To oppress a people, you don’t need to hold them at gunpoint, you only need to convince them that self-repression is social responsibility.
Sometimes we make the mistake of equating patience with spiritual strength. We bear oppression politely in hopes that our quiet resignation will have a transformative effect on our persecutors.
Other times, there is wisdom in being patient. As Muslims, we understand that there is a metaphysical power in self-restraint. We know that God listens to the oppressed. Patience can be prayer.
The Prophet Muhammad taught, “Beware the supplication of the oppressed, for there is no barrier between it and God.”
The prosperity and welfare of an entire nation are at stake when its members fail to protect those who are underprivileged from those who are in power. Prophet Muhammad once declared, “How would God sanctify a nation that does not protect its underprivileged from its powerful?”
Where Does Power Lie?
As Muslims, we are called to contend with our own demons; our own racism, and prejudice. If we can cry Islamophobia when we talk about the way Muslim minorities are treated in the West, we can certainly check our own hypocrisy and consider how we treat the most vulnerable within our own communities.
As people of faith, we recognize that power is something that can be harnessed in ways that transcend access to instruments of oppression. There is power in prayer. There is power in patience, and there is power in moral conviction.
Civil Rights pioneer Rosa Parks encapsulated the spirit of moral conviction when she said, “I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.”
The struggle for moral clarity is in knowing that while it is our moral obligation to do everything we can to eradicate oppression, our efforts should not lead to greater evils. And when footage of the arrest of George Floyd showed him pleading for his life with the words, “I can’t breathe”… “please, please, please”, America’s mind was made up. Clarity was achieved.
In cities across the United States, tens of thousands of people have swarmed the streets to express their outrage. Fearless and fed up, the days of polite protests are over!
Black Lives Matter
Multiple mobile phones captured Mr. Floyd’s last words and memorialized what became a rallying cry for those all too familiar with this style of deranged police brutality and a wake call for those who were still in denial.
Before George Floyd, there was 26-year-old aspiring nurse Breanna Taylor who was shot at least eight times by Louisville police officers in her apartment on March 13.
And before her, there was Dominique Clayton, Eric Reason, Walter Scott, Tamer Rice, Yassin Mohamed, and countless others. And let’s never forget Eric Garner who also implored for justice using the same last words, forever etched in the American conscience:
“I can’t breathe.”
Civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson explains that there is not one single thing about the death of George Floyd that is extraordinary or new. Not the killing in plain sight or even the complicity of the officers on site. “Everything we are seeing is a symptom of a larger disease,” Stevenson says.
In an interview with the New Yorker, Stevenson reminds us that “We have never honestly addressed all the damage that was done during the two and a half centuries that we enslaved black people.”
An Open Wound
Too many innocent black men and women have been battered and killed by law enforcement officers who are never held accountable for their crimes. Between 2013 and 2019, 99% of killings by police officers resulted in no charges, according to Mapping Police Violence.
Americans are frustrated and fatigued and know that without dismantling the horrors of institutionalized white supremacy, our nation will never recover from this.
“What you’re seeing now is a curtain falling away. Those of us who have been burdened by this every minute, every second of our entire lives are fragile right now. We are tired.” Said CNN commentator Van Jones.
He is not the only one. Everywhere you look, the emotional energy is an unusual combination of exhaustion and strength. It’s this simultaneous eruption of two contradictory forces that will lead to meaningful change.
“I can’t breathe” has come to signify something deeper about the American experience: One where the moral crime of racism and our great original sin- American slavery will suffocate all of us until and unless this nation has a reckoning for its sins.
The practice of slavery may have ended. But even after the passing of Civil Rights legislation, including the voting right act in the 1960s, the United States has not fully done all that it should to heal the open wounds of our past.
The call to defeat racism is a moral calling that begins by understanding the nature of this evil disease.
The Evil of Racism
Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another on the bases of some biological characteristics. It is driven by a primitive need to ascribe moral or political significance to a man’s identity, not on the basis of his character, but on the basis of some predetermined inherited attributes.
Racism is the belief in the helplessness of the individual and his ability to think and reason. It’s the belief that the value of a man can only be determined in relation to the group to which he belongs.
Racism is a form of pathological insecurity disguising itself as supremacy.
Racism is the manifestation of irrationalism. It relies exclusively on the idea that your worth is determined by the inherited not chosen. And that the survival of your identity depends on the preservation of the group to which you belong, not by choice but by default of your genetics.
Racism is a short cut to self-esteem. It’s the subconscious belief that self-actualization is not possible except by clinging to the status, privilege, and comfort you are told is yours by nature, or worse, divine decree.
Racism is a tool of control. It gives unearned privileges to some at the expense of others in order to fortify the position of the ruling elite who can only survive through the blind loyalty and support of those who stand to benefit from their crimes.
Racism proliferates in societies where generations are raised without a sense of reality outside of the one that is being socially engineered for them by those who wish to maintain a particular status quo. A reality built on lies; The lie that black people are not as good as white people. The lie that they are less human or less capable than whites. The lie of white supremacy.
These lies can no longer be granted the pretense of respectability or order. Protests against the police killings of black Americans continue to spread with no sign of dying down.
Protesters continue to march, armed with nothing but confident resistance and the moral conviction that truth must prevail because life and liberty can never last until we command – Justice for all!
The post Racism is the Real Pandemic appeared first on About Islam.
source https://aboutislam.net/family-life/your-society/racism-is-the-real-pandemic/
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