Not so funny in Mousetown

On September 12, 2001, I was walking across campus to my Politics and Film class when a guy bumped into me, sent my books scattering across the tarmac and then called me a raghead.

Since then, I’ve been subjected to similar forms of racial epithets, even though I’m not Arab (I’m of Indian descent). My fellow Muslims have faced similar reactions from Americans, most notably white Americans, who seem to think that anyone with brown skin is a potential terrorist.

We’ve been through this discourse before. Islamic Horizons, ISNA’s magazine, had a recent article about it. We call it by different names: Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism, and so on and so forth.

I call it ignorance.

On both sides.

I can understand the strain this places on many people. People like Hilal Isler and her husband, who were faced with a similar experience a few days ago on an I-Ride bus in Orlando, Florida. From the Orlando Sentinel:

He greeted passengers, told a blond joke and then said he was an "equal-opportunity offender," Hilal Isler said. What shocked the Islers, both college professors, was his talk about Muslims:

"And now they're telling us we're supposed to be nice to these Muslim terrorists who are trying to kill us all," Hilal Isler recalled him saying. "Here in America, we call them 'rag- heads' or 'towelheads,' but that's not right. What they wear on their heads is more like a sheet. We should be calling them sheetheads."

Isler said the way he pronounced sheetheads turned the word into a vulgarism.

"My husband and I were shocked, felt insulted and distressed," said Isler, who is Muslim but does not wear a traditional head scarf or anything else that would identify her as such.

I can understand the strain and shock that these people went through, especially given the fact that this happened in Orlando, Fl, perhaps the only city in America besides New York to see as many international travelers. And, as the officials at the bus company noted, this is the first complaint of its kind in ten years. I can empathize with what they went through.

In their place, my reaction would not have been the same. But I get where they’re coming from.

See, I work in a great place, and in this place that shall remain nameless, I have granted my fellow coworkers to make all the terrorist jokes they like about me, to my face, behind my back, whatever. Often, the jokes ascend into a kind of one-upmanship that one new employee found incredibly horrifying - until I told her it was okay with me.

Then she beat all of their attempts at humor my suggesting that the fat around my midsection was actually explosive.

I give them this permission, and engage in the banter with them - and my other friends and colleagues - because frankly, I find their jokes funny at times, and even when they’re not, there’s a certain catharsis that they experience when they joke like that. In an environment of political correctness tinged with the multicolored paranoia of terror alerts, joking about this stuff is good for them, and to a huge extent, for me too. For those few moments when we are messing around, we can use the word ‘terrorist’ without the sobering memory of 9/11 in the room, and that’s a good thing. It’s almost like watching white people listening to a black comic and laughing at all the jokes about black stereotypes.

Of course, the joking that I condone around me has never gotten mean-spirited or nasty. On one occasion, when it did, it wasn’t at work, it was at a party when a woman made a rude remark about Muslims and terrorists. I simply gave her the most the most pitying look I could muster and told her just what a dumbass comment she’d made. She hurried to say that she didn’t mean to suggest anything about me; I was happy to tell her that she should close her mouth before her foot got lodged in her oesophagus.

I don’t know if I’d bother making a complaint about this dumb dolt of a bus driver. He lost his job because of it, and that’s one more guy who was already pissed at Muslims and is now incensed at Muslims. I don’t care about his feelings, per se, but I do care about what the incident says about Muslims.

It says that we are touchy, that we can’t take it when someone slings slurs at us. It says that we are hypersensitive in a country that is just as sensitive about its own struggle to understand and find common ground with Islam. It says that we can’t handle the backlash of a nation whose people found itself face-to-face with an enemy they neither understand, nor knew they had.

I don’t fault the Islers for their reaction, but I see a different way to address this, and other issues of ignorance. I see education and discourse, discussion and debate and openness and transparency as the means to a mutually beneficial end. That’s why I work on this website, why I write this stuff, why I’m happy to laugh about stereotypes.

The idiot who called me a raghead at college will be undone by his own ignorance, as would have the bus driver, even if he hadn’t been fired from his job. I am of the firmest belief that ignorance isn’t beat out by people registering official complaints about being insulted, but by people whose own wit, humor and intelligence, whose compassion and tolerance, whose commitment to pluralism and whose ability to rise with grace above the fracas is the greatest.

And hell, if that makes me sound holier-than-thou, then so be it. I just may be.

And no, that’s not a detonator in my pants. I’m just happy to see you.