Islam and Muslim Americans—even though, both in the US and globally, most terrorists are not Muslim.¹⁴ Consider the experience of a young Muslim man growing up in Metro Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s. Salim was a second-generation Indian American Muslim whose religious identity was a source of conflict for him. In addition to disparaging remarks about Muslims from peers, he dealt with anti-Muslim sentiment— disguised as comedy—from teachers. His ninth grade homeroom teacher “always joked” and said to him: “‘You don’t have a bomb in that backpack, [do you]?’ And he would duck and make a big joke in front of all the other kids.… We all kind of laughed and made a big joke out of it but it made me really uncomfortable.”¹⁵ For Salim, his teacher’s statements and actions legitimized the association of Islam with terrorism in the eyes of an entire classroom; Salim felt vilified by a popular authority figure. His teacher was magnifying a contemporary American cultural perception, of Muslims as terrorists, and placing his own student in that frame in front of all of his peers. Salim’s experience took place long before 9/11, in the early 1990s, during the time of the First Gulf War. Unfortunately, even today students who are Muslim or perceived as Muslim (such as South Asian Americans of various religious affiliations) confront harassment, discrimination, and assaults in school, college, and beyond.¹⁶

The association between terrorism and Islam, and between Islam and Arabs, became the subtext of many other public disputes, like the debate in 2015 and 2016 over the admission of Syrian war refugees to the United States. In the absence of any evidence connecting Syrian refugees with any anti-American terror plot, and in willful ignorance of the 14-step security vetting refugees receive, state governors and presidential candidates nevertheless assumed a connection. The winning candidate in the 2016 presidential contest promised a “Muslim Ban”¹⁷ and ultimately saw the executive order he signed in fulfilment of that promise upheld by the US Supreme Court. By contrast, between 2012 and 2018, White Christian men murdered three Muslim college students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh, a gurdwara in Wisconsin, a church in South Carolina, and a concert in Arizona, and yet the words “terrorist” or “terrorism” were rarely used by the media or the politicians to describe these men or their actions.¹⁸ Nor were there many references to the perpetrators’ race or religion. By contrast, when the media identifies an act as “terrorist,” attention is given to the perpetrators’ national and ethnic origins and religion.¹⁹