My unfiltered feelings about the election

Scene Sheen
Jul 20, 2017 · 7 min read

As Muslims, we aren’t just bitter about the president and his supporters — everyone’s played their part to get us to this point.

courtesy VOA News

By Maliha Khan

It would be the understatement of the century to say many Muslims living in the US felt deeply uncomfortable with the 2016 US presidential election and its aftermath. Let me list just a few of the myriad ways in which this was applicable to me.

Captain Obvious:

  • The rise in Islamophobic hate crimes, the frightening frequency with which they were occurring, and the even more frightening rate at which they were dismissed by local law enforcement. I would cringe when CAIR newsletters hit my email inbox every afternoon; it seemed as if though chapter leaders in each state were literally begging law enforcement for help. It didn’t help to see the FBI bending over backwards to identify culprits for bomb threats being called into JCCs (to be clear: equally terrifying, and thank God it wasn’t us) — it made me feel like Muslims were unwanted stepchildren. What will it take for us to have equal status (not legal, equal status of being wanted) in the US?
  • And of course the burden of proof rested upon Muslims to prove we weren’t crazy in our own heads — it seemed it wasn’t enough to have a fire at a mosque (and at many, many mosques around the country) for something to qualify as a hate crime — did attackers really need to leave DEATH2MUSLIMS notes as well for it to pass muster, while all other groups got to define what they thought a hate crime was for them? Not us — it was all too easy for attacks to be dismissed as a ‘parking dispute’ or other wilfully blind dismissals. I spent the first six months after the election hunkered down into my sofa, eating ice cream and checking the news literally dozens of times a day for the latest onslaught.

Feeling (tl; dr): I and my kind are unwanted, and I felt exhausted at the end of each day as if I’d spent it dodging bullets.

Annoyed at other privileged Pakistanis:

  • (I’m changing some details to protect privacy.) There’s a very nice private middle school in the Midwest. One grade was learning about world religions, and they spent a few weeks on Islam. On the Islam 101 board, one (white) kid had written about ISIS. And another student wrote, “Right after 9/11, it seemed the US was being racist in denying visas to Muslims, but they really weren’t, because ISIS could be anywhere.” Now that’s just a poor grasp of history, kid.
  • I don’t know what disturbed me more — how and why this belonged to a Islam 101 poster outside the 6th grade classroom, why students thought it was OK to write this — and if whatever, they’re kids, how could the teacher possibly be OK with it? And why was it not escalated to the administration immediately by, you know, a concerned human being, regardless of their religion? I’m going to venture a reeeaallyyyyy wild guess here and say that it probably wouldn’t have flown if this were on a poster in the school about a Christianity/Judaism/Hinduism/Buddhism/choose your poison. There’s one (among several) Pakistani family in the school. When the parents were informed of this board by a concerned family member on a back to school night, they chose to do nothing. And no, this is not a survival-is-an-act-of-resistance — this was purely privileged people not caring because their own day-to-day wasn’t affected.

Feeling (tl; dr): How casual Islamophobia is rampant and ignored in very PC schools; and how the family’s response to it (faint alarm) was the same as if someone had told them they’d gained 10 pounds.

Disdain for white ‘allies’:

  • I wish I could use that last word with a dozen quotation marks around it. White allies who suddenly came out of the woodwork to protest the travel ban just because they didn’t like the president and rallied at airports: where were you when some of the same countries were being bombed by your beloved former president? You know, the guy who smiled his palatable identity politics smile when he said he loved Muslims but continued bombing the shit out of (poor) Muslim countries and sucking up to (rich) ones?
  • If you say you’ll put your name on a Muslim registry (as if it’s possible to opt into such a thing, and that’s only reflective of your own wide-eyed privilege), where were you when American Muslim communities were under constant surveillance after 9/11? And when a POC points the above out to you, you suddenly turn hostile and say we should be ‘grateful’ for your help? And that you weren’t politically aware before but you are now, but can’t be bothered to learn anything about history beyond what’s politically expedient for you right now? I can’t even. It’s not my job to break up information into bite-sized chunks and slowly and patiently feed it to you (not too much at a time, or you’ll choke!) when the NYT can’t do its usual job of fulfilling those duties. If you can’t own up to how you’ve historically been part of the problem, then you’re still part of the problem.

Feeling (tl; dr): Fuck you. Really, just fuck you.

Annoyed at SF liberals:

  • They say liberal, I say head-up-their-collective-ass and casually racist. Or maybe I’m the one who’s had her head up her ass her whole life and thought she was white/immune to racism because I had educational and socioeconomic privilege. I just started noticing…stuff. Stuff like people’s wide-eyed smiles when they ask me where I’m from and I respond truthfully (Pakistan) — and when they insist no, you grew up in the US, right — and I (again, truthfully) respond no, in Pakistan, and make their little heads explode as they try to process how a Pakistani from the homeland speaks better English than they do (albeit still with a funny accent, so that’s still a way to feel superior, yay?), is better educated than they are, is more wordly about virtually everything, and yet comes from over there? Doesn’t regale you with constant tales of this is what I grew up doing in my exotic childhood in a country full of simpletons. And isn’t a victimized Muslim woman who is ever so grateful to be here in this country, isn’t what you think a good Muslim is (note: it means they’re not too Muslim, because we don’t want to make you uncomfortable), doesn’t speak in charmingly halting English that makes you feel good about USAID programs, doesn’t wave around a pocketbook Constitution, isn’t amenable to being trotted out as a shining example of a good Muslim (because good Muslims are those who’re helpful on the frontlines of terrorism, a la Hillary Clinton — not actual people, just so we’re clear), and has the audacity to want to be treated as an equal?
  • Is that not enough stuff to feel annoyed at SF liberals about? How about how they have so much sympathy for Muslims that they’re literally oozing with it, but only ever think of us as victims — not of us as people who have opinions, who may disagree with your opinions of us, and definitely not as people who have nuance, or are anything but grateful recipients of your benevolence of paying attention to our plight. You know, nuance — we may be Pakistani or we may be Muslim or many other things — and our perception of and relationship to those things is complicated. But wait, I forgot, nuance is the purview of the privileged. Feminist interpretations of Islam? Nobody wants to hear that. The only kind of stories you want to hear about us are those of female victims of acid attacks, things that reinforce your perception of the world. Or stories about good refugees (because we all came to this country with $20 in our pockets, and the only clothes we had were the ones on our backs, and they smelled of curry). We’re supposed to be black-and-white about things (terorrism bad, US good, but never explore historical foundations of why terrorism exists, how structures of power determine who gets called a terrorist, or how our communities should or shouldn’t respond to it). But you? You get nuance and complex feelings. We’re just those people from that part of the world with singular narratives. Hopefully my future generations will have the luxury of complexity — either when they’re born white through excessive intermarriage (gasp! Log kya kahenge?), or when they’ve been in this country long enough to get rid of their funny names, whichever comes first.

Feeling (tl; dr): You’re pathetic. But hey, you think I’m a little pathetic too, because I come from the Third World, and you can’t quite wrap your head around that. So maybe we can be pathetic together and wait for the end of the world AKA the 2020 elections?

The only upside (not) to all of this has been my being able to keep the racist card in my back pocket at all times, and fling it at anyone whenever I want, including (and especially) at a woman who stole my seat at the bar.

Maliha Khan is a Karachiite who now lives in the Bay Area.

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Scene Sheen

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Views for, by and about the Pakistani diaspora. http://tinyurl.com/SceneSheen

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