Society Expects Me To Explain Something That Had Nothing To Do With Me

I’ve been looking at the news all night, feeling distraught for the victims, feeling sadness for the refugees who fled there to escape this violence.

And angry. I feel angry.

I’m angry because just a day earlier than this tragic event, another tragedy had happened. In Beirut on Thursday there was an explosion that killed 41 people, and in Baghdad there was an explosion on Friday at a funeral, killing 19 people. But I didn’t see those events flood my newsfeed, I didn’t see millions of people tweet and post Facebook statuses in solidarity, I didn’t see nearly every top politician in the world offer their condolences to the Lebanese and Iraqi people.

I’ve always known, but it’s been glaringly apparent since yesterday, whose lives we as a society value more. We’ve become so desensitized to violence in other parts of the world, that we just glance at the news and go on with our lives. Only when it impacts a people we consider more similar to us, does this outpouring of grief occur. The West-dominated media laps it up, in a way you don’t usually see with similar tragedies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

I’m lucky to be surrounded by good people in my life, and so it’s not often I see spews of hate on my Facebook feed, and trolls on Twitter are easy to ignore. But when a tragedy happens that you are made to feel somehow personally responsible for because of your background, those trolls are not as easy to ignore.

I’m not even a practicing Muslim. I don’t know what I believe. But that doesn’t change the stigma attached to my ethnicity, or when I’m out and talking on the phone in Farsi, or when I wear a keffiyeh around my neck to stay warm.

I’ve been confronted with people who have told me I need to justify who I am, one person even telling me in class after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, “Islam is evil. Saying otherwise will put you in my bad books.” I was trying to explain Muslims are a diverse and vibrant demographic and Islamic terrorism doesn’t represent 1.57 billion people.

I don’t usually get too upset. I know there are bigots all over the world who will think in ways I’ll find unacceptable. My general approach is to ignore them, or make a flippant comment and move on. But last night, I fell in to the trap. I tried to justify who I am. I tried to talk reasonably to unreasonable people. And admittedly, I became upset because of the impassioned hate filled, not so factual rants I was seeing.

I shouldn’t try to reason with racist, ignorant individuals. I shouldn’t I shouldn’t I shouldn’t, I tell myself. It’s a bad idea. But sometimes I get sucked in, trying to get a person to see the light, or vainly hoping there are others reading the conversation that agree with me. Oh wow, I got a like from his brother’s friend’s cousin, victory!

Yet, after all that frantic typing, the futility of the task caught up with me. And made me realize that good and enlightened people in the world are much more worth my time and energy. It’s them that will help us change this problematic narrative, it’s them that will help us change the media’s priorities whenever it comes to these heartrending events, and it’s them that will help us combat the hateful campaigns of religious fundamentalists.