Racism and Islamophobia – by Don Mead

On April 8, 2017, Lisa Sallaj was out walking her daughter’s dog in central California when a man approached, kicked her dog and began shouting profanities at her, telling her, “go back to your country.”  He punched her, she was taken to the hospital and treated for serious injuries.  She was a Muslim, presumably selected for assault because she was wearing a hijab.

In Olathe, Kansas, on Wednesday evening, Feb. 22, 2017, two friends, Srinivas and Alok, stopped by a local watering hole at the end of a day’s work for a relaxing drink.  Another customer, Adam, began launching racial slurs at them, saying, “you don’t belong in this country.”  The manager had Adam escorted out of the bar, but soon he returned with a gun and shot the two friends.  Srinivas died immediately, Alok was treated and survived.  They had each been in the United States for more than a decade, working in a tech firm; both were from India. Their religion was not reported.

These are but two of the more than a thousand examples of hate crimes documented in the United States in recent months, a sharp increase over previous levels.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has offered us important insights into the forces that lead to hate crimes. In his exploration of race and racism, he argues that racism is the father of race, not the other way around. Racism, he says, is fundamentally a process of dividing a community/nation/world into “us” and “them,” using that division to instill fear of “them,” then asserting that it is right and necessary for “us” to subdue and control “them,” because “they” are a threat to “us”. Race then follows as one particular way of othering, providing the basis on which the dominant group divides the community and unifies those in power through a process of subduing those considered “other.” The outcome is what he and others have called “systemic racism.”

Much of the discussion of those terms has focused on differentiation based on skin color, in a binary world where people are judged to be either “black” or “white”. But the process is also alive and well using other criteria for discriminating. Some particularly virulent forms are based on religion. Examples abound. We are familiar with issues of Anti-Semitism, which surely divides people based on their religion. If that is considered as a form of racism, does that mean it’s appropriate to think of the Jewish people as a race? Not an easy question! Conversely, the United Nations – and particularly, the UN agency, UNESCO – has been deeply embroiled in a controversy as to whether Zionism is a form of racism. Words can be toxic and explosive, and there seems to be no final adjudicator to decide these issues. Language surely does matter, since whole systems of discrimination and control are built on such differentiation.

This brings us to an issue which has taken on great significance in our country today: Islamophobia. There are regular reports in the American media today reminding us of how dangerous Muslims are. Laws have been proposed and existing laws have been interpreted in ways that single out Muslims as people who must be approached with great care (with “extreme vetting”). The ways in which news is reported in the press could easily lead one to believe that many if not most followers of Islam are best described as “radical Muslim terrorists.” Since it is virtually impossible to judge from either dress or physical characteristics who is a Muslim, and many Americans are singularly bad at misreading the signs that do exist, Islamophobia has resulted in many examples of aggressive acts against unusual-looking people who are wrongly presumed to be Muslim (e.g. Sikhs, Christian Arabs).

So what is to be done to confront this situation? The first step is to recognize that there are indeed some radical extremist terrorists who claim to be Muslim. Al Qa’eda and the Islamic State are examples that are creating havoc wherever they can. Alongside that fact comes a recognition that those extremists are a minuscule portion of world-wide Islam; that the people best equipped to identify and challenge them are other, more moderate Muslims; and that attitudes and policies on our part which alienate and antagonize more moderate followers of Islam make that task more difficult, and may well be the best recruiting mechanism for the radical branch.

That may be the core of a pragmatic response; but for Christians, there is a much deeper theological response, built on countless passages in both the Old and New Testaments, with the ringing words, “Do not be afraid!” While that idea is spread liberally throughout the Bible, it comes out most clearly in the actions and teachings of Jesus, as he constantly and regularly challenged the many boundaries and borders placed on the breadth of God’s love by religious leaders of his day. Attitudes, actions and policies built on fear of some particular group of “others” meant that they found it difficult to follow the boundary-breaking discipleship which Jesus taught.

Maybe the Muslims of today are the Samaritans of Jesus’s time. Much to the consternation of his disciples, Jesus did not scorn or exclude the Samaritan woman at the well but rather challenged and invited her and her community into his world. In his telling about the man who “fell among thieves” on the road to Jericho, Jesus commended the outsider, the “other” man, a Samaritan, for his good deeds. We also remember what He said at the conclusion of that story, where he instructed his listeners to “go and do likewise.” May God give us ears to hear and to follow.

Don Mead is a Presbyterian Ruling Elder and a retired economist. He spent 19 years as Professor at Michigan State University, where the principle focus of his teaching, research, and advising was on issues of economic development, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since his retirement 19 years ago, he has done volunteer work for the church, much of it relating to issues of peace and justice in the Middle East.  He has been actively involved in three national networks of the Presbyterian Church: the Israel/Palestine Mission Network, the Syria Lebanon Partnership Network, and the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship.