Race Is Still a Painful Issue

… and I know I’ve said this a hundred times…

Assalamu alaikum/ greetings, I’m still pondering the Obama speech given yesterday on race, and also pondering the Sean Hannity / Newt Gingrich reaction/pontification that I caught on the way home yesterday.

In short, regarding Obama’s speech, it was well-delivered, forthright, honest, and concise, and I think said what needed to be said.

What I’ve been mulling over, though, is comments I heard on the Sean Hannity show. I normally try not to let myself get angry over such things, however, my emotions got the better of me, and I could feel the muscles in my face changing, I could feel the color rising to my cheeks, and I knew at that moment I’d lost the battle. I’d wished at that moment that I could be like my husband and remain laid back about the situation, to just “listen to see what the other side is saying”. To be able to say to myself that these talk-show people are just making a career out of playing on people’s worst hatred and fears, and using those fears and hatred to divide people. However, I can’t do that, because what people say, in many cases, affects me profoundly.

I’ll sum up the Hannity / Gingrich exchange in a few words, they admitted the speech was a good one, but as Gingrich put it, “he gave a good speech about the wrong topic”, and then proceeded to say something about how Obama didn’t say enough, how there was still certain things Obama didn’t address, that “how could Obama know this man for twenty years and not hear or know of him saying these sorts of derogatory things”, etc. I’m not sure what the rest of the conversation was about as I’d arrived at home by that time, and was happy to not have to listen to that anymore.

What struck me, though, was a few things. Gingrich and Hannity kept talking about “hate”, again driving home the “racism” and lack of patriotism of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, yet not mentioning Conservative pastors who made statements after 9/11 that the terror attacks on that day were vengence against America for homosexuality, abortion, and a whole host of other things.

Not only this, and I know this has nothing to do with race, however, shortly after 9/11 Hannity had the Reverend Jerry Vines? on his show talking about how the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), was a child molester (wa aoodhu billah), and all of the other lies that we all are aware of regarding the Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace). And when he was saying all of this him and Hannity went on and on about how “we need to get this information out to people so they know what we’re up against”.

I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget how sick I felt, how I literally almost threw up, how sad, upset, and angry I felt. This added to the sense of fear and foreboding I felt after 9/11, how I was afraid to go outside of my home because of the fear of being attacked. How some of my friends at that time (non-Muslim) stopped speaking to me. How someone who was a friend of a frend said “go back to where you came from”, and the friend stayed silent.

So when Sean Hannity talks about how he is not a racist, how he doesn’t hate, I just don’t, I just can’t, believe him. And when he talks about “Obama not saying enough” I just say to myself that this man is a hypocrite! Pure and simple!

I wish I could put into words all of the things I still want to say. how sometimes I feel like I don’t fit in anywhere, how hard it is to say “yeah white people have done this”, and not sound like a guilty white person for saying it. Because I’ve been thinking a lot about my previous posts, and methinks they are a bit harsh. I feel badly for saying them.

Because maybe they are true, but I don’t like voicing those sorts of thoughts, because I feel like no matter what, if you’re white, you can’t be in the middle, you can’t say “yes we’ve done a lot of htings”, because then you seem guilty, but if you don’t admit to certain things, like that racism still exists, for example, then you seem like a racist.

There really is no middle ground I don’t think. And as I’ve said, I went through that “white guilt” stuff before, and perhaps sometimes I still go thorugh it to some degree, however, at some point, you have to find a happy medium between recognizing the truth and not feeling responsible for something you had nothing to do with. And in so doing, find a way to correct the wrongs of the past by Inshallah, making sure they don’t happen again.

To take it back to the original topic at hand, I think that was what Obama was trying to do yesterday. To put the truth out there in a non-threatening way, to make people aware of it who might not otherwise would be, and then give us a way to move forward from there.

For many of us, whether black or white, or whatever, race has been and continues to be a very painful experience / topic, and it’s a very nuanced thing. And I just think there’s a lot of ignorance out there on all sides, of communities that people don’t come into contact with, except on TV and in movies, etc.

And it’s the same with blind people, there’s a lot of ignorance about the disabled, why should I think it would be any different that in an all-white or all-black community, there’d be a lot of ignorance about “the other”, just because you don’t try to get to know anything about “the other”.

And on that note, I’ll stop rambling as I need to get to bed.