Confusion and Privilege within Islamophobia and the "Other"
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I remember a text my older sister wrote as a child some time after immigrating to Canada. It was about blending in. It was just after 911, and she felt she couldn't be Arab or Muslim. She got rid of her accent and in later years dyed her hair blond and moved in the world like a white woman. Her proximity to whiteness was obvious. Privilege within the inner perception of difference is really incomparable to the lived experience of someone experiencing everyday racism and/or Islamophobia. I wish I could speak to her about it now, but she passed away some years ago. Although I look very different than she did, I still have the abstractness that allows me to move in the world with the benefits of light skin privilege. I remember the airport being a place where I couldn't make jokes if they stopped my family for our name, and I remember feeling a difference between my friends and I as a child. I couldn't tell them certain things about my father without them telling their parents and my family being perceived as some type of other/ violent. I felt the need for privacy and silence, which still follows me to this day in seen and unseen ways. Despite being able to join the system and structure of the West, my father never really joined this society despite assimilating for survival purposes. His soul and habits seem to stay in the faraway past, in a land that he will most likely never return to. There's so much isolation here. Work with no connection to a community. Never-ending grief. My father never speaks of war. Never speaks on the bombing he experienced growing up. Never speaks on his pain. But it's omnipresent. Never speaks about my sister. Silence is violent. Grief is internalized. This affects me in countless ways. I too have become somewhat of a "Savage". Ironically, my father calls me primitive. There's layers to this. There's earth. There's hope. There's insurmountable grief. Broken family. Broken roots. My ambition in life is to be the soil. To feel rooted. To not fear. I remember as a child crying a lot, and my father saying that's a sign of weakness. I was a baby. That tells you everything. I think when living in this strange matrix/ Babylon, we all dissociate on different levels in order to function. We yearn for identity and kinship, yet we are confused by all the dynamics they come with. Detaching from our own pain while simultaneously using it to connect and truly be present to support others is key. Recognizing our privileges, without end, is key too. And using it to break down the walls of oppression. It's much bigger than us. Islamophobia itself is felt in us in ways that, like white supremacy, lives in the air, especially in certain institutions. It's internalized like racism. My own relationship to Islam is affected by it in ways that even I cannot fully perceive. How much have I assimilated and dissociated to be able to move a certain way in this society, without even doing so consciously? I am in perpetual reflection.
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I block out a lot memory wise due to pain but I experienced Islamophobia within my own household and mother's family - the effects of which I can't fully perceive.