Wednesday, 12 September 2001
.....
DALLAS, TEXAS (September 11) By now everyone knows the details of the terrorist attacks that took place on Tuesday in New York and Washington D.C. In the months ahead there will be time to talk about the degree to which U.S. foreign policy contributes to international terrorism, and the degree to which that policy is explicitly and implicitly racist. The more immediate concern, however, is the all too common reaction of many Americans.
I saw and heard signs today, both on the Web and around Dallas, of a virulent, unthinking, and twitchy anti-Arab racism. Some of my friends, including people for whom I care a great deal, are or are taken to be "Arab" by most Americans. They are nervous about the mood in the country, and I am nervous for them and for so many others. Dallas has a very large Arab-American community, including the beautiful people who fed me during my pauper days in graduate school, a family with whom I often talked about the new mosque in north Dallas, about life as a Muslim in America, about mundane things like baseball.
Despite being a White man, I am often taken to be Hispanic, sometimes Greek or some generic, non-Occidental ethnicity; and I felt the slightly-too-long stares all day as people seemed more willing to give everyone else less benefit of whatever doubt and apathy is ordinarily at work among us. I cannot very well imagine what it must be like for Arab-Americans now.
It seems certain that in the days and weeks to come or at least until or unless a non-Middle-East connection is proven our fellow citizens who are or seem to be of Arab or non-Occidental ethnicity will be targeted by the same racist Americans who targeted them, with harassment and abuse, after the Oklahoma City Bombing and the TWA 800 Crash.
The White antiracist course of action is a sober, critical watchfulness, first of oneself, then of other White folks, for signs and displays of racism against people of color, especially Arab-Americans. Watch for it. Refuse and resist it. Raise your voice against it: in your community, on your favorite mailing lists and Web discussion forums. Name it for what it is irrational, jingoistic hatred and name it forcefully and with dispatch.
To do so is your minimal moral duty.
Postscript. At least six bullets shattered windows of a North Texas mosque this morning, causing about $3,000 in damage, officials said. -- Dallas Morning News, 12 September 2001
See also Massive Attacks inside the US <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/774>
This is Refuse and Resist Anti-Arab Racism <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/776>